Returning Player full of Questions, Round 2

[Duskofdead]

I have yet more questions for all of you!

1. For a professional character specializing in cooking (but dabbling in other things as well, such as tailoring) how important is intelligence to the actual skills themselves? Will they affect my fail or quality rates? I ask because cooking routinely raises intelligence, but I find that really the most important thing I need when lugging around pitchers of water and flour and large quantities of meat... is strength. While on the topic, how important is dexterity? Or do neither of these stats have any bearing on my success rate or quality of crafted items?

I scoured the stratics "skills, in-depth" articles but frankly I do not trust them as they are clearly outdated. (Most, if not all of them, completley don't even mention changes to the skills or items which are now craftable from within the last several years.)

2. Help me understand the new economy! Finally, my character became old enough to place a house, and I now have a modest 16x16 within reasonable moongate distance in Homare-jima. I have two vendors and somewhat regularly advertise them with free runes, though of course I am competing with some heavyweights on my shard with the enormous (I call them "choir houses" because it looks like they're all lined up to sing "hallelujah" in pageant gowns) vendorhouses who power-advertise and put down runes every quarter hour or so. I am turning a profit though of course, being a re-establishing player, I am not trading in the highly desired, high priced items. I am haggling with basic items like scrolls, bandages, good-but-not-the-best potions (no way to keg them yet, never seen empty kegs for sale and I don't have a high level tinker or whoever makes them), minor deco stuff (like rarity 1, 2, 3 items that are cheap and sell for under a thousand) and assortments of minor to moderately nice rings and bracelets. (Nothing to sacrifice your left ear for, though I do sell a few per day.)

One thing I am UTTERLY stumped on-- I can make and sell recall scrolls to the NPC vendors for 41 gold. Yet I routinely see recall scrolls being sold on people's NPC vendors for 400 for 10 or 4000 for 100..... in other words, no real profit advantage over selling to the NPC's. In addition you can buy 500 recall scrolls at a time from those same NPC merchants in town... so where exactly is the reasoning behind making or selling these scrolls to players?! It stumps me completely. (I didn't like the changes to the game making high demand craftables purchaseable from town merchants, but, it's there, and we have to adapt ey?)

So I suppose my question here is... what are good movers, and what makes decent money? One of the top "complaints" from visitors to the house is "more rares and arties", but I don't have 50,000 to 1 million gold to plunk down just to buy 1 piece of inventory, and even if I did, I would be mortified to actually do it not knowing if I could re-sell it at a profit. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Basara]

1. Stats no longer affect skills, but skill gains are what raise stats (and each skill only affects 2 of the 3 stats, 1 of them 10 times more likely than the other).

Strength is the only important stat for crafters that aren't scribes.

Intelligence is important for scribes, for the mana (when making scrolls), as not only is your mana pool based on your intelligence, your mana regeneration rate (before equipment and other things that improve it) is (3xINT + Meditation skill)/400, provided you're wearing leather, leaf and/or mage armor (or nothing at all).

Dexterity really means nothing for a crafter, currently (but it should).

2. The only thing I can figure is that the people who DO sell them, do it as a convenience to others, as each time the vendors reset (say, after an invasion, or publishes that reset the vendors prices back to default), each NEW NPC vendor rolls randomly whether they will sell level 1 only, level 1-2, level 1-3 or level 1-4 scrolls. After some publishes, there might be only ONE mage NPC selling level 4 (including recalls) in all of Trammel on a shard - other times, there might be a half-dozen; and almost NEVER where they were prior to the publish. Personally, I don't have ANY characters that use recall scrolls at all anymore - they all have Chivalry, Magery, or Necromancy (a Necromancer can recall at 0 magery, if in wraith form - and might not even need regs - can't remember at the moment).

The potion kegs, you about have to special order, if you don't make them yourself. the people I know that have sold them in the past, stopped selling them on vendors because no one would buy them for months, then they'd sell out in one hour. Making things harder is that the potion bottle price skyrocketed with the heartwood quests (there are actually FACTION VENDORS now dedicated solely to selling potion bottles!).

It's easier and cheaper to contract a carpenter/tinker to make them for you. Making them is easy enough though.
Ingredients -
a. Keg - can be ones from gypsy camps, brigand camps, or dungeon spawns, after being open and emptied, or crafted.
Crafting a keg takes barrel staves (carpenter made or SOS loot), a barrel lid (carpenter) and barrel hoops (tinker). Most of these can be made at very low level skill.
b. Another barrel lid, a tap (tinker made or found on loot - also an item one can make for Heartwood quests), and 10 potion bottles (cheaper to drink looted potions or pour them in a keg, than to buy the bottles themselves - snd you can't make them until GM Alchemy and reading the glassblowing book - at least sand stacks now). Tinker skill will combine the Keg with these to make the Potion Keg, starting at 75 skill.

Everything but the final combining to make the potion keg can be done by a beginning crafter.

 

[Dragonchilde]

I'm really glad you're here posting. You've been asking the questions I haven't thought of yet. I wish you were on Chesapeake, we could stumble around discovering stuff together.

One thing I've noticed (and again, I have no experience) is a complete and total lack of anything BUT artifacts and rares. Walking around Luna is an exercise in futility for finding anything I need. I had to start a carpenter because I found nothing. I think they might have finally managed to give us TOO many options.

I do have to say, I like the ease of placing houses... that's somethign that was always frustrating before. I accidentally placed a two story patio the other day. LOL. Ah well, it was an upgrade, if not the marble that I wanted.

 

[T_Amon_from_work]

If on LA, the area around Tram Yew gate has some good vendors, also the Yew Crossroads to Brit. Take a stroll around the mountains by Destard ... several vendors there as well. All decently priced.

I do have to say though that the amount of good vendor shops has dropped. I have less than a runebook of spots - compared to 2+ a couple years ago.

 

[GFY]

If your looking for a way to generate gold try this. (I used this to double my money every couple of days) I would go to the faction vendors selling regs for 2 and 4 gp. I would buy hugh amounts of regs and sell them on bulk order deeds of 1000 or more. I would sell them for 4 and 6 gp each doubling my investment. I would buy up all the regs and keep buying until they spawned 999 each. Keep my vendors stocked and the customers would keep coming back for bulk regs. When I hit 10 mil per restock in profit I would restock with half my gold and pocket the rest.

 

[Duskofdead]

I'm really glad you're here posting. You've been asking the questions I haven't thought of yet. I wish you were on Chesapeake, we could stumble around discovering stuff together.

One thing I've noticed (and again, I have no experience) is a complete and total lack of anything BUT artifacts and rares. Walking around Luna is an exercise in futility for finding anything I need. I had to start a carpenter because I found nothing. I think they might have finally managed to give us TOO many options.

I do have to say, I like the ease of placing houses... that's somethign that was always frustrating before. I accidentally placed a two story patio the other day. LOL. Ah well, it was an upgrade, if not the marble that I wanted.

Agreed, it is CLEAR to me from wandering around Luna looking for basic items (being new and not knowing where there are still actively maintained houses on my shard other than Luna -- the big majority of new houses in Malas and Tokuno both have spawn that I can't cope with nearby and mostly do not seem to have vendors whatsoever) that most vendorhouses are kowtowing entirely to faction, pvp and bored artie/deco collectors. Want to spend 150,000 on one item? Luna's your place. Need an affordable runebook? Probably not so much... I haven't even so much as seen a vendor titled "runebooks" and the couple that have internal bags labelled "runebooks" seem to have not been restocked in a very long time.

That's part of why I started my store the way I did, selling basic items like lower end runebooks (not exceptional 18 charge filled ones for 25,000 gold like the few I saw in Luna) and individual greater heal potions and such is because I figure players like me could use a purchase point for those kinds of things, even if the older players turn their nose up because I don't have that last piece of a Virtue set they were looking for. I label my runes clearly enough -- BASIC GOODS & EVERYDAY NEEDS, without a huge subtitle about arties and deco and rares, yet that doesn't stop people from showing up and complaining that I need more arties and rares.

It does feel like you can't win, though. The few customers who show up wanting potions complain that I don't have kegged potions. Yet I'm sure an average player wanting a couple pots wouldn't want to blow 4,000 gp on a keg. Just trying to find the right market seems difficult though.

 

[Duskofdead]

Regarding Commodity deeds, specifically with regards to selling them on vendors:

Will people buy pretty much anything in bulk? Or should I stick to certain things?

I have a lot of regs, and usually wind up with tons of extra, because I have both a scribe and alchemist, and so I keep bulk around anyway, and buy in bulk whenever I can. If I slightly slide up the price per reg (I believe it's what 3 gp per piece to buy from NPC's) will people purchase? Like say, I dunno.... 3800 for 1000 regs on a commodity deed?

I want to set a fair price, but at the same time, I don't have a really well known vendorhouse yet (and it probably will never be one of the huge ones) so I need to price it to help cover vendor fees in case it doesn't sell for a couple of days.

 

[GFY]

Regarding Commodity deeds, specifically with regards to selling them on vendors:

Will people buy pretty much anything in bulk? Or should I stick to certain things?

I have a lot of regs, and usually wind up with tons of extra, because I have both a scribe and alchemist, and so I keep bulk around anyway, and buy in bulk whenever I can. If I slightly slide up the price per reg (I believe it's what 3 gp per piece to buy from NPC's) will people purchase? Like say, I dunno.... 3800 for 1000 regs on a commodity deed?

I want to set a fair price, but at the same time, I don't have a really well known vendorhouse yet (and it probably will never be one of the huge ones) so I need to price it to help cover vendor fees in case it doesn't sell for a couple of days.

When I buy from faction vendors they sell for 2 and 3gp. (Npc's sell for 3 & 5 gp) I then place ones that cost 2 gp on bods of 1000 or 10,000, selling for 4000 or 40,000. The 3 gp regs I sell on bods of 1000 or 10,000 for 6000 or 60,000.

People like (well me any way) to be well stocked up on regs. I usually keep around 100k of each for personal use. Most people will pay a little gold for someone who provides bulk regs, so they don't have to spend time buying them up.

 

[FatMagic]

p.s. I'm learning alot being a returning player as well, thanks to the OP for asking the questions, and thanks to the Vets for answering them

 

[Duskofdead]

I think that's the major thing, is the time investment. I've never taken the reg spawn all the way up to 999 because it just takes so long. I think I always run out of time around 160 (sometimes a few of the vendors were restocking faster and I may get one or two of 'em to 320 before I have to stop.) Spending x many hours just farming up the vendor spawn, I do have serious questions if I'd be better off just spending the same time killing something that drops a lot of gold frequently.

We're talking, takes up my whole Sunday morning or something to do though. I doubt I could get enough on a regular basis to sell 10,000 deeds in any sort of bulk.

Thanks for the suggestion though. I'll try to sell some bulk based on whatever extra I can grab.