Christmas Festives... and BODs.

[Dot_Warner]

I just tested it last night - it took around 300 small BODs, a mix of normal & Exceptional, and about 30-40 of them colored material, from alchemy, carpentry, tinker and blacksmith, to get a CHARLIE BROWN tree in Minoc. Last year, the same number of BODs was enough to get a city to a plain small green tree.

No, no it wasn't.

If you aren't using LBODs to grow the tree, you're wasting your time.

 

[Basara]

Small BODs are not all the same bank value. The players who made the chart that shows points for each level, added the exact points up. 10 plain dough and 20 ex dough are not the same value.

No duh.... I AM the one that rewrote the BOD FAQS AND GUIDES ON STRATICS ten years ago, after all (after most of it being out of date since before AoS - and I paused work on new guides HOPING that the devs would get around (as they promised) to fixing the messed up carpentry and fletching BODs).

But there are a few guidelines my estimate was based on.

1. Most non-smith/tailor BODs are normal only. Scribe and alchemy are all normal for their base items (scrolls, potions), Fletching. Carp and Tinker are mostly normals (and often the smalls can be exceptional but the larges can't). Of all things, COOKING is the only one that seems to approximate the ratios we see for Smith (50%) or Tailor (33.3%)
2. 10/15/20 are supposed to be equal chance. That's 0.2/0.5/1.0 bank points respectively for normals of base materials, or an average of around 0.5666. My 300 BODs were a little light on 20s (I've not done tailor BODs yet for the trees, just did tinker last night (and awaiting turn-in on those), and filled several 20-count ex weapons LBODs (after bribing some 20 normals up to Ex), so the actual average was probably closer to 0.55.
3. Because of the conditions in #1 above (And, again, having not yet gone on my tailor BOD filling spree), the percentage of exceptional BODs in the 305 or so (+/- 5 - went from three-twenty-something to an even 20 when the book was reduced to JUST larges - I literally got the CB tree on the LAST small in the book) was less than 20% (mostly smith and Carpenters) that's another 4 points each for about 40 BODs.
4. Lastly, only about the last 30 BODs I turned in (was down to about 50 BODs at that point) were colored material, and none of them higher than gold for the smith or Ash for the carpentry. So most of those were another 4-6 points (the excessive number of DC & Oak probably brought the lot down to less than the 4.5 for Shadow).

So, to calculate

Line 2 results in 300-ish times something just south of 0.55 or about 160-170 bank points
Line 3 results in another 160 bank points (40x4)
Line 4 results in another 120-150 bank points (30 x something between 4 & 5)

So, that looks like something between about 440-500 bank points to get a Charlie Brown tree.
Last year, I was able to get a Charlie Brown tree in every city on LA (including the ones ignored by my fellow crafters, as they concentrated most of their BODs on Jhelom last year - and talking around with them, I found I was the ONLY person to drop a BOD in 2 of the cities) with only about ONE HUNDRED points of small BODs (10-12 colored smith BODs, with an average value of around 8 to 10 depending on if they were normal or exceptional). And I was able to get to the next tree (the unadorned small green tree) WELL before hitting 500 banked points. It was after that where the BODs amounts got extreme.

 

[Basara]

No, no it wasn't.

If you aren't using LBODs to grow the tree, you're wasting your time.

Stop hitting yourself in the face to make the demons go away. You didn't understand what I was doing in the slightest, and inflicting a concussion on yourself won't make you right. The Minoc experiment was not a SERIOUS effort to get a tree (maybe to get a red item drop for my necro that dropped all the BODs, but I wasn't trying to actually accomplish much other than test what it took to get a CB tree using just smalls - in other words, trying to PROVE the truth of what you're accusing me of doing through ignorance)

I KNEW what I was doing. I was also testing LAST YEAR vs. THIS YEAR (using accumulated non-combinable smalls to get a tree going, because my fellow LA crafters mostly won't even put a SINGLE BOD on an elf that doesn't have a tree ALREADY STARTED except maybe in their home city, after getting burned the first year). And I know the point values. Smalls are worth 10% of what larges are before adding in the extra 200-600 (40-120 after Bank point reduction) points for the large itself.

I'm saving the larges for our last big BOD push (probably in Britain, since we were able to get rewards from it last year despite its late start, and I was able to get it to the large plain tree last year BY MYSELF after everyone else ran out of larges at Jhelom).

 

[Basara]

And, besides, I have 500k wood and iron ingots each, and was running out of space storing BODs with NO LARGE.

 

[Pawain]

I thought smalls would help me get gifts on a tiny tree. Nope. 20 toons. Three turned in Larges and they are the only ones that got a gift. 3 repeats. Darn, I like the new sculptures.

I only gets BODs now so I am out of Larges. Ill turn in all the smalls normally and hope for larges.