Bye Bye Valorite and Frostwood

[gjohnson5]

Been having trouble finding these after changes to wood and ingot spawn.
Also on Great lakes, I see very little valorite armor being sold in Luna, but I do see quite a bit of vertite armor pieces. I believe this is causing inflation of frostwood and valorite items (assuming you can find them) Also how is one supposed to play the game regularly and find these items

 

[Frarc]

Gargoyle pickaxes and Prospectors tools are your friend for mining valorite. It gives 2 color up from the ones you find.

 

[WarUltima]

Being an elf actually make a lot of difference.
If you are already one then I dont know what else to tell you.

 

[Kazar]

I think that if you use the prospectors tool on agapite you get verite. Use it on verite you get valorite. And be careful using the gargoyle pickaxe! A valorite elemental can chew you up quick!

 

[Marcellis]

Being an elf doesn't produce any noticeable difference in being able to get high yields of colored ore. It's the vein itself that determines it. I have a human miner with several recall spots to veins that consistently give 80-90% colored ore per spawn.

 

[5% Luck]

http://vboards.stratics.com/showthread.php?p=918412#post918412

I wrote this up a few days ago.

I think elves get more colored per vein (at least when mondains 1st came out it was very true but now???)

 

[Lord Bishop]

My elven miners and ljs do much better than they did as humans. If you are not already an elf I strongly recommend the change.

 

[Winker]

Elves have a 20% Higher chance of getting Jewels and Humans have a 20% higher chance of getting colored ore. It was on a FOF one week but cant remember when

 

[Basara]

Elves don't get more colored per vein, at least for the same number of swings of the pick - I tested it back in the winter. Marcellus is right on that - each resource area gives an XX% chance of colored resource, for the base resource, regardless of race.

Lord Bishop, I agree with you on the Lumberjacking (elves DO get more swings per resource square with it), but I couldn't disagree more on mining.

With lumberjacking, you're gonna be overweight regardless. But with Mining, that extra weight capacity (combined with a fire beetle) can keep you out in the field (without having to go to a bank or home to unload) for an extra 10-20 minutes per mining trip.

The only benefit Elves seem to get to mining are "more special gems", and that is a bit of a booby prize, if you don't use them, as they weigh 1 stone each. I'd rather stay mining, longer. Besides, there's often been times when, my human mining beside a guildmate's Elf, I STILL got more of the gems than they did.

 

[UO Relic]

Aye with mining the prospectors tool and gargoyle's pickaxe can help you acquire high levels of ore.

But until they give us something similar for wood the odds of finding a frostwood tree are ridiculous and 80% of the time as soon as you empty the tree once its gonna respawn as something else. There's just so much joy in spending 5-7 hours looking for frostwood to get maybe 70 logs and than oh boy its now oak, yippeee. My lumberjack elf is now collecting dust as its definitly no longer any enjoyment to play with until EA smartens up and gives us something to compensate. I personally would love to have some type of wood dryads jump out of a tree and attack me for using some item that boosts wood level!!!

 

[Maplestone]

rare resources are ... well ... rare.

 

[NB-Cats]

For what it's worth, you see verite armor because it's better to use then valorite in terms of base resist.

 

[Lord Kotan]

Gargoyle pickaxes and Prospectors tools are your friend for mining valorite. It gives 2 color up from the ones you find.

I thought they changed it to where they don't stack, and you only get one?

If they did, at least you can use the prospector tool to see what is there, then dig with the pickaxe

 

[Basara]

Kotan, no idea where you could have got that idea. They've been stackable at least as far back as the AoS launch, without interruption, and I can't find anything suggesting that they even considered changing it.

Thanks to those tools (I go out with 1 sturdy shovel, 1 Prospector's Tool & 8 Gargoyle Pickaxes every time), I come back from EVERY mining trip, just mining from point A to point B, along a mountainside, with 100-300 valorite ingots (and the lower numbers are usually becuse I sometimes need agapite or verite for a specific BOD, and either use only one of the tools, or neither, if I find the appropriate metal on the first swing).

When mining is on a combat character, elementals aren't a threat - they're just bonus ingots. I don't even stop mining if I spawn a single elemental, as I can kill even a copper or valorite, autodefending (if I get two, I have to back off. Or, if I get a paragon - call me sick, but I LOVE mining in Ilshenar - less competition for the veins). I once got 5 shadow elementals in 9 swings of a single garg pick, and never stopped mining - and the first 3 were dead by the time the vein ran out (and the 5th popped) on the 9th swing. I never dropped below 50 HP, and I didn't even have healing on the character at the time.

 

[UOKaiser]

Elves don't get more colored per vein, at least for the same number of swings of the pick - I tested it back in the winter. Marcellus is right on that - each resource area gives an XX% chance of colored resource, for the base resource, regardless of race.

Lord Bishop, I agree with you on the Lumberjacking (elves DO get more swings per resource square with it), but I couldn't disagree more on mining.

With lumberjacking, you're gonna be overweight regardless. But with Mining, that extra weight capacity (combined with a fire beetle) can keep you out in the field (without having to go to a bank or home to unload) for an extra 10-20 minutes per mining trip.

The only benefit Elves seem to get to mining are "more special gems", and that is a bit of a booby prize, if you don't use them, as they weigh 1 stone each. I'd rather stay mining, longer. Besides, there's often been times when, my human mining beside a guildmate's Elf, I STILL got more of the gems than they did.

Actually the way ive seen it work with my miner cant speak about lumberjacking as i just got a elf lumberjacker but with the miner i did notice that there is more color than iron whith elves. Example human would strike and get more iron on a color vein than elf. Before I turned my miner into a elf I received a average of 60% ratio iron with 40% color using prospect tools. After elf I always receive 60% color to 40% iron well the percentage not entirely accurate but close enough to be noticible. Gems and special resources also average better .black rock no noticible difference

 

[UOKaiser]

Kotan, no idea where you could have got that idea. They've been stackable at least as far back as the AoS launch, without interruption, and I can't find anything suggesting that they even considered changing it.

Thanks to those tools (I go out with 1 sturdy shovel, 1 Prospector's Tool & 8 Gargoyle Pickaxes every time), I come back from EVERY mining trip, just mining from point A to point B, along a mountainside, with 100-300 valorite ingots (and the lower numbers are usually becuse I sometimes need agapite or verite for a specific BOD, and either use only one of the tools, or neither, if I find the appropriate metal on the first swing).

When mining is on a combat character, elementals aren't a threat - they're just bonus ingots. I don't even stop mining if I spawn a single elemental, as I can kill even a copper or valorite, autodefending (if I get two, I have to back off. Or, if I get a paragon - call me sick, but I LOVE mining in Ilshenar - less competition for the veins). I once got 5 shadow elementals in 9 swings of a single garg pick, and never stopped mining - and the first 3 were dead by the time the vein ran out (and the 5th popped) on the 9th swing. I never dropped below 50 HP, and I didn't even have healing on the character at the time.

How long are youre trips out? And yes val eles verite eles rock I enjoy spawning acouple on those slow days for extra ingots. Unfortunetly my miner is not a combat character so when i spwan a couple i recall abck and send my fighter to deal whith them.

 

[Lord Bishop]

Again it could just be the spots I chose to make my trips but I had a significantly high amount of special with an elf then a human. I'm not talking a few ore either I have mined 100,000's since the elfen race began. Its just what happened with me. On the other hand I could find no rhyme or reason to when and if I got blackrock.

 

[Basara]

Kaiser, I've tested it using spot I know were giving the same range of colored vs. iron prior to ML.

All the results stayed the same, human or elf, in terms of percentage. That's not to say that elves might get more digs per stop than a human (the way they do with chopping trees) and end up with more colored, but I've had it confirmed by the Devs that the "higher chance for elves" is supposed to only apply to the gems, for mining.

Even after ore randomization, the percentage of colored for a given spot stayed the same, regardless of what colored ore you got from it (though you have to use a PT to get colored from it when it's iron), and whether you were human or elf.

Even if it effects the ore when it shouldn't be, the difference would be almost impossible to see (as that would be modified by the site's integral chance for a colored ore per dig); even a 20% improvement would only make a 50% colored ore place become 60%, 30% become 36%, or 70% would be 84% - all of which would be statistically insignificant for tests under hundreds of thousands of tries, because of the uncertainty from square to square.

The only way to eliminate this extra variable would be mining a SINGLE resource square for the test for tens of thousands of digs, since the range of colored ore chance per site seems to be a random value between 10% & 80%+, differing from resource square to resource square (even neighboring ones can be opposite extremes).

 

[Maplestone]

I'll have to run some new tests but could have sworn I was getting 50% more colored ore with my elf than with my human.

edit: results of a quick test (2 150-charge sturdy shovels, 100 mining, no bonus gloves/guantlets or prospecting tool, stripmining the same cave)

human: 538 iron, 76 colored, 2 gems (12.4% color)
elf: 470 iron, 99 color, 3 gems (17.4% color)

(it's a small sample, I think the human lost a couple more verite ingots in smelting, the area seems to have become rich in iron-only deposits, but it roughly came out to 1.5:1 by percentages, but was much closer by actual amount -- I don't think I've been paying much attention to the effect of the "bonus ore" humans get now and then)

(I only have one of the rarer "super-deposits" in my regular area, which I avoided for this test, but I don't it behaves the same way as regular deposits - it has around 75% colored instead of the normal amount)

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

Garg picks and Prosp Tools for mining, Deco stumps for Lumberjacking.

 

[UOKaiser]

Kaiser, I've tested it using spot I know were giving the same range of colored vs. iron prior to ML.

All the results stayed the same, human or elf, in terms of percentage. That's not to say that elves might get more digs per stop than a human (the way they do with chopping trees) and end up with more colored, but I've had it confirmed by the Devs that the "higher chance for elves" is supposed to only apply to the gems, for mining.

Even after ore randomization, the percentage of colored for a given spot stayed the same, regardless of what colored ore you got from it (though you have to use a PT to get colored from it when it's iron), and whether you were human or elf.

Even if it effects the ore when it shouldn't be, the difference would be almost impossible to see (as that would be modified by the site's integral chance for a colored ore per dig); even a 20% improvement would only make a 50% colored ore place become 60%, 30% become 36%, or 70% would be 84% - all of which would be statistically insignificant for tests under hundreds of thousands of tries, because of the uncertainty from square to square.

The only way to eliminate this extra variable would be mining a SINGLE resource square for the test for tens of thousands of digs, since the range of colored ore chance per site seems to be a random value between 10% & 80%+, differing from resource square to resource square (even neighboring ones can be opposite extremes).

Thats weird even a dev said that even though every reference to elf is increse chance to aquiring special resources including colored ore. Either they need to recheck it or if they changed the way elves work at least reference that it only applies to gems not boards or ore.
I have all my spots marked and have always use those exact spots to dig with the exact amount of digs per square as example a certain square always gives 15 uses of shovel before it gets drained lets say the color changed to val then as a human 9 of those shovel uses will give val while 6 give iron at a average then if i use a elf in the same square it wouild still be 15 as that wont change but i will get 11-13 val and 2-4 iron because of the increase chance that i will pull up val instead of iron most likely its just a 1- 2 ore change but enough to make a difference in constant mining.

 

[Harlequin]

I think that if you use the prospectors tool on agapite you get verite. Use it on verite you get valorite. And be careful using the gargoyle pickaxe! A valorite elemental can chew you up quick!

Actually, digging up the val elemental is the mother lode!

25 valorite ore each.

I just wish the smelting success rate is higher.