It's not so much giving up as it is hard to motivate myself to continue working these time consuming crafting skills when i dont think i will have any use for them.. and meanwhile i am a no good crafter without the basics done.. ( Like imbuing ) .. so... Catch 22, is it?
We're in the summer slump right now, it'll pick back up when going outside involves turning blue this winter. Many are spending a fair bit of their playtime outdoors I suspect.
I play two characters, Landreu, a crafter, and Tanivar, a gatherer/alchemist. Been into UO crafting since joining the game fall of 2000. Came to Siege on the way out the UO door from prodo a few years back and hung around for a few months, then came back to Siege last December. I'm mainly doing gathering and selling to bazaar vendors these days. Some of them pay decent amounts for goods. Some are miserly thieves. You can make a living at it,
For training Imbuing the thing to do is hunt monsters that give loot and just unravel everything you can in backpacks which will give you multiple skill gains up to 70 where RoT kicks in. Then it's a single gain every so many minutes. I ran both characters dual client with Landreu unraveling loot items one at a time that Tanivar brought in. I think I nearly GMed Imbuing this way. Did all Landreu's skills dual client while Tanivar gathered resources. Makes the crafting training time much less a hassle.
Solen Infiltrators are good to hunt. You get gold, gems for imbuing, loot to unravel, and zoogi fungus to make into powder of translocation which sells at the bazaar for 750 to 1000 gold each.
As artisans/gatherers we make our gold putting in the time to get and make goods others need but don't want to spend their playtime doing, they'd rather spend their playtime going where Bad Things Play and hunting. Me, I hate getting burped up by monsters...
