Suiting up

[Naisikras]

Back in my time when you were working on a nice pvp mage suit your best bet was to get a couple artis and find your richest friend who always had loads of leather armor created from barbed runics kits lying around to finish off your missing pieces. If you had enough money, you could just roll your dice on your own barbed kit.

Now imbuing has jumped into the picture and I'm really not sure how it works, from what I've read you get to pick the properties you want... so to me sounds like it has replaced tailoring. I most likely have the information wrong though.

Anyone mind explaining to me imbuing and the best way to finish off a suit? Crafting with barbed armor still a good random choice?

 

[Basara]

My choice is

Get a few core artifacts
Craft a couple more pieces (as runics can have higher intensity than imbuing)
Then Imbue the last items as needed to close the gaps in the suit.

Some people go straight to imbuing, without one or both steps before, but I feel they're not really optimizing their suit that way, as the suit will always be weaker than a similar suit without runic input.

Plus with the higher minimums, and the caps for tailor & smith runics now at 100%, you can now make decent items with lower runics, to imbue to be even better (much harder to imbue a barbed kit piece).

 

[Naisikras]

Ok, I see... So imbuing can never give as good of pieces as a barbed runic kit. But imbuing cuts out the randomness... So BRKs will always have their place.

What exactly do you mean when you say barbed armor is more difficult to imbue?

And what is the process of imbuing? Like when would you want to? when can you?

 

[Basara]

Imbuing has the unfortunate nature that if you imbue a resist that has been altered by use of colored leather and/or had points you got from the exceptional bonus, those points are lost in the imbue.

For example, the most fire resist you could imbue a leather armor (human/elf) to 19 (the base 4, plus 15).

If the piece, after crafting, has 12 fire resist, 8 of that is considered a "property", if you try to modify that resist. You only want to raise resists on pieces where the resist being raised is at or near the minimum for that armor type.

Now, with a barbed kit, you're going to get 3-5 properties on an item, plus the exceptional bonus. This means that you will on rare occasion get to add 1 property, but most of the time, you'll be stuck modifying the existing properties a barbed kit put on the item, without the ability to add more.

On the other hand, with a spined kit, you'll get 3 times as many uses, and be trying for 1 or 2 specific properties that you don't want to go to the expense to imbue. You then imbue everything else you want on the piece.

The only way to get a leather armor piece superior (in total intensity) to what you can make with a runic is to craft with regular leather, imbue, then enhance (with a very high chance of breakage). In some cases, it's worth it.