Forging Advice

[LivderaDeralleur]

OK - after a long drawn out affair without using Lich, I've managed to Master in Forging THW/Crafting on my Warrior. With EG opening today and the slab-generator being available along with the rarer glyphs, I wanted to ask a few questions and clear some things up.

Note - my main goal is going to be to create a perfect maul, if I can, to use as a project piece.

Questions:
1. Is there a bonus to Forging if you have a perfect forging-hammmer? Is this even known? I've managed a 'well-crafted' mithril one, though haven't buckled down to try harder for a completely perfect one yet, as I wasn't sure if it mattered.
2. Is it better to try for the perfect maul using steel and then player-enchant it from that base? I considered using vultite, though that may get expensive. I also considered just trying the slab-generator and attempting with some of the other metals coming from there, though then there'd be the issue of perhaps running out of the slabs or wasting the expensive glyphs trying with metals that are harder to forge.
3. Any good rule of thumb as to how many of the gold glyphs should be purchased to have a comfortable margin to work with in attempting the perfect? Was thinking 5, though having never done this before I haven't the foggiest.
4. Really any other advice in attempting a perfect - do the elegant, etc., pieces have a secondary value even if they're made out of steel? I'm imagining that I'd go through with creating weapons with some of the 'non-perfect' components to try to recoup some of the silvers from the glyphs, if that's the case.

Thanks for any advice,
- Liv

[Mohrgan]

Questions:
1. Is there a bonus to Forging if you have a perfect forging-hammmer? Is this even known? I've managed a 'well-crafted' mithril one, though haven't buckled down to try harder for a completely perfect one yet, as I wasn't sure if it mattered.

According to previous GM post, yes there is a bonus to chance of getting a piece (including best) based on quality of hammer:

This is related to a chance to learn. Not a chance to get a best piece. Hammer quality (and whether you are attuned to it), Profession, Race, Metal being forged, injuries, [removed], and random luck ... all play a role in getting a piece (including best).

Also, you may already know this but you MUST use a perfect hammer to produce a superior piece (which is necessary to produce a perfect weapon) and you MUST have a perfect hammer made of a magical metal (mithril is the most common) to forge with magic metals and making your own perfect hammer auto-attunes you to it, however if you buy a perfect hammer from someone else, you have to spend time (ie lots of forging) to attune to it. I believe you still CAN make perfects with an unattuned hammer, but your rate of BEST pieces is reduced until you are fully attuned.

that's about right. you need to be mastered in crafting, mastered in the weapon style, using a perfect hammer you are attuned to (which you will be, if you made it). You need a "best" piece for the shaft/hilt and the head/blade (if you appraise them i believe they will show as "superior" quality) that you created while you were already mastered in the above. Then you need to get a "best" vise attempt with those best individual pieces and you make a perfect. (from non GM source http://forum.gsplayers.com/archive/index.php/t-77976.html)


2. Is it better to try for the perfect maul using steel and then player-enchant it from that base? I considered using vultite, though that may get expensive. I also considered just trying the slab-generator and attempting with some of the other metals coming from there, though then there'd be the issue of perhaps running out of the slabs or wasting the expensive glyphs trying with metals that are harder to forge.

Practically speaking, the only difference between vultite and player enchanted steel is a 0.8 weight/encumbrance factor of the weapon for vultite vs 1.0 for steel. By all means, perfect vultite is super cool, but I think you are going to be aghast at how much silver you end up spending to make one, unless you get ridiculously lucky. I typically work with mithril myself (which is to say, I used to, I quit actually forging forever ago because its so horrid a system), and still would end up spending hundreds of thousands - millions producing a perfect. The other factor is that each round of GET TONGS is far, far longer with vultite vs mithril vs steel in descending order, as the length of the RT is based on the metal and strength of natural enchant.

The slab generator is great fun. Once you get hooked, be prepared to bring millions of silvers to sink into it trying for those elusive rare slabs like golvern, rolaren, eonake, eahnor. You will get literally tons of other less valuable stuff, and its a perfectly reasonable thing to save all those misc metal slabs (mithril, ora, vultite, etc) and locker them for later use. Lots of people just throw away everything except the rares ones. Having locker mules is a must.

3. Any good rule of thumb as to how many of the gold glyphs should be purchased to have a comfortable margin to work with in attempting the perfect? Was thinking 5, though having never done this before I haven't the foggiest.

Gold glyphs last a good long time (some lone neuron in the back of my brain wants to say that they last 500 uses? Can't find a source though), but it depends how dedicated you are to the forge whether you'll go through 5 in a year. Most likely you'll have no trouble getting several perfects out of 5 gold glyphs, but again, forging is based on probability, and do not underestimate the power of bad luck in forging.

4. Really any other advice in attempting a perfect - do the elegant, etc., pieces have a secondary value even if they're made out of steel? I'm imagining that I'd go through with creating weapons with some of the 'non-perfect' components to try to recoup some of the silvers from the glyphs, if that's the case.

Elegant pieces value - nope. Sell em for pocket change at the pawnshop if you want. You are not going to make much headway at recouping losses by selling the non-perfect pieces. Forging is as expensive as it is time consuming. One of the things forgers have been hoping for for years is a Smelting system that allows us to recycle those non-best pieces, especially as it pertains to rare metals, but its been RSN for about a decade.

[Mogonis]

The forging system will make you quit gemstone forever. Turn back now!

[mgoddess]

The forging system will make you quit gemstone forever. Turn back now!

I was going to post this originally... but, OP's already mastered crafting & THW, so they already know the torture that forging is.

[Mogonis]

Haha, well, mastering those is good experience. The forging system really takes its toll when you decide to commit to forging for real. Then you want to burn down your house and find a dark alley and cry in a wet cardboard box until the bittersweet mercy of a slow, agonizing death finally finds you.

[kutter]

I think that the GM's created forging so they could more easily catch people AFK scripting, because you have to be more than a little nuts to do it by hand. 170 hours to master one skill and there are 6 skills. Do the math, if you play 6 hours a day every day, it will take you approximately 4 weeks to master a skill, now multiply that times 6. Six months of nothing but forging. Just put a bullet in my head already. And I say this as someone that has mastered 4 of them and I am about 5 ranks from mastering the 5th. But I am probably a little nuts.

[mgoddess]

I think that the GM's created forging so they could more easily catch people AFK scripting, because you have to be more than a little nuts to do it by hand. 170 hours to master one skill and there are 6 skills. Do the math, if you play 6 hours a day every day, it will take you approximately 4 weeks to master a skill, now multiply that times 6. Six months of nothing but forging. Just put a bullet in my head already. And I say this as someone that has mastered 4 of them and I am about 5 ranks from mastering the 5th. But I am probably a little nuts.
170 hours per skill, eh? Huh... that's actually fairly more reasonable than everyone's led me to believe. If done right (aka, lots of squelching of messaging, scripting it right, and making sure I'm in front of the keyboard whenever I'm running it), this actually sounds like it could be doable. 6 months to master everything really just isn't all that bad, for someone who has the time to devote to it.

[Mohrgan]

Mastering skills is already insanity inducing. But when you look at the numbers for actually producing perfect weapons:

1/10 for the best blade
1/20 for best vise

you're looking at something like 1/200 chance of a perfect, that's OMITTING the time (also 1/10) you spent on the best hilt.

I was always making mithril handaxes...What was mithril per get tongs, I want to say like 300 seconds. So what, 5 minutes x 4 GET TONGS x somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 blades forged for one perfect mithril weapon? Works out to almost 67 hours of hard, lonely RT for a single perfect, statistically. I mean...

If I could go back in time and never have heard of the forging system, I would.

Bear in mind, its been a number of years since I took a stats course, so my calculations might be off...

[Donquix]

170 hours per skill, eh? Huh... that's actually fairly more reasonable than everyone's led me to believe. If done right (aka, lots of squelching of messaging, scripting it right, and making sure I'm in front of the keyboard whenever I'm running it), this actually sounds like it could be doable. 6 months to master everything really just isn't all that bad, for someone who has the time to devote to it.

It took me 2 months of near constant forging to master all weapons and crafting. I'm talking near 16 hours a day at least ~4 days a week, then most of sunday as well. I did what you said, squelched everything and scripted w/ it set to timeout if i didn't input something every so often, while at work. or it was during football season so while watching the games on sunday.

i feel so coooool though.

[Androidpk]

It took me 2 months of near constant forging to master all weapons and crafting. I'm talking near 16 hours a day at least ~4 days a week, then most of sunday as well. I did what you said, squelched everything and scripted w/ it set to timeout if i didn't input something every so often, while at work. or it was during football season so while watching the games on sunday.

i feel so coooool though.

Will you forge two troll-claws for me if I given you a metal slab? I don't care about the quality.

[Mogonis]

Steel dagger blade - 2 tongs @ 180 RT/per
Steel short sword blade - 3 tongs @ 180 RT/per
Steel falchion blade - 5 tongs @ 180 RT/per

Plus 30 RT for scribing, and...plus the hilts.

[Jarvan]

Only thing worse then forging is Alchemy.

[Donquix]

Only thing worse then forging is Alchemy.

In terms of game design I'd actually say forging is worse. Without lich, you're literally completely alone for the entirety of it.

A game based on social interaction and roleplay, with a system that by design puts you alone in a room for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

[tyrant-201]

Mastering skills is already insanity inducing. But when you look at the numbers for actually producing perfect weapons:

1/10 for the best blade
1/20 for best vise

you're looking at something like 1/200 chance of a perfect, that's OMITTING the time (also 1/10) you spent on the best hilt.

I was always making mithril handaxes...What was mithril per get tongs, I want to say like 300 seconds. So what, 5 minutes x 4 GET TONGS x somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 blades forged for one perfect mithril weapon? Works out to almost 67 hours of hard, lonely RT for a single perfect, statistically. I mean...

If I could go back in time and never have heard of the forging system, I would.

Bear in mind, its been a number of years since I took a stats course, so my calculations might be off...

Mithril is 240 per. I think 1/200 for a perfect is a bit overstated, otherwise I've been extremely lucky in the 10 or so perfect pieces I've created.

My understanding is that a superior at the grinder takes +/- 1/20 attempts
A superior at the forge is +/- 1/10 attempts
A perfect vise is +/- 1/10 attempts

All considered, it may be worse than 1/200 statistically, not exactly a numbers person :(

[Wrathbringer]

Only thing worse then forging is Alchemy.

Than, not then. You're welcome.

[Mohrgan]

Mithril is 240 per. I think 1/200 for a perfect is a bit overstated, otherwise I've been extremely lucky in the 10 or so perfect pieces I've created.

My understanding is that a superior at the grinder takes +/- 1/20 attempts
A superior at the forge is +/- 1/10 attempts
A perfect vise is +/- 1/10 attempts

All considered, it may be worse than 1/200 statistically, not exactly a numbers person :(

Oh is it the grinder thats the 1/20? I knew it was one of the three components. Well, 1/10 x 1/10 would be 1/100 then, excluding the grinding. then [(240 X 4 x 100)/60] = 26.667 hours, statistically. Maybe that's closer to reality. I dont know, again, i havent forged in a long time.

This is again assuming that my application of these probabilities to the system is valid.

Thanks for the correction.

[Gnomad]

That's not quite how the statistics work. You have a 0.99 probability of failure, so your probability of success after n pulls is 1-0.99^n. I like to work with 95% certainty, so 0.95 = 1 - 0.99^n gives us, as expected, 0.05 = 0.99^n

You'll need ln(.05)/ln(.99) = 298ish attempts for a 95% chance of success. That puts you at 298*4 pulls*4 minutes per pull = 4768 minutes to be 95% sure you'll get a perfect mithril handaxe, ignoring handles. That's about 79 and a half hours, or 3 1/3 days.

100 pulls puts you at 1 - 0.99^100 = 63% certainty.

[LivderaDeralleur]

So many numbers ...

I somehow have managed to master the 2 skills without scripting, though the trick is - as someone else said - to maybe have something else to do like watch TV or listen to music during the long-RT moments. My screen reader was helpful with this, as I can listen to the game output and it doesn't take that much to manually input 'get tongs' every so often. And if I got super busy during work or sidetracked, I didn't mind losing out on 5-10 minutes of forging time. It was just a side project for these past couple months.

Anyhow - think I've decided to go for a mithril maul and, after I get a perfect from that, may attempt some others with any of the magical metal slabs I find from the slab generator.

And note - I found Alchemy more painful than Forging so far. Fletching, which I Mastered on my Ranger, is at least doable when you're in a crowd and you can talk/socialize. I made an attempt at Cobbling once, though couldn't see a point in it.

[tyrant-201]

Consider that it also matters what you're forging. The special glyphs only require one round of RT, so one could potentially push out 20 attempts at a steel maul-head in an hour. 15 attempts for mithril. This is also likely why you see a lot more mauls and lances made of specialized material.

Try forging a vultite greatsword and you'll quickly see it's neither worth the time or money.

[Androidpk]

Wasn't very fun when I was forging golvern battle axes.