Shamanic Infusion

[Tagamogi]

I was wondering what other people thought of the process of leveling and using shamanic infusion?

I personally feel pretty uninspired by this skill but I can't really put my finger on what would make it more fun. Or maybe I'm just using it all wrong. I started out really liking the skill: give my armor some cool minor buff using easily obtainable mats, level up my skill - fantastic. And then I hit level 4 and stopped leveling up every time I used an infusion recipe. :D

Obviously, it makes sense that leveling up would slow down a bit and require more practice. My problem is that practicing shamanic infusion just isn't exciting to me. Working on trade skills that have tangible results is fun - there are lots of workorders to fill for carpentry, toolcrafting etc, there is NPC demand, and if worst comes to worst I can always just vendor my practice items. Leveling up less tangible skills like augmentation and transmutation is also ok - I get something as reward for my practice, so even if it's just a currently fairly worthless bead, I can still save it up for future use if I want. With shamanic infusion, I get to infuse an item and then get rid of it. That just feels non-rewarding. I don't even like infusing the gear I'm currently wearing since I discover new infusions more quickly than I replace gear, and then there's no way to remove the old infusion from my gear if I like a new infusion recipe better for it.

I finally settled for infusing white items since that turns them green and allows me to practice my augmentation on them. That is actually fairly fun, but I'd say it improves the fun of augmentation more than the fun of shamanic infusion since shamanic infusion is still stuck at "spam skill and discard result."

I got shamanic infusion when my combat skills were in their 40s, so I think I'm replacing my gear less often a lower level player would do. So, maybe infusion would actually work out fine if someone first got it around level 15 or so, used it for their fairly frequently replaced gear, and maybe through multiple combat skill switches?

So, how does everyone else like this skill? Is the problem just me?

[ShieldBreaker]

I was wondering what other people thought of the process of leveling and using shamanic infusion?
....
So, how does everyone else like this skill? Is the problem just me?

Shamanic infusion is nice to have overall. It's easier and cheaper then augmentation with some nice mods and belts.

But your not completely alone, I at least will join you in the quandary as to why Shamanic Infusion doesn't remain feeling fun. I am leveling it on two characters my old mainly maxed out character, and an almost mid-level character that got Shamanic very early on in there skill development phase, might have still been in the 20s level. Both of them get stuck at levels for a long time. For the main he gets burst of progress when a work order or two happen to match up with stock piles of materials for SI. I do, on main character, enjoy placing the odd Infusion on my secondary gear, a little +25 or + 50 to epic attack, a +1 speed + 5 unarmed to some underwater boots.

Things that might help it stay fun.
Idea 1
Ability to Undo an infusion
Tier 1, 95% chance of destroy item. This should be learned early on and not be too expensive to use. By almost certainly destroying the item you get to have another tiny boost to xp for each item. Might be interesting if there was a punishment like a temporary curse for using this skill at all, the benefit the item had is reversed and your stuck with a debuff. It would stack with each use so it makes using the skill more risky. If it happened on Successful uses, you could have it also apply on unsuccessful uses, or double the effect on unsuccessful uses.
Tier 2, 50-75% chance of destroy item. ...
Tier 3, 25%-50% chance of destroy item. ....
Tier 4. 5%-25% chance of destroy item. ... At this tier it would be fine to risk junk items, but would be interesting if you wanted to try and rework something you really wanted to keep. With higher material costs and maybe the debuff effect you would earn the right to get the increased xp for the skill use and the ability to get more xp on applying a new SI.

Also it would allow you to be more free with adding an infusion, you don't have to think about holding off for the next available infusion for this particular item type. You can gamble that you might get a back up piece of gear or could luck out and undo successfully and rework it no problem.

Idea 2
More concurrent types of SI
Basically different types of recipes with different inputs for the same or different item types at levels of SI that already have recipes.
Already submitted some in-game so not repeating mine here. It should just make it easier to level up and give more variety to what you can add to an item. Like at this level I can add armor or i can add power to these boots, I don't have those boar tusks, okay I'll wait or no I'll just add power. I would think we would need a NPC to take on the role as alternate SI mentor.

Idea 3
Input into other Recipes
If it was a step into making something bigger, like how some mushroom things go into make cheese or potions. So if you had a call for an infused skull which you would need a animal skull for. And then could apply the infusion recipe to the skull instead of a piece of equipment, then that becomes an input for a potion or necromancy recipe. If the infusion used could be any given infusion that would free up the waiting for a particular type of equipment issue. Wonder if necromancy would start putting out work orders for infused skulls, wanting to work the necromancy side xp but not the SI side.

at this point I have to wonder if there is a lot more already planned for it we just don't know about, and so its not fun because its not done. Or do we need to find ways to adjust input materials to make it more fun to grind. or more exciting effects or level up bonuses (i.e. more +1 to alchemy or +1 to lore) that make it worth the grind. Just for the record I think my opinion is based on the grind with the more recently updated xp table. It is a relatively new skill, so hasn't had much time for it to be reworked. Also maybe it is just the old players that feel it isn't working great, maybe brand new players love it the way it is. Haven't heard them say much yet about it one way or the other.

[Tsugumori]

I think the core of shamanic infusion it just to get it to 15 for the belt with inventory space. Easier than the toolcrafting grind in all honesty.

That's my take on it. If you have a lot of money and feel like dishing out quests to lower level players I bet they'd be more than happy to go grind the animal parts. With the whole infusion aspect, that encourages either crafting the associated item or going searching for it in vendors or chests. I do agree with it being an entry level crafting/augment/alteration skill, but I find it hard to stick with.

[Eachna]

Shamanic infusion is nice to have overall. It's easier and cheaper then augmentation with some nice mods and belts.


I agree it's cheaper on a per-item basis (the market value of items that go into an infused piece are cheaper than the market values of an augmented/transmuted item), but it's not easier or cheaper overall. It's harder and more expensive.

The relative "power" level is fine. It's the investment in leveling that sucks. According to the wiki, Shamanic Infusion is "supposed" to be for people who want to personally boost their gear but don't want to grind out all the trade skills needed for the full Augmentation/Transmutation skill set. If this is correct then it's the "lite" version of magical enchanting, and the generic combat boosts it provides are in line with that explanation.

tldr; There are too many costs/penalties on leveling Shamanic Infusion for the amount of return you get in being able to enchant +100 enchancement point bonuses into gear. The enchantments themselves are fine. The costs and penalties ought to be reduced.


Here are my issues/opinions/thoughts:

Some Pros:

* The recipes are free, which is nice.
* You can use higher-level infusions on lower-level gear (and low-level infusions on high-level gear). Whatever your skill level in SI, you can infuse the gear you're wearing, as long as you have a recipe for that slot.
* You don't have to pay much to get started harvesting the raw materials for SI. All you need is a skinning knife and there's no ongoing consumables cost (no consumable recipe ingredients).

Some Cons:

* The gear (except the belts) requires you to have Shamanic Infusion in order to be able to use it and the infusions be placed on existing gear. The belts don't require this but one of the two kinds (the pocket belt) has a competing item in a different skill line that is systematially superior (the toolmaking pocket belts always have more pockets). It's very difficult to predict what Infused gear will be interesting to players and to know if players will even be able to wear very nice enchanted gear that's also Infused. One or two players can keep pretty much the entire game supplied with all the SI belts any players might fancy using the player vendors, and they do.

* When you infuse an item and go to sell it to a NPC vendor, it sells for exactly the same price as if it wasn't infused. The NPC vendors think Shamanic Infusion is worthless.

* I haven't found any NPCs that buy the belts for full price (except general vendors who have very small buying pools of councils) or accept them for favor. This isn't just a problem with the rat and evasion belts. It's an issue with all the belts in the game. Even the NPC vendors who sell belts won't buy their belts back if you mis-click. Either vendors that buy leather armor, or jewelers, or the SI trainer should buy belts.

* I haven't found any work orders for Infused items or belts.

* Infusers have no control over the drop rate of resources. Both Transmuters and Augmenters have some control over their supply of rare materials (they generate prisms, the runoff mats, and phlogs from magical items). They have multiple sources of magic items to generate their materials. They can craft their own magic armor, they can buy used magic equipment from NPC vendors, they can use loot drops. Infusers are entirely dependant on the RNG from kills/skinning (mats only rarely display in vendor buy used tabs and only in small quantities). The rare materials are less frequent as drops from their corresonding animal than magic equipment drops are from mobs.

* The materials sink gets brutal fast. SI has various recipes based on items that drop from animals (Wolf, Dinosaur, Bear, Deer, Panther, Tiger). Each recipe gives a different bonus and each recipe needs multiple units of a rare animal drop (antlers, bear claws, cat eyes) as well as a common item drop (deer guts, cat tails, gall bladders). You need more of each rare item than you need of each common item. This is the reverse of most other crafting systems in game where you need more common items than rare items. It's as if in order to make a pair enchanted leather pants you needed more gems than you did pieces of tanned leather.

* Only equipment can be infused and equipment doesn't stack. This causes storage issues. You either have to hoard dropped loot (filling precious bag/storage slots), buy it from NPC vendors (a further cash expense), or level up armor crafting skills and make the equipment to infuse on the fly.

* I'm cash poor. I'm a newish player (I think I'm up to about six months playing). Every activity is a cash sink for me. I'm still gifting tens of thousands of councils worth of loot drops and harvested resources for favor unlocks (there's always more NPCs when I change regions). I'm paying more tens of thousands for the the level 50-60 skill unlocks. I'm buying special attacks for my combat skills. These are all fine, they're where my money is supposed to go. But, I cannot afford to complete with the old time players who are rolling in millions of councils and putting up high-paying work orders for the rare animal items when they decide to bang out SI to round out their completionist skills.

* The scale and claw drops for dinosaurs are problematic. I don't know what it is. All I can say is that there aren't enough hours in the day to farm for the dinosaur recipes in the sewers or Eltibule. Maybe I'm supposed to go farm in some dungeon in Kur (or a higher zone), but I haven't found herds of dinosaurs anywhere with decent drop rates. The wolves, panthers/tigers, and deer all have approximately equivalent drop rates. This means every level I get a dinosaur recipe I grind out the xp using some other recipe that is sub-optimal for the xp it gives.

* After hitting the low 30's I stalled at a Boar recipe that requires a trophy pig hide for each casting. Fuck that idea, and the horse it rode in in, and the horse's ancestors and descendants for 7 generations in each direction. Now I'm going to need to start skipping levels with recipes that require trophy hides too!!! Even with my shiny bonus skinning knife I don't get enough trophy hides from skinning. And that's throwing away cash. Trophy hides are worth hundreds of councils each. In some cases close to or more than a thousand councils each. I'm supposed to use them in recipes that the NPC vendors think are completely worthless??? If I pay other players to farm trophy hides I'll be broke. Please note the part where the SI recipes aren't profitable, there are no work orders, and there's not a realtistic option to sell the gear to other players.

* The grind and xp/mat curve do not fit with the supposed intention of this being a simpler alternative to Transmutation and Augmentation. I can level A&T faster. I have a steady supply of the mats I need. I get better results with my gear. I realize that A&T is probably easier now so more players can level it and test it but I don't know how hard it will be in the future, and I can only compare it to how it works now. I've also considered SI next to all the other crafting skills I learned.

* I'm not in a hurry. I've spent at least five months working on this. It's one of the earliest crafting lines I started. I've since hit level 50 in Tanning, Gardening, Textile Creation, 45 in Leatherworking, 60 in Tailoring, 45 in Alchemy, 50 in Cooking (and some others I don't know without logging in). I've hit level 35 in cheesemaking faster and with less frustration by mostly making butter. I reached higher levels in the five Augmentation skills I unlocked in two weeks of Augmenting than in five months of steadily leveling Shamanic Infusion. Note: Half of this was done under the old xp table but I still keep stalling even on the new one.

* There are NO grinding recipes for Shamanic Infusion. There's no slow/steady recipe that gives just a little xp but is really cheap to use and consumes common materials. Nothing like the feather recipes in fletching or wood chips in carpentry or butter for cheesemaking. Other than the harvesting skills (that don't have recipes), most other crafting skills have a grinding recipe.

* There are no consumable recipes. There's no reason for other crafting skills or combat-skill-using players to put up orders for Infusers to make stacks of "something" for them.

* There's a few nice things but not much that stands out and makes me say "Wow, I want that skill line". It doesn't "have" to be awesome, but the way it is now it "ought" to be awesome to justify leveling it.

* Not being able to remove or overwrite infusions means that you either want to max it out or not use it on really precious gear. I have a nice pair of boots that I've kept for 3 months. I'd like to infuse them with the deer run speed bonus. But with a SI level in the low 30's I know there's at least one more run speed bonus recipe in my future. Even with how slowly I level SI, with my play style I know it's unlikely I'll get a better pair of boots before I get the next level of Infusion recipe. Since I can't overwrite Infusions the skill is *only* useful for equipment that will be replaced before I gain the next tier of Infusion, which limits its usefulness. With Augmentation, I can detatch/attach a mod to bridge a gap.

* Despite it supposedly being an alternative to A&T, it actually fits in perfectly for creating low-cost green gear to grind out A&T. To date, the best use I've found for SI is to power level A&T . I can create green gear from my tailoring skill without using any gems, only rare animal parts. Since A&T both level fairly quickly, this is much more efficient than using SI for infusing gear to wear or sell to vendors. Since the effort I've put into infusing an item (farming the rare mats and casting the infusion) is "worthless", it's cheaper to burn the items I create for A&T than burn items that increase in value after casting enchantments.

Edit: I know this post is long, even for my wordy posting style. I *WANT* to like SI. It's exactly the sort of thing I'd do in a MMO. But it makes my teeth hurt (from all the grinding). I understand the game is in alpha. It's very clearly *intended* to work in the way that it does now (especially since this isn't the first thread these issues have been hashed out in) and it's a badly designed intention.

It's BAD GAME DESIGN to only "cost" players to create gear they can "only" use for themselves and provide an alternate system that is both more powerful and is profitable and can be leveled faster using the first system (so you can get the better system at reduced cost by using the worse system).

[alleryn]

Disclaimer: I am level 2 in Shamanic Infusion.

I agree that shamanic infusion isn't all that useful as it stands, and many of your points are good ones. But the issue with trophy hides i think is somewhat wrong.

If i understand it correctly all the recipes from 34 on up use trophy hides and they are the top-tier shamanic infusions. The level 34 Shaman's Boar Foot Infusion is the top tier Boar Foot Infusion. You should probably not use those recipes to level up, and maybe there ought to be more recipes interspersed at higher levels in case you are only interested in, say, the level 48 recipe and don't really want to spam the level 31 recipe to get there.

But, really i can't imagine it would take that long farming bear groupies (but see my disclaimer above). I farmed groupies for i think 2 days and i believei have a whole stack of claws and bladders. Even if there was a spammable level 40 or 45 SI recipe it's not that big a difference, maybe a 2:3 ratio in the xp you receive. Just make sure to do each recipe once for the bonus xp and then find the most spammable item. That's how leveling most skills seems to work.

For me, the issue with SI is that there just isn't really any incentive to level it up. An augment is almost always going to be superior. Some of the low level recipes can be useful, but it's not worth the investment to level up a skill intended for mid-level range, when by the time you've leveled it up you're no longer mid-level.

[Eachna]

Disclaimer: I am level 2 in Shamanic Infusion.

I agree that shamanic infusion isn't all that useful as it stands, and many of your points are good ones. But the issue with trophy hides i think is somewhat wrong.

If i understand it correctly all the recipes from 34 on up use trophy hides and they are the top-tier shamanic infusions. The level 34 Shaman's Boar Foot Infusion is the top tier Boar Foot Infusion. You should probably not use those recipes to level up, and maybe there ought to be more recipes interspersed at higher levels in case you are only interested in, say, the level 48 recipe and don't really want to spam the level 31 recipe to get there..

I haven't looked at the recipes in the wiki, just the top part, so I wasn't sure if those were the final recipes or there were more after. (51-60, 61-70).

I'm fine with using trophy hides to Infuse items I want to wear or for the one time bonus. I'm not fine with using them for grinding xp. That's what led to my exuberance :D.


But, really i can't imagine it would take that long farming bear groupies (but see my disclaimer above). I farmed groupies for i think 2 days and i believei have a whole stack of claws and bladders. Even if there was a spammable level 40 or 45 SI recipe it's not that big a difference, maybe a 2:3 ratio in the xp you receive. Just make sure to do each recipe once for the bonus xp and then find the most spammable item. That's how leveling most skills seems to work.

That's what I do with every other craft and it works for me. I'm leveling cheesemaking by making butter, usually 2x a day that I play. It's not fast, but it's reliable and low stress.

There's no grinding recipes in the tree. Everything needs rare animal parts. Everything needs to be cast on a non-stacking item. It's fiddly and storage intensive and I don't bother to use it on gear because it was so slow to level I ended up picking up Augmentation and Transmutation and I outleveled SI with all those skills. Really the only reason I'm still getting xp in it is because it rocks for power-leveling A&T skills. I can feed them green gear that doesn't need any gems (not even redwall crystals), and I get phlogs and runoff mats and prisms and xp.

Just to be clear: I didn't just pick up Augmentation and Transmutation faster. I learned Goblinese. I learned Toolmaking and Tailoring and Blacksmithing (and Armor Patching). I picked up ALL THE REQUIREMENTS while SI crawled along. It took me two weeks to get transmutation to 50 and to bypass SI with my Augmentation skills.

The reversed rarity (needing more rare than common) of items really messes with leveling. Especially with the second tier of recipes, where you need 4 rare items per click.


For me, the issue with SI is that there just isn't really any incentive to level it up. An augment is almost always going to be superior. Some of the low level recipes can be useful, but it's not worth the investment to level up a skill intended for mid-level range, when by the time you've leveled it up you're no longer mid-level.
There would be an incentive if it was faster and less fiddly to level. If, by the time you hit level 50 in your second set of combat skills you also had level 50 SI, it "would" have been worth it. You would have been using it on your gear all along as you were leveling.

Then you could decide to either keep using it, or discard it and either pick up the attachment skills and just attach mods other people extracted for you to your gear, or move up to full A&T.

Later on (not now because he's one guy working hard) Citan could add more tiers to the recipes for people who wanted to keep using it. For testing now 50 levels is fine. It just needs to level much faster, pay out at least some cash, and have a place in the larger crafting network by producing consumables other trees use.

[alleryn]

Fair points. Personally i'm still not convinced there are no grinding recipes in the tree. I often collect equipment for a certain slot or with a certain pre-req for favor with a particular NPC. What i do is just drop items of that sort off in Joeh's enormous storage (and i still have like 3 rows of outdated gear in there as well for skills i haven't used in ages and for stuff with no pre-reqs that i'll eventually dole out to other starting toons).

I don't see what's to stop you from just dropping off extra gear in storage, then going to farm a stack of whatever rare animal part you need, then spamming a recipe.

I may well be missing something, and i'm sure i don't play in the most efficient manner (so maybe that process is too time consuming or something, when i find it just sort of one of the many stops in my routine).

I'm not totally convinced i would use SI even if it leveled faster. My gear has 100 available augmentation points and i have SI i could put on if i ever thought of it, just doesn't occur to me and i don't feel like i really need the extra power to do what i want to do. But then again, i'm not very interested in combat and only really do it when i really need some drop, so i'm probably not a very typical example.

[ShieldBreaker]

This has got me thinking about enchantment points. If you could squeeze one of these Infusions into 20 left over enchantment points on some gear that would be really nice. I would almost think that the lower level infusions shouldn't really take up a whole 100, they are low level, if you put 2 on one item don't think it is going to throw off the balance of the game. Might want to have a system that doesn't let you have 2 of the exact same infusion on one item.

[Tagamogi]

This has got me thinking about enchantment points. If you could squeeze one of these Infusions into 20 left over enchantment points on some gear that would be really nice. I would almost think that the lower level infusions shouldn't really take up a whole 100, they are low level, if you put 2 on one item don't think it is going to throw off the balance of the game. Might want to have a system that doesn't let you have 2 of the exact same infusion on one item.

Yeah, something like that would be nice. I wonder if that would still allow Shamanic Infusion to server as intro skill then - it seems more complicated to me to manage several different infusions per item than just figuring out the augmentation system.

I'm a bit stuck on this whole "intro skill" idea anyway - if it's supposed to be an introduction skill only and transmutation/augmentation is always going to be better, than maybe SI should be permanently level-capped at 20 or something like that... Which kind of takes the fun out of a crafting skill, imo - I'd like to have SI as an alternative/addition to T&A, but then leveling it shouldn't be so much more complicated.

Eachna - I basically agree with your entire post. Picking on a couple things:

I don't think SI needs to be storage intensive. You can buy an infinite supply of basic white armor from Joeh for around 50 councils each. If you are trying to level augmentation, buying a 50 council item and putting a low-level shamanic infusion recipe on it is arguably more cost effective than using actual green gear drops you get, since those can likely be vendored for more than the cost of the white item plus the shamanic infusion mats. I've also bought some used underwear and infused that, which just feels ... morally wrong. But cheap, and easy to obtain.
None of that changes the base argument that using SI to level T&A doesn't really make SI more fun.

I thought all the shamanic infusion mats were equally common, just some of them get used more than others, so the less-frequently used mats tend to pile up more. It doesn't help that antlers and dinosaur scales are used for things other than shamanic infusion. And I've never found a good spot for farming dinosaurs either. The bigger dinosaurs drop large dinosaur scales which I don't think are used in shamanic infusion at all (or at least are used beyond my paltry level 30 skill).

[Eachna]

Fair points. Personally i'm still not convinced there are no grinding recipes in the tree. I often collect equipment for a certain slot or with a certain pre-req for favor with a particular NPC. What i do is just drop items of that sort off in Joeh's enormous storage (and i still have like 3 rows of outdated gear in there as well for skills i haven't used in ages and for stuff with no pre-reqs that i'll eventually dole out to other starting toons).

If there are recipes made with cheap, easy to acquire materials that can be spammed, please mention them in the thread. I can't prove a negative (I can't post the non-existance of recipes).

What I can do is say this:
I have all the gear I could want. I have leathermaking and tailoring. I don't need to store gear to infuse it. What's stopping me is that I don't get enough rare animal parts after hours of farming to spam any of the recipes.

I spend whole weeks farming in Eltibule. I move from area to area killing the mobs there. I skin everything and I save all the animal parts. I take all the bits and drop them into storage at the end of each day. I don't sell any of it to vendors. Other days I spend farming deer for the hides and antlers in either Kur or Serbule.

Then I spend a day growing cotton from a stack of Strange Dirt (because I want Tailoring xp). I card it, I make threads, I set up everything to be ready to tailor cloth armor.

I make gear. I infuse it. I augment it to break it down. At the end of the process, I'm leveling Augmenting and Tailoring faster than Shamanic Infusion (Transmutation is already at 50). I am also, disconnected from this specific process, leveling every other skill I have faster than SI.

I level exactly as fast as the rare mats come to me from skinning, and no one can level faster than that. Connected to this, my storage is stuffed with common animal mats because I don't have enough use for them. Every now and then I just sell them to Mushroom Jack.


I'm not totally convinced i would use SI even if it leveled faster. My gear has 100 available augmentation points and i have SI i could put on if i ever thought of it, just doesn't occur to me and i don't feel like i really need the extra power to do what i want to do. But then again, i'm not very interested in combat and only really do it when i really need some drop, so i'm probably not a very typical example.

Well that's an entirely different issue. If you don't want to enchant your gear then of course SI isn't going to be that appealing for you. My feedback presumes a person wants to enchant their gear but doesn't want to go to the effort of unlocking A&T.

I never said I was providing feedback to make it so every player wanted to use SI :D.

[Eachna]

Eachna - I basically agree with your entire post. Picking on a couple things:

I don't think SI needs to be storage intensive. You can buy an infinite supply of basic white armor from Joeh for around 50 councils each. If you are trying to level augmentation, buying a 50 council item and putting a low-level shamanic infusion recipe on it is arguably more cost effective than using actual green gear drops you get, since those can likely be vendored for more than the cost of the white item plus the shamanic infusion mats. I've also bought some used underwear and infused that, which just feels ... morally wrong. But cheap, and easy to obtain.

I agree. It doesn't have to be storage intensive. It's fiddly though, because gear doesn't stack. Storage is at a premium. I pay the fiddly cost by instead *making* the stuff. If alleryn is leveling by dropping stuff in Joeh storage and infusing it later, then he (she?) is losing out on storing more gear sets in there (or whatever else people do with Joeh storage). If you buy white gear instead of storing it or crafting it, then you're using the money you earn from other stuff to 'pay' to level SI.

LOL. I like the underwear solution. I hadn't thought of that.


I thought all the shamanic infusion mats were equally common, just some of them get used more than others, so the less-frequently used mats tend to pile up more. It doesn't help that antlers and dinosaur scales are used for things other than shamanic infusion. And I've never found a good spot for farming dinosaurs either. The bigger dinosaurs drop large dinosaur scales which I don't think are used in shamanic infusion at all (or at least are used beyond my paltry level 30 skill).

I don't think the mat drops are even. I always end up with more significantly more deer guts than antlers after a farming run (or more scales than claws, etc.). If the drops were even they should be even in my bags (before I made it to storage). If they are supposed to be even that could be signs of a different problem.

[alleryn]

If there are recipes made with cheap, easy to acquire materials that can be spammed, please mention them in the thread.

I already mentioned the bear parts from groupies that i collected a stack of in 2 days. Not really sure which one is meant to be the rare one, i found them in roughly equal numbers.

[Tsugumori]

The rare claws are the enchanted ones - the ones used to barter with Percy.

(If you found them in 'roughly equal' numbers then that's just your luck. They aren't hard to find that said, more of a semi-uncommon drop)

[alleryn]

The rare claws are the enchanted ones - the ones used to barter with Percy.

(If you found them in 'roughly equal' numbers then that's just your luck. They aren't hard to find that said, more of a semi-uncommon drop)

The shamanic infusion recipes use regular bear claws, not the enchanted ones.

[Tsugumori]

Smh - Not what I was saying but I guess not everyone reads /o/

[Tagamogi]

If you buy white gear instead of storing it or crafting it, then you're using the money you earn from other stuff to 'pay' to level SI.


Well, my thought process is this: I want to level augmentation, and I just found a piece of green gear worth 300 councils. I can:
1. Disenchant the piece of green gear. Total cost 300 councils.
2. Sell the green gear for 300 councils. Buy a piece of white gear, put a low level shamanic infusion on it for maybe 200 councils total cost. Total cost for doing one augmentation is than 300 - 200 councils = 100 councils profit plus bonus SI xp.

Of course, this calculation rather depends on the price of the piece of green gear, and whether the limited supply of shamanic infusion mats is going to drive me crazy before I get augmentation where I want it... I also tend to use the higher level SI recipes (3+4 mats) which I don't think are as cost/xp efficient as the starter 1+3 recipes. So, yeah, I'm probably not as cost-efficient as I like to pretend I am.

My primary source of shamanic infusion mats is Mushroom Jack, so that's why I always assumed the materials drop in equal proportion. I'll pick up things when I kill animals for other reasons, but I'm really not a huge fan of extensive farming, so I go shopping instead. Sorry if I'm buying up stuff you want - depending on how excited I feel about SI, I may check the used tabs a 1-3 times a day or not at all. ( I just hit the recipe with the trophy boar skin requirement yesterday, so I think I may start ignoring SI for a while now... )

Oh, and you are entirely right about the skillup rate. I had a nice buildup of SI mats yesterday, including more than 100 cat eyeballs, and got a few levels in SI. Augmentation leveled about twice as fast during that time, if not faster.

[Eachna]

My primary source of shamanic infusion mats is Mushroom Jack, so that's why I always assumed the materials drop in equal proportion. I'll pick up things when I kill animals for other reasons, but I'm really not a huge fan of extensive farming, so I go shopping instead. Sorry if I'm buying up stuff you want - depending on how excited I feel about SI, I may check the used tabs a 1-3 times a day or not at all. ( I just hit the recipe with the trophy boar skin requirement yesterday, so I think I may start ignoring SI for a while now... )


AHAHAHAHAHA :D. So we're at the same level and stopped at the same place. :D.

Good on you getting the mats at Jack. I'd decided it had to be a display issue as I knew *someone* had to be selling them. Other people buying them means the display works correctly and I'm just too slow/lazy.

As far as what I mean by "rare/common" (which may not be how they're "coded"). When I farm bears, I don't get equal numbers of regular bear paws and gall bladders. When I farm cats, I don't get equal numbers of tails and eyes. When I farm deer, I don't get equal numbers of antlers and intestines. I consistently get less of the one that's required in higher numbers in SI recipes (I get fewer antlers than intestines). In my own head, I think of that as the rare material. Maybe it's not "rare", but I need a word to describe it :D.

I'm not talking about mats like magical bear paws that aren't used in SI.

[alleryn]

As far as what I mean by "rare/common" (which may not be how they're "coded"). When I farm bears, I don't get equal numbers of regular bear paws and gall bladders. When I farm cats, I don't get equal numbers of tails and eyes. When I farm deer, I don't get equal numbers of antlers and intestines. I consistently get less of the one that's required in higher numbers in SI recipes (I get fewer antlers than intestines). In my own head, I think of that as the rare material. Maybe it's not "rare", but I need a word to describe it :D.
What kinds of ratios are you seeing? Looking through my storage (i can't say for sure what exactly i've used for quests or sold... other than antlers i haven't used much in recipes) i'm seeing more pig feet than boar tusks (~3:2) and more tails (panther+tiger) than eyeballs (~3:2), but roughly equal wolf teeth vs. wolf tails and bear paws vs gallbladders. Rat parts i have too few to make any kind of assessment, but the others i have 100+ of most (all but tusks, paws, and bladders, which are at 60+). I have significantly more deer guts than antlers, but i've used a decent amount of antlers in recipes.

Edit: Another thing occurred to me, which is skinning vs butchering. I'm not totally sure how this works, but i tend to skin most animals, but i do mostly butcher deer; pigs i have butchered at times as well. If butchering deer gives deer guts, which skinning gives antlers (seems sort of logical) this might account for some of the disparity in this case. This might logically apply to gallbladders vs paws as well, and perhaps teeth vs tails (for both wolves and rats), and maybe even eyeballs vs tails for cats or feet vs tusks for pigs/boars. This is just conjecture though, i'll try to keep an eye on it in the future if i think of it.

[Yaksnot]

I am leveling it, but find it fairly lackluster at the moment. time will tell. I like several of the ideas in this thread though.

[Eachna]

What kinds of ratios are you seeing? Looking through my storage (i can't say for sure what exactly i've used for quests or sold... other than antlers i haven't used much in recipes) i'm seeing more pig feet than boar tusks (~3:2) and more tails (panther+tiger) than eyeballs (~3:2), but roughly equal wolf teeth vs. wolf tails and bear paws vs gallbladders. Rat parts i have too few to make any kind of assessment, but the others i have 100+ of most (all but tusks, paws, and bladders, which are at 60+). I have significantly more deer guts than antlers, but i've used a decent amount of antlers in recipes.

Edit: Another thing occurred to me, which is skinning vs butchering. I'm not totally sure how this works, but i tend to skin most animals, but i do mostly butcher deer; pigs i have butchered at times as well. If butchering deer gives deer guts, which skinning gives antlers (seems sort of logical) this might account for some of the disparity in this case. This might logically apply to gallbladders vs paws as well, and perhaps teeth vs tails (for both wolves and rats), and maybe even eyeballs vs tails for cats or feet vs tusks for pigs/boars. This is just conjecture though, i'll try to keep an eye on it in the future if i think of it.

Back from a week off for RL stuff.

I hadn't thought of skinning and butchering both being a factor so that's a very good point.

I know some things that are both skinning (eyes and cat tails) fall in unequal numbers. I get more gut than antlers just from the basic drops at the top of the loot box (ie: the deer drops that come from neither skinning nor butchering). I didn't write down numbers based on days spent skinning and days spent butchering.

Still at the end of the day the resource sink going into the skill is not worth the 100 enchantment point effects that come out. Right now I don't think it's the enchantments that are the "problem". They seems reasonable-ish for a simple crafting system. It's that the skill levels too slowly to be useful and that happens because of the resources going in.

It's my opinion that if the grind was less difficult it would make it easier to judge the relative merit of using SI vs the relative merit of using A&T. It may then turn out that even with another boost to the xp table (or a reduction in resources/addition of a grinding recipe) the 100 point effects are too weak. That'll be hard to determine as long as it levels slower than the other trade skills. IOW - it takes so long to level it you might as well just get A&T (which level very very fast) and enjoy the benefits of the full enchanting system.

By making it slower to level than A&T as well as slower to level than at least most of the other trade skills, it doesn't meet what's being stated as the intended purpose: to be a faster, simpler, "basic" enchanting system to be used either instead of A&T or at least "before" you unlock A&T.

[Darvious]

There are several levels where you don't get a new recipe, plenty of room to put in Infusion removal by level. That being said, SI is a different type of infusion and in cost not as valuable as doing Aug\Trans. Make SI it's own art, 1 Infusion per piece whether or not the item has been Auged or Transed, but it makes the piece attuned. Still sell-able, but if someone wants the piece thy have to get you to remove the infusion. This way you can still get the bonus, but you have to go through the pain of learning SI for yourself.