Issues with Slayer Procs

At some point in the last couple of weeks I've noticed a serious decrease in the proc rate for slayer bows. I was averaging 1.5-2 slayer bows of random quality on my GM fletcher for every 300 lumber that I went through and now I'm averaging less than 1 per 300 and almost half of the slayer bows I proc aren't exceptional quality.

I can understand if this was an intended patch to increase the value of slayer items but, since fletching doesn't have power scrolls it seems a little bit unfair to limit the proc rate to 1% or less. Out of 5k lumber that I used today to craft I ended up with 10 slayer bows and 4 of them were normal quality. Since more than half of the Slayer types are impossible to sell to players, it's seriously effecting my ability to make a decent return on investment.

I know of others that are having the same issue, is this going to be permanent or is it a balance test?
 

yourdaddy

Grandmaster
It's nothing to do with boards. At GM you have 1 % chance of crafting a slayer. Sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you're not. Overall it should be a slayer for 700 boards (including the 20 % material cost reduction of the Britain crafter's guild) if it is 8 board per bow (don't remember but I think it is).
 
my biggest issue is at GM you have a 68% chance to craft exceptional Katanas, but at GM fletching you only have a 58% chance of exceptionals on bows..... this meed almost half the time Slayers are cheap non exceptionals...
 
also you can get BS PS' making the Exeptional % higher and a higher % for slayers.... but no Fletching PS' are out there....
 

eppy

Grandmaster
What is the damage reduction on a slayer normal versus exceptional? I cant imagine that it matters that much.
 

yourdaddy

Grandmaster
Exceptionnal is +4 dmg (so between might, +3, and force, +5), which matters even more on a slayer since it has a dmg% increase.
 
It's nothing to do with boards. At GM you have 1 % chance of crafting a slayer. Sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you're not. Overall it should be a slayer for 700 boards (including the 20 % material cost reduction of the Britain crafter's guild) if it is 8 board per bow (don't remember but I think it is).

Basically the same as what Zander said, since this is a crafting profession that was for some reason denied a powerscroll, not only is the exceptional chance reduced but, also the proc rate is limited. As I stated in the first post the rate WAS higher and then it was reduced during one of the patches I assume. Are there plans of adding Fletching powerscrolls? Are we going to see runic bow kits? I've seen a billion threads about why we shouldn't have it but, why are they limiting certain crafting skills? What about carpentry? These are non-combat crafting skills that are just as hard if not harder to raise than Blacksmithing and yet the expansion gives blacksmithing even MORE stuff.
 

Doomsayer

Grandmaster
I dont know if it is intentional or not, but you have to take into account the price and how simple it is to obtain boards compared to ingots into the equation.
Given that boards are almost "free", at ~3gp each, the amount of bowslayers that can be crafted for a really low price compared to BS-crafted slayers is staggering.
 

eppy

Grandmaster
I dont know if it is intentional or not, but you have to take into account the price and how simple it is to obtain boards compared to ingots into the equation.
Given that boards are almost "free", at ~3gp each, the amount of bowslayers that can be crafted for a really low price compared to BS-crafted slayers is staggering.

Also the ingot requirement for the desirable weapons. Long spears and war hammers are absolute ingot drinkers when trying to make slayers. Kryss's I can do alright with but the heavy hitters are expensive.
 
Doomsayer, each bow I craft costs 7 wood...so lets say I buy 7,000 wood from some poor bastard that spend 3-4 hours farming it. At 3 gold per board I paid that person 21,000 gold. Now according to the proper average that means I'll be crafting 10 slayer bows. Any crafter would know that less than half of the slayers that are possible to proc aren't worth anything because they're impossible to sell to players. Let's just round it to half for the purposes of making the math easy. So now we're dealing with .5% chance that a bow we create will be worth anything. Now since Fletching is following the proper GM formula we have a less than 60% chance to craft a bow exceptionally even while in the Britain crafting area. So now lets reduce the above percentage by another 40% and we'll come to a whopping .3% chance that a bow will be worth anything. That means that out of 7,000 boards, statistically we will craft about 3 slayer bows that are worth selling to the public.

We would have to sell each of those bows for an AVERAGE of 7k gold a piece to break even on the price that was spent to purchase boards.

Now take into account that even if we purchased ALL of those boards instantly instead of farming them ourselves, we can only carry a maximum of about 360 boards at a time if we're completely naked and have nothing else in our bags. It takes about 19.44 (but, since you can't really take half trips it's actually 20 trips) back and forth from the bank to the crafting area just to use the wood necessary to make those 3 slayer bows we were talking about.

Now to be fair, you CAN sell the non-slayer bows to vendors and make back about 500g per trip which does come out to be almost 10k gold recouped but, since you can't use the razor selling feature to sell bows, you have to manually click sell almost 1200 times to do that AND you have to drop any slayer bows you crafted in the bank before you sell any bows because there's no price difference or way to tell the difference between slayer bows and a GM bow in the vendor GUI.

The point I'm trying to make is that even with a little luck, with the new proc percentages cause this skill to be almost not even worth having.

I could farm earth elementals for an hour with a fresh character with 50 archery and 50 tactics and make more gold per hour that I can with fletching. This doesn't really promote a strong crafting community and it makes the server difficult to enjoy for people who just want to find a niche in the crafting community.

/rantover
 
We would have to sell each of those bows for an AVERAGE of 7k gold a piece to break even on the price that was spent to purchase boards.

i am doing a case study on 100k boards. i will tell ya for sure what the %s are buy i think this is a little off. I sell mine for 4/5k and i tend to make more than i spend.

IdeaMatrix i am Pming you
 
Well, of course you're going to make more. If you proc high value slayers, you'll recover your cost in 1 bow but, you could also proc 10 worthless normal slayers with 7k wood...as an average you will be making a profit but, it's still not the same kind of profit you'd be making farming low level dungeon creatures. I'd just like there to be some kind of benefit to providing a service that most people don't want to provide. There needs to be a sense of accomplishment for any GM or higher crafting skill. If you're going to reduce the slayer proc rate for a GM then at least give us powerscrolls so we can have the opportunity to raise it again.
 

yourdaddy

Grandmaster
Normal slayers sell too. A Repond normal bow can easily sell for 15k.

Say you have 3 good bows, and according to your analysis, I'd say excellent bows, you make 50k for a 20k investment.

And about ingots... it's true they're harder to get but you can smelt undesirable items. Not bows.
 
Normal slayers sell too. A Repond normal bow can easily sell for 15k.

Say you have 3 good bows, and according to your analysis, I'd say excellent bows, you make 50k for a 20k investment.

And about ingots... it's true they're harder to get but you can smelt undesirable items. Not bows.

Well if you think Normal repond is a sell at 15k you should check out my vendor. I'm selling exceptional repond at that price and normal for half of that price. Just walk 1 screen south of trinsic moongate and look for the sandstone tower with the Slayer Bows! vendor.
 

yourdaddy

Grandmaster
I sell my except repond at 25k and they usually don't stay on vendor more than a day or two. Your vendor location isn't that good tho. Not much traffic.
 
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