The level 16 enchanter spell, Mesmerization, is research only on the TLP servers like Mangler. Since this is the first and only targeted aoe mez spell for a LOT of levels (next one is Fascination at level 52, incredibly---from Kunark expansion!) this means it's kind of essential. Now as is my habit I level my toons fast and I tend to dump all loot on vendors but I did start saving HIDES of all types since I know they're used to research spells. Except I must have inadvertently sold all the low level RAW HIDES cuz I had none in my bank and it requires a plain old RAW HIDE to research this essential spell.
Looking up on Magelo to see what drops them the most I found "not much" and I really didn't want to have to kill 100 trash mobs to get 2 or 3 hides. So I noticed on the cat island off Tox there is a mob called a kerran pazdar shaman which seems to have a drop rate of roughly 1 in 3. From a tiny sample, it's true, so this might not extrapolate to 33% on larger quantities but it sure looked a lot better than the 1 in 20 or so rates on other mobs.
So I meandered down to Tox, which is really nice this time of year. Thank God for DRUID TRACKING. I found 4 of the shamans spawned and they were tricky to find, inside underground tunnels under a building at the very top of the island.
Only 4 were up. I killed them all and got 3 RAW HIDES. Which was good enough to make 3 copies of this spell, since I used the CRAFTSMAN DRAUGHT that comes with the market "package" with the big bags. That DRAUGHT is only good for 2 hours OR 48 combines, and failures count, so I made these 3 plus a copy of the level 44 slow, and that's it. The regular DRAUGHT can't be bought on TLP servers, I guess, so back to the old grind to level trade skills since you can only buy this package once.
Yeah, TLP servers are not really close to as tough as EQ was in the early days. But they're sure tougher than regular servers and a lot tougher than WoW. I can't imagine WoW ever making players jump thru so many hoops to get a very essential level 16 spell for any class. Right?