Artisan Quest, who be doing it?Follow

Hey I'm working on this with my main and I'm loving it! It's like the old epic quests only several times harder and involves travelling all over Norrath, visiting old zones you almost had forgotten about. I actually found sections of some zones I had never seen before, like in Icewell Keep. This is an incredible quest and the prize is well worth the humongous effort: an augment of fantastic power and prestige which no doubt will remain attached to a proud owner's earring until the day the last EQ server shuts down for all time.

I'd like to start this thread for comments about this quest, and for tips and info on getting it all done.

For those not in the know, here's a basic rundown of how it works. Even though walkthrus and info threads have been created here, on DBG forums and on EQTraders, because some of those threads were works in process, I would like to coalesce the info here for the sake of simplicity:

1. MAX OUT YOUR TRADE SKILLS
1. You have to be a master craftsman in every trade skill for which you are eligible. Yeah, if you're not tradeskill junkie, this is a big hurdle. Which is why I say this quest is several times harder than any class's epic. BUT.... no raiding required. There is lots of info on how to max out every trade skill so I won't get into that. Since being 300 in a trade has inherent value anyway, I'd suggest it's well worth becoming a Master Craftsman even without the availability of this quest. You can make millions of pp creating and selling bags, power sources, and other items requiring easily pharmed components.

2. DO ARTISAN'S WARES
2. Complete the Artisan's Wares achievement. You might want to set one of your bind points near this guy in Halas since you'll be visiting him several times. This requires gathering 16 items in 16 zones all over the old world. They're all ground spawns but you might have to do some clearing to get to some of them, such as in Harbinger's Spire and Erudin Burning. Easily solo'd by 100+. Below that, maybe bring a friend or 2. This step does contain a notorious bottleneck: the Plane of Time ground spawn is in a room which can only be accessed by hailing an NPC while in possession of a Quintessence of Elements, which is what old-timers received for completing PoP progression. Unfortunately, most of us <ahem, like ME) destroyed this item to make space, since we were told you could move such flags to your keyring and never ever have to use the original item again. Fools Be Us! THIS is why many players on every server are redoing all the old PoP progression, fighting for the same once-every-3-days spawning PoP Boss. The easier solution is find a friend with the item, group with them and have them hail the NPC in Plane of Innovation. Failing to find a friend who still has the item, do what I did: offer a hefty pourboire in general chat and eventually you'll find someone willing to sell 10 minutes of their time for many stacks of platinum pieces.

3. GET A TRADE SKILL TROPHY
3. You need to have at least one trade skill trophy and max out its highest level. If, like me, you never bothered to acquire these while levelling your skills to 300.... there's good news! It didn't matter! Just go to West Freeport, find Baublie Diggs, not far from the zone-in, and she gives out all the Master Trade Skill quests. If your skill is 300 she will automatically offer you the Master level tests. I did Tailoring myself. You have to make about 10 items which aren't particularly hard, although at least one is 300+ so you could suffer a failure there. At least for Tailoring, none of the components are particularly difficult to locate.

4. MAX OUT SAID TRADE SKILL TROPHY
4, Once you turn in the 10 items you have to make she rewards you with your Master Trade Skill trophy. But it's levelled to 6/7 and 0% so you need to max it out. This is accomplished by equipping it and making 400-1000 successful combines for any recipe above 300 trivial. You can read more about this on DBG forums but the current wisdom is that anything 301-350 will do and that nothing is gained with a trivial above 350. The 400-1000 range depends upon which trade skill and the long thread on the Artisan Quest at DBG has a post with specific info on which is which. I chose Tailoring for my first trophy because it's only 500 and it allows you to create the very costly Artisan's Seal of Tailoring (which we will discuss below.)

5. MAKE/ACQUIRE 12 ARTISAN SEALS (!!)
5. Once you've maxed out your trade skill trophy, head back to Halas, find Lebounde ab Dolmen again (where DO they get these names?) hail him and now he'll talk with you and offer you the 12 Artisan's Seal quests, one for each trade skill. Grab them all, it can't hurt. You have to acquire all 12 seals and turn them all in to this guy. The seals are tradeable, but at least on my server they're expensive. Asking prices run between 150k and 2milpp. EACH. My decision was to buy every one I could get below 500k and make the rest. Of course, as a halfling druid I can't make the Alchemy or Poisoncrafting seals so I will be stuck buying those. On FV Alchemy is pretty cheap but the rogue guild seems to be fixing the price on Poisoncrafting at 2millionpp (the max price the Bazaar allows) so I'm holding off for the time being. Making all 12 of these yourself is a BIG deal. Mainly because every one has components that drop rarely from mobs. Add to the rarity the fact that multiple players are pharming these, some for their own Artisan Quest, others to make up to 2millionpp selling them to questers, and you see why they can be tough to find.

6. MAKE 3 ITEMS
6. Now you then need to make three items, Earring of the Solstice, Eron's Jewelry and Signet of Might (or Signet of Arcane. Lebounde provides dialogue giving hints as to how to find the quests involved. Those all involve separate quests that are well-documented here and elsewhere so I won't go into detail.

7. TURN IN ALL 12 ARTISAN SEALS
7. Hail him again, /say work and he offers you THE ARTISAN'S PRIZE quest. Turn in all 12 seals to Lebounde. Follow the steps and the dialogue and you will enter his little house, find a container, combine the 3 items from #6 in the container, gasp for a moment in anguish when the combine seems to fail, and then revel in relief when Lebounde comforts you and awards you with the Artisan's Prize, best "conventional" (i.e. Type 7/8) augment in the game.

8. GLOAT, BRAG, REVEL, especially if you're not a raider
8. I'm not entirely clear here (maybe someone can comment who knows for sure) but it MAY be that you need to have all your available trade skill trophies maxed out to see the FULL effect of this augment. But I do know even with the obligatory single maxed trophy the augment stats are still far superior to any other augment in the game, and I mean by FAR. Just the +80 heroics is phenomenal, not to mention 100AC and 700-800 HEM. This beats even the top raid augments in the game, such as The Silver-Etched Coin. Frankly, I'm astonished as well as pleasantly surprised that EQ would allow non-raiders access to a prize far better than anything you could acquire by raiding. Raiders must be wailing and gnashing their teeth all other Norrath.

More to come as I work my way thru this. Fun, fun, fun!


Edited, Sep 3rd 2016 8:02am by Sippin

I never have and never, never will get into tradeskilling, no matter what the reward is. They simply drive me crazy with the monotony involved in making the combines. My loss I know, but I value my sanity.

I fully agree the PoP locked room thing is lame. There are enough rare spawns and rare drops in this entire "epic" quest arc that it's already a very time-consuming and challenging chore. To require players who came along well after PoP to do the entire flagging work for an entire expansion is a bit much, in my book. Although I do think it isn't that hard to find someone to port you to the room in PoI. Now if PoI itself requires a key just to reach the guy you hail to get to the room with the ground spawn, then that's a new wrinkle I had forgotten about. I did all the PoP stuff long long ago and my only grief was no longer possessing the Quintessence of Elements on any of my six flagged main characters.



Edited, Aug 26th 2016 5:58pm by Sippin

who is the quest giver for The artisan quest? Is there a link available for an outline? Can't seem to find any info.

I guess I missed this post earlier. You may not know, but combines are pretty much automated now. Once you have a recipe in your "book" (i.e. you've scribed a recipe book or completed the recipe at least once the old fashioned way), you can open the new tradeskill UI window and just let it complete the combines for you, and repeat until you run out of mats, if you want. Way easier that the old way.

Tat

Yeah, it would be really nice if they sped up the auto-combines. Working up Baking, for instance, is an enormous pain. Every skill-up combine has like 3 or more sub combines, some using different containers. So you have to run to the brew barrel and do 100 combines and then do 100 in the Mixing bowl, then 100 more in the mixing bowl, then off to the oven to do the final 100.

It'd be nice if you could just select the top-level item and have it perform the sub-combines for you.

Or perhaps the auto-combine could speed up as it goes. So, like, the first 10 combines take the normal amount of time each. But the next 10 go a little faster. And so on. Or perhaps after a while it does 2 at once, then 3 at once and so on.

Or maybe you should be able to queue the combines up to be done while you're offline. You have to have all the mats and everything, but once you go into the auto-combine process a "Combine Offline" button activates (like Buyer mode) and lets the process finish while you don't have to sit and watch it.

Seriously, trying to work up tradeskills just takes too much time sitting watching items combine. Thousands of combines. It's really, very boring.

Funny, but I hope you're not demeaning my point.

I believe it's a valid concern. I spent over 10 hours this past Saturday just watching the Auto-Combine work, trying to work up tradeskills. And there's virtually nothing else I can do while I'm doing that. It's simply not fun. And last I checked games are still supposed to be fun.

You're exaggerating my argument. No where did I say they should be "instant auto-combines". I simply said they are frustrating and the process of leveling them up is unnecessarily tedious. Yes, they have made improvements, I played "back in the day" too. I too remember having to drag every individual component over, 1-by-1. But that doesn't mean it's as good as it could be. That doesn't mean we shouldn't suggest more improvements.

I absolutely agree there has to be some delay. Otherwise it doesn't feel like you're actually doing anything. But watching Auo-Combine work for hours at a time, with your only action being to select a new recipe, or move to a new container, or grab more mats from the bank .... it's just not fun. And, imo, not necessary.

Perhaps a better way to remove the tedium is to introduce other ways to get skill ups. Make a handful of recipes that are guaranteed to get a skill up. Put limits on it, like the ingredients are rare and No Drop. Or perhaps you can only do X number per day. Or maybe these recipes only work for certain levels of that tradeskill... for example you can do guaranteed skillups this way from 200 to 220. But from 220 to 240 you have to go the traditional way. Completely arbitrary numbers there. But at least this would break up the monotony.

Or put in quests that reward skillups.

Anyhow, I digress, I've already derailed this thread too much. Especially since there is another thread talking about this topic.

Well, haven't seen any updates here, so figured I'd give an update.

Per above, Sippin, TwoScoops and feldaar appear to be pursuing this. Post some updates, so we can compare notes.

I started working on all this on 8/22, so it's been just over 3 weeks. So far:

Completed Artisan's Wares (the 16 various ground spawns) on 4 chars. Got the seal quest for 7 tradeskills.
Completed Poisoncrafting 0-300 and making and maxing a trophy on a rogue alt. Also made a tinkering trophy on that alt (tinkering has been ~55 for a long time on that alt).
PoP flagging for my main three chars: At Agnarr, Aerin'Dar and Bertoxxulous. Rallos Zek down in Tactics. So still a ways to go here.
Made 20 fishing seals, and up to then, I'd seen them for no less than 30K in the Bazaar. Right before I made mine, the bottom dropped out, and I haven't sold any at 19Kpp. And the ones priced less than mine don't look to be moving either. Glad it cost me next to nothing to make the 20, and very little time as well :)

Tat

I'm still hard at work. I took a one-week break from it to redo all my darn bags, for all my alts, because I was finding it frustrating to try to gather all the mats needed for this massive trade skill quest with the limited bag space I had. I loaded up 2 alts with a bunch of trade skill containers and 2 other alts with a bunch of general purpose 20-slot containers and then moved all the kee-rap I had on my mains, especially Sippin. It is mind-boggling how much stuff you can pile up during gameplay! And it kills me that you really can't just destroy stuff willy-nilly because everything could have a use. Like I discovered by checking logs that I looted a Hope Stone long ago but for the life of me I can't find it anywhere. I must have destroyed it thinking it had no use for me at the time. That thing sells for 50kpp on FV right now, since it's needed in this quest. Rather than suffer thru the estimated 1-in-300 pharming drop rate for this thing, I just bought one. But it was done with great chagrin since I know I had one in my furry paws some time in the relatively recent past. Lesson well learned: loot everything, destroy nothing and take the time to move stuff to alts when the bags get too full!

I have all my Seals and am about to finish Aid's last step. Which means I can do all turn-ins to get me to "6. MAKE 3 ITEMS" which is the last part I still need.

Since last update:

Got Agnarr, AD, and Bertoxx. Also got one of the 3 named in HoH.

Got 8 of the 16 spawns for Artisan's Wares for my Poisonmaking alt.

Now waiting on the other two named in HoH, and Saryn/Mareeq in Torment.

Tat

Latest update:

Finally got Mareeq/Keeper of Sorrows in Torment. Just need Saryrn and SolRo now.

Alchemist alt made 3 more seals, sold one in Bazaar :)

Have gathered mats for several seals each for Research, Baking, & Brewing,

How's everyone else doing?

Tat