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Why is Synthesis still class dependent?
I thought the entire point of the trade skill change was to make trade skills class independent, but for some reason Synthesis restricts the amount of primes someone who isn't Alchemist can extract.
Can someone clarify? With limited extraction a person literally cannot compete on a time/gold ratio with an Alchemist, making the skill economically still entirely tied to Alchemist.
@Tecton @Makarios
Can someone clarify? With limited extraction a person literally cannot compete on a time/gold ratio with an Alchemist, making the skill economically still entirely tied to Alchemist.
@Tecton @Makarios
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It seems people are more prone to cleaning out caves than going through mountainous areas as well. I get a fair amount of primes from the mountains in a lot of areas.
As Serpent
Every time I'm not Alchemist I only get 2. When I'm Alchemist I get 3-4. Doesn't matter the area. This was in the Great Rock. I've had the exact same results in Manara too. Those are heavily harvested areas.
You're saying that you "can't possibly compete", but...in what sense?
It doesn't cost anything but time to extract. Yeah, your time-to-gold ratio isn't as favourable, but it isn't like the quantity you can ultimately extract is limited in any substantial way. It isn't like you can't possibly come up with enough to stock a shop because it takes you a little bit longer to get the primes. It isn't like you go to sell to someone and they say "nevermind, I don't want to buy cures from you because an alchemist could have produced them faster".
You can't make the same gold per unit of time. That doesn't mean that you can't compete. You're not unable to bring your product to the market. People still buy it.
It's pretty absurd to say that this "[makes] the skill economically still entirely tied to Alchemist". It doesn't. At all. You just make slightly less gold-per-hour if you aren't an alchemist. You can still be perfectly succesful at making gold through Synthesis without being one.
And synthesising and transmutating still take the same amount of time, so it isn't nearly as big an advantage as it sounds when you're looking at just prime extraction.
Should tradeskills also be moved to a different balance? Quick-witted classes "literally cannot compete" at Synthesis on a time-gold ratio either. And that's an advantage that applies to extraction, synthesising, and transmutating. Why aren't you railing against the unfairness of that?
It's a nice bit of flavour. If anything, I wish there were more things like this. Give forestals a little bump for harvesting and magi a bump for enchanting and serpents a bump for toxicology. Letting anyone learn to harvest herbs was a nice change, but there's no real problem with giving forestals a slight edge at it.
On Kas, I had harvesting for a bit. And then did what you did, paid people who had far more patience than I did.
That more or less answers the above question and the rest of your rambling post which fails to really contribute much other than being devil's advocate for no apparent reason.
You certainly don't see me running around anymore trying to offload five and six-digit amounts of primes per month, or being sure to log in at prime replenishment happy hours. Even as an alchemist with the respective trait and gloves it became a losing proposition when I could hunt or quest instead, and I haven't missed it since I left alchemy behind.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I said, for instance: "You can't make the same gold per unit of time. That doesn't mean that you can't compete"
You're conflating getting a lower return with being unable to compete. Your post insinuated that any bonus to Alchemist extraction made Synthesis uneconomical for non-Alchemists.
You said: "making the skill economically still entirely tied to Alchemist" (emphasis mine).
Except a small bonus doesn't make a tradeskill economically "entirely tied to a class". Making slightly less gold per hour is not at all the same thing as not being able to compete. It's absurd to call a tradeskill "entirely" tied to a class as though it's pointless without the class when all they're actually getting is a relatively small bonus (which you've obtusely phrased as a limitation on every other class).
If it has indeed already been changed, I understand, but I think it's a shame. It was a nice flavour element that helped to mitigate a little of the weirdness of splitting off the tradeskills that were more clearly class-aligned and it didn't really harm anyone.
Your language indicates that you are attempting to counter his argument, but your argument is not actually counter to his.
Ignoring the negativity on both sides, he simply indicates that the gold/time is favorable for alchemists and he does not believe it should be. You simply indicate it's favorable for alchemists and you believe it should be. Yet your argument focuses on him saying it's favorable, which you agree with, and not why you believe it should be, beyond "thematic."
Also, to your previous "It doesn't cost anything but time to extract." Time is very hard to place a value on, the typical method is to relate other returns for the same amount of time. To say "you get less per time but you do not lose value - it just takes more time for you" is invalid on a basic level. You're comparing two currencies while ignoring the value of one of them.
It doesn't much matter what its particular value here is either - if one person is getting more resources per unit of time, then obviously that's an advantage. I definitely didn't say "you get less per time but you do not lose value". You lose value. But that doesn't make it impossible to compete.
The point I was trying to make is that it isn't a particularly large advantage. There isn't some elastic supply of Alchemists that, combined with the bonus, results in pricing out every non-Alchemist. The economy of Synthesis is not "entirely tied to Alchemist". The initial OP was a pretty melodramatic reaction to what is actually a pretty small difference. We'll see and maybe I'm somehow wrong, but I highly doubt the prices of Synthesis cures are going to go up much, if at all - and you'd expect them to go up if in fact non-Alchemists were unable to compete and the market was "economically still entirely tied to Alchemist".
It's bizarre to phrase it as an inability to compete in resources-per-hour. You can still bring your product to the market. You can still turn a very respectable profit. You just make slightly less. You aren't getting priced out by the Alchemists who have lower production costs. You just have to put in more time per cure produced, which means your margins are slightly worse. That's not the same thing as being unable to compete. The margins aren't being reduced to zero by that small buff. The margins aren't actually reduced very much at all. Extracting two more primes at a time isn't the difference between Synthesis being a good gold return on your time and Synthesis being a poor gold return on your time. (And it's also pretty bizarre to phrase it as a restriction on the number of primes everyone else can extract.)
I'm not sure what's confusing about it being thematic either. Synthesis has a pretty strong thematic tie to Alchemist, just like nearly all of the other tradeskills. It wasn't just a coincidence that they used to be part of classes. It's not so outlandish that an Alchemist would be better at extracting the primes that form a significant part of their class skills or that a serpent would be slightly better at preparing the venoms that he or she studies, uses, and even naturally produces. Mechanically-speaking, the fact that these tradeskills and classes line up is treated as just a coincidence. A small bonus helps to alleviate that, very slightly incentivises tradeskill-class combinations that make more sense (not enough to limit people to those combinations, but enough to maybe make them slightly more popular than the alternatives), and shouldn't really upset anyone unless these markets suddenly become hyper-competitive with razor-thin margins.
My point was, and maybe I'm misreading, but there seems to be an argument when you two are agreeing for the most part!
Either way, looks like it was fixed, so point is moot now. Stuff here is super cheap anyways, I don't understand how anyone turns a profit harvesting or extracting. I tried harvesting and I can make way more hunting at level 80 than selling stuff at the prices I see it go for.
Or 100% depending which direction you look at it from.
The non-Alchemist can't go anywhere near as low in price before it starts making more sense for them to bash or fish for their gold.
You "lose" gold when you could have made more gold doing something else with an equal amount of overhead and time. Basic econ
There's only one scenario in which that's not the case and that's the one where the market price of minerals actually reflected the difference, leading to Alchemists dominating the market by being able to undercut everyone else'se prices. We'll be able to see if that was the case by looking at whether mineral prices change significantly, but I really, really doubt it. It's pretty unlikely that many people were choosing Alchemist just for that bonus and reflecting it in their pricing. Prices are so ridiculously low already that it's hard to imagine anyone going for that - plenty of people already value their time very, very, very little and there's just not much actual incentive to dominate the market that way: there's already a lot of demand for cures if you want to sell them and the limiting factor in ability to sell has more to do with things like finding a shop to stock or advertising than undercutting competitors.
Essentially, what you're talking about is too basic econ. You're not considering that there's a huge amount of inelasticity here. What you're talking about only affects the price a non-Alchemist can charge for goods if the supply of the Alchemists' goods (and the supply of Alchemists themselves) is elastic enough to supply the entirety of the demand and everyone has equal access to the market. And that's assuming that you value your own time the same or less than they value theirs - which is often not the case because a lot of people who participate in tradeskills don't value their time much at all or even assign a negative loss to time spent dealing with tradeskills (people who participate in tradeskills not for the gold involved, but because they enjoy that aspect of the game).
You're also looking only at extracting. Primes are not the main output of Synthesis. The point of Synthesis and by far the largest market for its products is in minerals, not primes. Producing minerals is a many-step process. Producing liquids is even more steps. Extraction is only one of those steps. Alchemists weren't even close to 100% more productive than non-Alchemists.
And since all of those things require balance, you could just as easily say that Quick-Witted classes are unfairly disadvantaged. That's 10% slower on every step.
Basically, it wasn't a big deal. It isn't too terrible a loss either for the same reason. And, for the same reason, it would have been fine if it remained. This thread started from a pretty melodramatic premise and it was sort of the equivalent of complaining about seeing someone else with a shinier toy and insisting it get taken away. Or at least that's how it turned out - I guess maybe the hope was for everyone to get the 4-extraction, which would explain the way it was phrased as a restriction on every other class rather than a bonus for Alchemist.
Edit:
Nimble doesn't affect extraction/synthesis/etc. balance (or didn't when alchemists had the abilities, at least).
Selling primes is far more profitable. Even selling primes at 2 gold each gets you around 8k per hour (averaging around 4 primes per extraction without gloves). Back then the demand for primes was pretty low and they sold for 3-4 gold each last time I checked, so it still wasn't as good as questing or high level bashing, but now with gloves it should be entirely viable (though I'm not sure what the demand is like). I didn't really consider selling primes in my last post, so your argument could apply there, just not so much for minerals.
*The balance times and ingredients shown in the AB files are the same as before, are the yields for synthesis (2 metals) and transmutation (5 minerals) also the same? I also averaged a little under 4 primes per extract with the trait back then.
Each transmute of 5 potash requires 2 primes, which takes 1.5075 seconds of extraction. Each transmute also requires half of two synthesise, so we'll just call it one synthesise per transmutation (2.475) and finally the transmute balance (3.15).
There are 3600 seconds per hour, so the maximum amount of transmutes we can get per hour including extraction and synthesise time is given by:
3600 = 1.5075x + 2.475x + 3.15x
3600 = 7.1325x
x = 504.73ish
You get 5 potash per transmute and they each go for 6 gold per so multiplying we get the total gold per hour as 15142.
Now that we know the total time per transmute, we can generalize to get a gold/time function:
F(x) = 2325x where x is the price of each mineral.
For instance, assuming you wanted to make as much gold synthesising as bashing Annwyn/Underworld for an hour (Assumed to be 55k here) You would have to sell each mineral at 24 gold per.
Fun stuff.
Aside from the difference due to nimble, I don't see any problems with Amranu's math, so I must have made a mistake somewhere in mine (minerals should be 1.5s each, not 5.2s). I'm not sure how I made such a huge mistake though, with how many times I (and others, I know others calculated around 5 seconds per mineral before I did) repeated it and got the same numbers.
Just barely too late to fix my post, but that would have brought the 3500 gold per hour for minerals up to 12000 per hour. Still far lower than mid-level questing or high-level casual unartied bashing, but far better than ratting or river fishing.