any advice in forging pristine stuff?Follow

any advice for a lv 27 armorsmith to get pristine armor most of the time? i hate using up rare steels and blackened iron without getting pristine...

thanks, Dave

The thing to remember is that each different type of counter "spell" has a consequence as well as a reward. There's one that gives you durability at the expense of progress (or progress at the expense of durability), one that gives you durability/progress but lowers your chance of getting a success on that part of the combine, and one that gives you durability/progress but consumes mana/power. This one can get really "mana" expensive as the higher level you get, the more mana it consumes.

The first of the four "bars" seems to take the longest, and takes longer with each tier. In Tier 1, if you made 50 progress you were 1/4 of the way through the bar--in later tiers, 50 progress might get you only 1/8 or 1/12 of the way through that bar. Once you're past that bar, it seems to be pretty easy to get through the rest of them. That may change in later tiers, right now my highest crafter is only 37.

Another nice thing to know is that you can accumulate a surplus of durability, so spamming the durability buttons while you're already at full durability is NOT a wasted effort...you can build up a durability "pool" that will prevent you dropping below 100% durability when you get a critical failure or some such.

Here's my routine, and who knows if it will work for everyone. I do this with all six characters in their various tradeskills.

For the first half of the first bar, I spam the durability buttons to build up a surplus pool of durability (in T1-T3 it's not a bad idea to do this for the entire first bar, but by the time you get your new durability buffs in T4, you can build up a lot of durability in very little time, so spamming them for the entire bar basically only means that the combine is going to take forever.) This means that the first half of this bar is going to progress quite slowly, because keep in mind that one of the buttons I'm spamming detracts from progress. On a combine where there is no adverse event, I spam all three of them, and on the next combine (if there is no adverse event,) I will only spam the two that DON'T cost mana, thereby conserving mana so that I don't run too low. If an adverse event pops up, then I will hit the button to counter that first, then I will hit the others. Be careful about hitting the buttons too late in the "tick" or they won't actually register until the next tick, which means that if an adverse event occurs, you might fail to counter it.

After the first half of the first bar is completed, as long as I am at 100% or greater durability, I will switch the spamming the progress buttons. Since I built up a reserve pool of durability, and since the progress will FLY by as you spam these, not only do I get a pristine combine every time, but I end the combine at or near 100% durability. If I get too many failures and my durability starts to drop too far, I will switch back to the durability spells and build it back up again. In order to conserve mana, I do the same thing I did with the durability ones--first tick (assuming there are no adverse events) I will spam all three of them, next tick I will spam only the two that DON'T consume mana.

You might also find it helpful to get some items that increase your power regeneration. Consume beverages that are at your level or higher to insure max potential power regen effect from that, and invest in some totems. The tier 1 power-regen totem is beetle, tier 2 is rat, tier 3 is winged serpent, and I have no idea what the later tiers are. These usually last for 15 minutes to a half hour each, so if you notice you seem to be losing more power than usual, check and see if your totem buff has expired.

As I said, doing it this way, I almost NEVER fail to get a pristine combine. Usually when I do fail, it's because I was rushing through the combine using the progress buttons rather than the durability buttons.