f13.net

Just wanted to mention to anyone else starting a new Character that there seems to be a bug in the quest series 'Choosing a Profession'. This bug only seems to appear if you didn't do any crafting in Queens Colony or Outpost of the Overlord. The newbie experience is very well explained, but if you skip crafting in the newbie zone, this happens:

If you enter your starting Town (in my case, Castleview Hamlet), and start as a crafter for the first time there, you're going to be doing the 'Choosing a Profession' series. The second step in this series (Choosing a Profession II) requires you make "White Leaf Tea". Unfortunately, you're not given this recipe when you receive the quest. You're also not given this recipe when you buy Artisan Essentials II. You're given the quest, but no way to make it.

White Leaf Tea is part of Artisan Essentials III, which you can't scribe until you're Artisan Level 3.

I ended up crafting some Sunfish (good hour-long 15.0 HP regen food, far better than normal Rations) until I hit 3. That was about a 3 minutes process. Then I could turn the White Leaf from Thera/Mi_Tes (thanks!) into 'Refined White Leaf, which in turn let me make the White Leaf Tea. This second part (needing to convert "White Leaf" to "Refined White Leaf" is also not adequately explained, though here again, it's possible this is all well-documented on Newbie Isle.

I fail to see where the problem lies? The book is on basic trades vendors. Shouldn't have anything to do with skipping trades on the Isle, I had the same quest, though I started trades on the Isle.

The book for White Leaf Tea is Artisan Essentials 3, which can be bought, but not scribed until Artisan Level 3. However, this recipe is a requirement for starting one's life as an Artisan. The problem for newbies, as I see it, is that they can't start their life as an Artisan until they've achieved Level 3 as an Artisan.

This is not a problem for veterans or anyone who's familiar with EQ2. I'm only talking about folks who pick up the game anew at retail. Hopefully they'll follow the hints and start crafting on Colony/Outpost, but if they don't, this is what will currently happen to them.

Obviously this could drive them to conversing in the Crafting channel, which is what I did while seeking advice in the Guild channel. This had not happened to anyone else that I talked to though, and a few folks called it "wierd". I imagine that's either because they crafted on newbie isle or were experienced crafters already. Few have started from complete scratch recently.

Then the problem is that they took out the Dreak quest, which led you to crafting right away. I don't get why they rushed these changes.

Not enough testing on the crafting changes. In the old Isle, you were an artisan almost immediately (some workshop cleanup required) so this wasn't a problem. Good find. I'm surprised nobody else caught it. I didn't test any crafting on the new isle (bad, Souk, bad).

I recently played the Freeport Newbie island and enjoyed the change.  I did notice immediately that they removed the crafting quests and feel that this is a mistake.  I'm not sure why the replaced it with the Q&A guys.

There's shrine in the back of the church in freeport, and presumably somewhere in qeynos. You click on it, you get a level 3's worth of artisan xp.

Considering they already have some "racial sensitivity" for crafting (albeit optionally), you'd think they'd incorporate it into the new "Race Mentors" in the starting towns.

To be honest, I consider this a relatively minor bug. With enough people who know how to get around it, I don't think this would overly trip anyone up enough to make them cancel their account. In fact, I got to play hero last night to someone who asked what turned out to be the same question in Qeynos_Crafting. :)

I personally have found this patch to be pretty flawless. They had parts of LU19 up for, what, a month on Test? The magnitude of change to the newbie game seems to be working pretty well from what I experienced on Test and what I'm experiencing on Steamfont.

Of course, it could be due to not that many people banging on this update as a newbie.

My froglok is level 5 artisan(from the old isle) but I am still in the old crafting system.  My dark elf is level 1 and can't find any of the basic artisan books to get started.  I tried joining a few of the societies but all the books they have are red.  This tradeskill thing needs to flushed out better.

Did you /hail the Wholesaler in one of the societies? That's ultimately how I got my book. The quest giver didn't give me one, just the task to create. And initially when I went to the Wholesaler, I only saw him as a vendor. Only later did I /hail him.

And I just realized I forgot to mention that part below.

I was thinking about this and realized there was a very similar bug before involving not doing tradeskills on the island.  There is some NPC in the tradeskill instances standing by the stairs going down, he will sell you a note called "Starting a Profession", try reading the note - it should give you part one of the quest.  Hopefully then when you hail the wholeseller he will give you artisan 2.  There is no book, he just gives you the recipes.