Leafiara (prime)/Mechanical Musings/Order of Operations: Servicing Gear

Disclaimer / Recommended Reading

This wiki page assumes familiarity with item properties and the profession services being described. If these topics are mysterious to you, please read the following first:

More on item properties:

• Item properties page - "Just the facts" of what item properties are.
• Nothing to Fear but Gear Itself - A more colloquial discussion where Jervil and Leafiara host an event to discuss gear properties at Silverwood Manor.

More on profession services:

• Enchant page - The basics of enchanting.
• Ensorcell page - The basics of ensorcelling.
• Sanctify page - The basics of sanctifying.
• WPS page - The basics of weighting, padding, and sighting ("WPS").
• At Your Service with a Smile - A more colloquial discussion where Leafiara hosts an event to discuss profession services at Silverwood Manor.

Enchant

How much enchanting is enough?

Here are some different schools of thought:

• +20 is enough because, except for post-cap areas intended to be the most difficult hunting in the game, all other content is designed with the expectation that +20 is viable.
• +25 is enough because enchanting even from +0 to +25 consumes less than two weeks of a wizard's weekly resource points, but enchanting from +25 to +30 consumes three weeks, consuming from +30 to +35 consumes 6.75 weeks, and it only gets more intense from there.
• +35 is enough because it's the maximum an item can be enchanted by players without acquiring potions from pay events, raffles, or other means not ubiquitously available.
• +40 is enough because that's the minimum necessary enchantment for a weapon to hit certain demon creatures.
• +50 is enough because it's the maximum an item can be enchanted in commonly recurring circumstances and/or because, even when enchanting higher is offered, it's prohibitively expensive. (As I write this, enchanting up to +75 has been offered exactly once at a cost of 275,000 bloodscrip per +5 over +50.)
• +75 is enough because it's the maximum possible.
• Enchanting is irrelevant because you can make up a deficit from a low enchant with heavy investment in the enhancive and/or Ascension systems.

(The latter would typically only be argued in the case of, say, an auction item that has a lower base enchant but is attractive due to extraordinary properties that come with the downside of adding high gear difficulty to make further enchantment less feasible.)

When should I enchant?

According to the enchanting formula, some enchanting benchmarks are:

• +20 is 36 gear difficulty
• +25 is 58 gear difficulty
• +30 is 87 gear difficulty
• +35 is 121 gear difficulty
• +40 is 160 gear difficulty
• +50 is 256 gear difficulty

To put this in perspective, each tier of Ensorcell adds 50 gear difficulty, the first five tiers of Sanctify add 20 gear difficulty each, and holy fire adds 50 gear difficulty. Most gear you'll work on will already be +20 as a baseline, so the case could be made that moving to +25 is only another 22 difficulty, moving to +30 is only another 51 difficulty (over +20), and so on. Viewed in that light, Enchant is among the least gear difficulty-intensive of services.

It's less likely that adding to an item's enchantment at any step in the process of improving that item will get in the way of ensorcelling and sanctifying it later than that ensorcelling or sanctifying it will get in the way of enchanting it later.

However (and it's a very big however!), this is speaking very generically and assumes that the final result of your intent for the item could be reasonably handled by sufficiently skilled player clerics, sorcerers, and wizards without requiring suffusion, super potions from Bloodriven Village, or fixskills and mutant builds.

For example, it's viable to enchant an Animalistic Spirit Weapon to +35, add flares to it, and still expect that a player cleric can add all five tiers of sanctification to it. However, if you additionally wanted to add holy fire and the first tier of Ensorcell, then either the flares shouldn't have been added until after those services were finished, the weapon should have been left at +20, or both.

As safe as it can feel--and, in many cases, be!--to add enchanting early in the process, it's even safer to add enchanting late in the process.

There are several reasons why enchanting late or even last is a viable option:

• Clerics need 120 more skill than an item's difficulty to safely sanctify it (or 150 more skill in the case of holy fire) and sorcerers need 150 more skill than difficulty to safely ensorcell, wizards only need 100-111 more skill than difficulty due to the more multi-step approach of enchanting. In other words, all else being equal, wizards would be able to work on higher difficulty items than clerics and sorcerers.
• All else isn't equal in the first place! Wizards get 75 total bonus to their enchanting skill from having a familiar summoned and being in a workshop; clerics and sorcerers only get 20 bonus from being in, respectively, a shrine of their Arkati/spirit or a workshop. This is somewhat offset in that clerics and sorcerers tend to push their respective native spell circles higher than wizards do, but ignoring stat bonuses from race, high end post-cap wizards will have higher bonus than their cleric and sorcerer counterparts. (More on that with sorcerers, however, as there's a very specific race that they commonly are...)
• As for uncommon mutant builds, I don't have hard numbers, but they do seem to be more common--or at least more well-advertised--than mutant clerics and sorcerers. At absolute least, there are certainly more wizards in general than clerics or sorcerers. Furthermore, because clerics and sorcerers train more ranks of their spell circles than wizards, that means wizards have more room to grow when they do go mutant.
• Wizards' suffusion is five times as efficient as clerics' or sorcerers' suffusion, converting a week of resources into up to 125 skill instead of 25 skill. This means that as long as your item doesn't need more than five times as many casts of Enchant as it does casts of Sanctify or Ensorcell, it would be easier to push extra requirements onto the wizard than onto the cleric or sorcerer. (And that's even disregarding the likelihood that the wizard has higher skill in the first place!)

And, of course, if all else fails...

• The Duskruin Arena event offers a path, albeit an expensive one, to enchant items with no consideration of gear difficulty at a rate of 150,000 bloodscrip per +5. The same isn't true of ensorcelling or sanctification.
• The Duskruin Arena event also offers potions for 50,000 bloodscrip that grant +500 to a wizard's skill for their next CHANNEL of Enchant. These potions notably have five pours each (to make them suitable for, say, going from +45 to +50), unlike the cleric and sorcerer counterparts that have one pour each for the same price.

How high does wizard skill get?

• 645 is achievable without using Ascension nor enhancives on a race with a neutral 25 Logic bonus and 25 Intuition bonus using a fairly typical post-cap build with 128 ranks of Wizard Base and all other relevant enchanting skills maxed out through ordinary training.
• 655 is the same as the above, but with the use of BOOST ENHANCIVE STATS from daily logins.
• 720 is the same as the above, but now also wearing an incredible enhancive set to finish maxing out Logic and Intuition in addition to maxing out Magic Item Use, Arcane Symbols, and Elemental Mana Control. (Finding someone with such an enhancive set is very unlikely!)

• 820 is achievable without using Ascension nor enhancives on a race with a neutral 25 Logic bonus and 25 Intuition bonus using a mutant build with 303 ranks of Wizard Base and all other relevant enchanting skills maxed out through ordinary training.
• 830 is the same as the above, but with BOOST ENHANCIVE STATS.
• 895 is the same as the above, but now with the full set of enhancives.

• 945 is the same as the above, but now with the extremely expensive +50 spell rank enhancives from the High End Scrip Shop.
• 1020 is the same as the above, but now also the extremely time-consuming 1135 Ascension Training Points to nearly max out every skill. (Magic Item Use and Arcane Symbols can stop two ranks short of maxing while Elemental Mana Control can stop one rank short.)

• Add 15 to any of the above numbers if the character is a burghal gnome or halfling, the races statistically best at enchanting. Aelotoi and humans also get +10 while dark elves, dwarves, erithians, and forest gnomes get +5.

In summary, 1035 is as high as theoretically possible, but a range of 645 to 700 is what you could more likely expect from ordinary post-cap wizard builds while 820 to 875 is what you could more likely expect from post-cap mutant wizard builds.

So how tough an item can I realistically get enchanted?

• 544 difficulty: a conventional far post-cap wizard with no investment in Ascension nor enhancives.
• 589 difficulty: a conventional far post-cap wizard with a reasonable enhancive set and/or a good chunk of Ascension experience.
• 719 difficulty: a far post-cap mutant wizard with no investment in Ascension nor enhancives.
• 764 difficulty: a far post-cap mutant wizard with a reasonable enhancive set and/or a good chunk of Ascension experience.

Add +125 to either of the latter two numbers if you're willing to pay for an extra week of suffusion, +250 if you're willing to pay for two extra weeks of suffusion, and so on.

In other words, try not to push too far beyond these difficulty amounts if you'll still need a slew of enchanting afterward. These numbers are more forgiving than the ones for Ensorcell and Sanctify, though, as you'll see!

Ensorcell

How much ensorcelling is enough?

Some schools of thought for physical weapons:

• T1 is enough because it allows 60% as much stamina/health regeneration (on average) as a T5 and 100% as much use of Spell Cleave, Spell Parry, and Spell Thieve as a T5 while only adding 20% of the gear difficulty.
• T5 is enough because it's the maximum possible and/or because the AS boost scales proportionately with each tier and/or because Tainted Bond uses the AS boost.
• As far as you can go without requiring fixskills, suffusion, or super potions is enough.
• T0 is enough because the game isn't designed with the expectation that you have anything more and/or because stamina regeneration is an unlikely chance.

Some schools of thought for shields:

• T1 is enough because it allows the use of Shield Mind and Spell Block while only adding 20% of the gear difficulty that a T5 would.
• T5 is enough because it's the maximum possible and/or the CvA boost scales proportionately with each tier and/or CS attacks are among the game's most deadly attacks, so all protection against them is good.
• As far as you can go without requiring fixskills, suffusion, or super potions is enough.
• T0 is enough because the game isn't designed with the expectation that you have anything more.

Some schools of thought for armor:

• T5 is enough because it's the maximum possible and/or the CvA boost scales proportionately with each tier and/or CS attacks are among the game's most deadly attacks, so all protection against them is good.
• As far as you can go without requiring fixskills, suffusion, or super potions is enough.
• T0 is enough because the game isn't designed with the expectation that you have anything more.

Some schools of thought for runestaves:

• T5 is enough because it's the maximum possible and/or the CS boost scales proportionately with each tier.
• As far as you can go without requiring fixskills, suffusion, or super potions is enough.
• T0 is enough because the game isn't designed with the expectation that you have anything more.

(Note: In theory, someone could make the argument that T1 is enough because it allows 60% as much mana regeneration as T5, similar to the stamina/health argument for physical weapons. In practice, I've never heard anyone make this argument and neither would I.)

When should I ensorcell?

Since every tier of Ensorcell adds 50 gear difficulty, it will hinder clerics and wizards more than their services will hinder sorcerers. (Additionally, ensorcelling an item before sanctifying it will require the use of an inky black potion for each cast of sanctification. That point's far more minor, though, as inky black potions are readily available in playershops at low costs.)

The first tier of Ensorcell is sometimes done early, especially for physical weapons that reap immediate and noticeable benefits, but pushing items further is typically reserved for later--if not outright last--in the gear improvement process due to the high gear difficulty this service adds.

Finishing all five tiers of Ensorcell before finishing Enchant and Sanctify will very likely require more skilled clerics and wizards charging more silver than doing it the other way around. This isn't to say that doing Ensorcell last will be easy either, though, since sorcerers need 150 more skill bonus than an item's gear difficulty to work on it without failing (barring fumble) and suffusion doesn't give them the same degree of leeway that it does wizards.

Plan carefully to determine how far you can prolong Ensorcell on your project piece without rendering it impossible nor prohibitively expensive.

How high does sorcerer skill get?

Unlike with wizards, I'll assume as a base that the sorcerer is a dark elf rather than a race with neutral stat bonuses. Statistically, players have made this true due in some part to a combination of Faendryl lore and the calculations for sorcerer CS using Aura and Wisdom, which dark elves have the best bonuses in. As for ensorcelling, that uses Wisdom and Intuition, which leaves dark elves and halflings tied for the best.

• 642 is achievable without using Ascension nor enhancives on a dark elf (or halfling) using a fairly typical post-cap build with 170 ranks of Sorcerer Base and all other relevant ensorcelling skills maxed out through ordinary training.
• 652 is the same as the above, but with the use of BOOST ENHANCIVE STATS from daily logins.
• 730 is the same as the above, but now also wearing an incredible enhancive set to finish maxing out Intuition and Wisdom in addition to maxing out Magic Item Use, Arcane Symbols, Elemental Mana Control, and Spiritual Mana Control. (Finding someone with such an enhancive set is very unlikely!)

• 775 is achievable without using Ascension nor enhancives on a dark elf (or halfling) using a mutant build with 303 ranks of Sorcerer Base and all other relevant ensorcelling skills maxed out through ordinary training.
• 785 is the same as the above, but with BOOST ENHANCIVE STATS.
• 833 is the same as the above, but now with the full set of enhancives.

• 883 is the same as the above, but now with the extremely expensive +50 spell rank enhancives from the High End Scrip Shop.
• 970 is the same as the above, but now also the astonishingly time-consuming 1400 Ascension Training Points to nearly max out every skill. (Magic Item Use, Arcane Symbols, and one out of Elemental or Spiritual Mana Control can stop two ranks short of maxing.)

In summary, 970 is as high as theoretically possible, but a range of 642 to 710 is what you could more likely expect from ordinary post-cap sorcerer builds while 775 to 813 is what you could more likely expect from post-cap mutant sorcerer builds.

So how tough an item can I realistically get ensorcelled?

• 502 difficulty: a conventional far post-cap sorcerer with no investment in Ascension nor enhancives.
• 560 difficulty: a conventional far post-cap sorcerer with a reasonable enhancive set and/or a good chunk of Ascension experience.
• 635 difficulty: a far post-cap mutant sorcerer with no investment in Ascension nor enhancives.
• 663 difficulty: a far post-cap mutant sorcerer with a reasonable enhancive set and/or a good chunk of Ascension experience.

Add +25 to either of the latter two numbers if you're willing to pay for an extra week of suffusion, +50 if you're willing to pay for two extra weeks of suffusion, and so on.

Despite sorcerers nominally having similar skill bonus numbers to wizards, they top off at working on lower difficulty items because of how the formulas work! If your item would end up beyond these difficulty numbers before you reached your intended final tier of ensorcellment, that might be a signal to reserve enchanting for last. Alternatively, ensorcelling being so high difficulty is why others will leave it for last and simply stop at the earliest point not needing suffusion or super potions.

[Sanctify and WPS sections coming later, plus a broader overview section entitled "What would you do?" or something similar...]