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's attractive due to extraordinary properties--with the downside that said properties add an exceptional gear difficulty make further enchantment less feasible while starting from a lower base.)

When should I enchant?

According to Zhephen's research shortly after the latest iteration of Enchant was released, some enchanting benchmarks are:

• +20 is 40 gear difficulty
• +25 is 64 gear difficulty
• +30 is 93 gear difficulty
• +35 is 128 gear difficulty
• +40 is 169 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 24 difficulty, moving to +30 is only another 53 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 101-110 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. In other words, high end post-cap wizards in a common build capable of typical hunting will often have higher bonus than their cleric and sorcerer counterparts.
• 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.
• 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. The same isn't true of ensorcelling or sanctification.

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