>>As discussed in IMs, theres the issue that I'll suddenly have all these ranks of evasion/armor and suddenly NOT have a weapon skill that is even close to backing it up.

Given your actual values for current weapon skills and likely grandfathered evasion/armor, I think you would actually be perfectly fine. There's no way you'll ever keep your weapons equal to your defenses as a Trader (due to secondary vs tertiary disparity), and your aren't actually that far apart

It is a good point though, quite a bit of Traders are going to be getting a large amount of armor and survival skills grandfathered to their current level (which they then have to keep training in order to keep leveling), but without some weapons requirements, those Traders would be stuck backtraining a ton of weapons if they actually want to hunt for those armor/survival ranks. So that's even more reason to go with the "reduce trading, add some tertiary reqs" route

Apu
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http://www.elanthipedia.com/wiki/User:Apu

>>This is really surprising to me. I thought that, of all the guilds, Traders were the ones best situated to become "the Crafters." In fact I was sort of half-expecting a partial shift in guild focus, and maybe even a renaming/restructuring of Trading. I would not have been surprised in the least at a hard Craft req.

Well just looking at the current reqs, they're already basically forcing Traders into heavily training at least 2 crafting skills - since there are 3 "top N" skills, on top of Appraisal/Trading hard reqs, that leaves Scholarship, Tactics, Performing and the 5 Crafting skills. Scholarship is a viable non-crafting Lore skill to use for Top 3, but I seriously doubt many Traders at all will use Tactics or Performing (assuming the current plan where Vocals ranks don't count for Performing).

"Requiring" (not exactly the correct word, but in practice it mostly is) 2 Crafting skills out of the 5 seems about right to me. Enchanting isn't remotely "Traderly" (in the stereotypical sense), and Alchemy isn't particularly suited towards Traders either. So out of the "Trader-ish" Crafting skills where you are making non-magical items, our reqs strongly encourage us to pick at least 2 of those 3 (and potentially all 3 if you want to avoid scholarship, which I personally would enjoy). That seems about perfect to me.

Apu
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http://www.elanthipedia.com/wiki/User:Apu

>>but I seriously doubt many Traders at all will use Tactics or Performing

When it happens, I'm betting most traders will have Tactics as one of their Lore. The formula bouncing around now is (scholarship*2 + brawling + MO)/4. That means either people will have to backtrain another crafting to catch up, or backtrain a weapon so as to be able to learn tactics, or take up an instrument and most likely backtrain it.

Abison/Rystien

>>To alleviate more stress, I think it's actually more like months, not weeks...
>>The quote we got from the GMs was, "months, not years."

This is correct.

>>This is really surprising to me. I thought that, of all the guilds, Traders were the ones best situated to become "the Crafters." In fact I was sort of half-expecting a partial shift in guild focus, and maybe even a renaming/restructuring of Trading. I would not have been surprised in the least at a hard Craft req.

>>This is really surprising to me. I thought that, of all the guilds, Traders were the ones best situated to become "the Crafters." In fact I was sort of half-expecting a partial shift in guild focus, and maybe even a renaming/restructuring of Trading. I would not have been surprised in the least at a hard Craft req. Is there a reason that this isn't happening?

Mostly because I didn't want to pigeonhole Traders too much. You absolutely CAN use crafting as all of your lore reqs - That's totally legit. If a trader wanted to be more of the merchant prince than the crafting king, I also wanted to leave that avenue open.

>>And we're just now at the requirements.

Believe me, there's no 'just now' about it. The requirements are one of the last things that we have to do for the Skills part. We also are awaiting Magic and Combat 3.0, which need to happen in conjuncture.

>>I guess there are several options that could work pretty well, and that's not a bad thing either

That was one of my goals for most guilds, as best as I could. Options are good.

--

"The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true." -E.A.P.

>Believe me, there's no 'just now' about it. The requirements are one of the last things that we have to do for the Skills part.

No slight intended Socharis. They will get here when they get here. But I'd rather that the reqs have been nailed down earlier rather than be one of the last things (for Skills 3.0 at least), to allow delays to let one figure out how to train appropriately to minimize problems (Like me needing to pick up more combats to get my Evasion in a higher order).

Naniaki

P.S. Please answer my question about grandfathering order in the EXP System folder (basically, 0 Tactics->264 Tactics grandfather is free without affecting the bonus pool, and then raised to 290 Tactics for grandfathering to circle req. and does eat bonus pool a little bit...Or just grandfather straight up to 290 Tactics and eats a whole lot of bonus pool?)

>>Actually an opinion cannot be changed or corrected. Nice try back of line.-VERATHOR
>>But it can be wrong.-Starlear

I think Traders should be able to choose five careers.

And one hobby.

>>and I think the careers should choose the Traders.

I think every Trader who owns a shop should get rewarded weaponsmithing as a free career.

>>I think every Trader who owns a shop should bow at my feet and beg to sell my weapons.

I think the following should be Trader-only weapon templates:

* tog club
* weighted togball
* hunta kortok

I have to say that I really enjoy the upcoming changes that will allow traders to not be 'pigeonholed' as Socharis puts it. I like having the option of making my own weapons or items to sell, focusing on the shop, hitting the hunting fields, or even running routes (not that I enjoy this one), but I suppose my point is ...I REALLY like having the variety and choice to do something different. Thanks for all of the hard work!

~Crimsondae

http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/User:Crimsondae#NEW_FORGED_WEAPONS

the only good thing i can say about the new reqs are that at least i'll be able to count stealing.

I went over the reqs with my prime <83>, plat <47> and TF <45> trader.


As expected, the TF trader met all the reqs except for 3 ranks of 1armor. But really, my prime trader was like 30 ranks behind in some of the skills. Pretty damned harsh. Mostly because of combination of skills.

my trader presently has as his top survivals perception, hiding, climbing, stalking, swimming, evasion,escaping, and FA.
So 2 combines hide/stalk, swim/climb plus one going away <escaping>, he'll now have
percpet, hiding, climb, evasion, stealing , and FA <or foraging if i can train up 20 ranks of it before 3.0 hits. As I seriously only trained it up to enough so he can tend a bleeder if needed in an emergency, he doesn't want to go around bleeding like my necro does. For the TF fellow, 3rd lore will most likely be tactics cause his brawl is pretty good, too bad vocals won't count for performance or he'd have enough there for quite a few circles to come. heh.

But seriouslyly, giving us reqs that I have only in TF because of the possiblity of afking over there????

plus armor with 2 combat abilities, plus one if you take your caravan into combat with you and spook it if anything goes wrong. Really???????

Speculate defense and speculate coin. And the seond one -- thats if you actually want to waste your coins throwing them at critters. Its not really IC for my trader to throw away money.


My girl over in plat-side has evasion as her top survival, thought i'd trained her fairly well for a non-combat guild. But still don't meet the new reqs in either survivals or armor <except 2nd armor, she's way ahead in shield. Pretty damned harsh. You should really up the 2nd armor and lower the first a bit.






And the



"we're doing it for the good of mankind," said the philosophers of murder, waiting for the rest of the world to congratulate them"-Elie Wiesel <the gates of the forest>

As someone who actually sat down and tried to circle a 100+ Trader recently, all I can say is Trading is awful. The requirement is awful, the rewards from training it are awful, and hunting as a Trader is awful (needed armor, ironically enough).

I'd love to see Trading more like 4 5 6 6 6 and serious Weapons requirements like 2 2 3 3 4 honestly, even if there's a lot of speculative improvements for training it on the way. One major one, for me anyway, would be the ability to sell gem pouches while "afield," eliminating the run back to sell gem pouches to keep Trading moving. As a guild-only ability it would be pretty unenviable, but for training purposes it would be on the same level as making Astrology trainable in combat.

>> I probably shouldn't be barging in since I don't have a horse in the field, but I like the idea of remote/servant NPCs for traders to pawn gem pouchs and skins and such.

I'm the same way, no horse in the race, but I've always felt traders should be a pet class. It may make hunting a little less annoying. The trader could "pay" his mercenary to attack. The level of the mercenary would be based of their trading and charisma skill. While in combat, the trader could haggle with the mercenary to bring prices down or to give "buffs". Success would be primarily off the trader's tactics, trading, charisma, and (to a lesser degree) combat skills. Critical success - the mercenary works for dirt cheap and gets a couple of his friends to help out for a limited amount of time. Critical failure, the mercenary turns on the trader.

The trader would want to boost morale by offering more coins/treasure (augmented by circle and tradiing skill), and could send a runner to buy new armor (+defensive boost for a short time), or to get some magical items (+spell attack), or get some new weapons (+physical attack). As you level, you get more options, more weapons and armor choices, more spells, and more types of mercenaries to choose from (which you'd hire in inns and trader guilds/major outposts). But, it's probably a pipe dream.

Socharis, any word on scaling down the Trading req in exchange for tert reqs?

I can't see any reason that the weapon requirement wouldn't be LT.
Supposedly, it helps with speculate coin, so it's not exactly out there, for the RP'ers, to call that the requirement.

Disclaimer: I haven't trained LT, so I'd be working on it for a while, too.

>>Did we ever hear more about this?

The update on circling reqs was embedded in the April Fool's Day Trader Magic post (the april fool's joke was that the post was 100% serious)

http://forums.play.net/forums/DragonRealms/The%20Traders/Game%20Master%20and%20Official%20Announcements/view/278

The magic requirements are not live yet, until we get the ability to train the skills

Apu
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Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/

>>Ah, thanks. Any idea what the Trading req is at 151+?

Trading is 15 per level after 150th

Apu
_
Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/