It’s time for ‘ol Stephers to eat some crow. Only a ‘lil bit though. It tastes kind of leathery, ya know.

*ahem*

Apparently I have been going about crafting all wrong in EQ2. That -50 strike to health? Well, it is indeed random, but there is something that can be done about it.

In my defense, the game absolutely does not explain the crafting system. So you hop in, give it a try, and you are confronted with a system that - by all appearances - seems to be broken. I only found the “right” way to go about it after checking their forums for an unrelated topic and happening across some crafting How-To’s.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty details, but I was going about the whole crafting mini-game in an all too mechanical manner. I’d match the icons with the ones that randomly appeared and thought that was it. In fact, I did at one point try randomly using the various trade skill abilities but that didn’t appear to do anything.

Well, that’s what you do, only you have to hit the trade skill abilities in an almost-though-not-quite so random order. It looks like part of the game is attempting to out smart EQ2’s anti-bot code, so you have to try to take some sort of meaningful approach to their use.

I still haven’t figured out exactly what that approach is, but I did succeed in several “pristine” items last night. Heck, I even took on a challenge to complete several pristine items within a given time frame and failed by only … hmm.. maybe 8 seconds or so.

So close!

It looks like I’ll be doing a lot more crafting in the game.

~Steph