Once the inventory is looking pretty full, and my weapons are dinged up, head back to town for post massacre processing. Vendor the stuff I can't immediately process or just don't have the place for. Process the rest. Occasionally upgrade equipment or make something that takes my fancy (oh look I can make tabards and chainmail now)
In this fashion I've worked on my combat jobs and upgraded my equipment as possible.
Saturday was kinda fun. At one point I'm working on my "make some chainmail for the heck of it" project. Some random person shouts, asking if anyone has a level 8-10 gladiator weapon. Now I've moved on from the Bronze Dagger to the Brass Gladius and I ended up vendoring my original dagger (no place in the bazaar for it). But I'm feeling in a crafting mood so I convo him: "If you can't find one, hit me up I'll make you one". At which point he replies that he's been looking for the last 3 hours and having no luck.
This matches my own experience from looking for an axe and a spear... You can find plenty of level 20-30 gear on sale but practically no low level stuff. This is an example of the poor market that is the result of the current lack of retainers and lack of auction house and lack of sales slots. It's simple: As a crafter we just can't afford to not sell our best available items. Basically it's a profit per slot issue. We can simply make more profit selling higher level stuff than we could selling the low level stuff. With only 10 slots it's usually faster simply to vendor the old stuff. Or stuff that does not sell for that matter. The end result is that new players that don't get stuck in with a linkshell that has multiple crafters and up having a hard time getting equipment.
So once my current buff was up. I spent the next half hour crafting a few items for my new found customer. No +1's but at least he was feeling better by the end of the half hour. I got skillups and gear. He got the gear he was looking for. We were both happy. The problem here is I think a difference between the shopping patterns in Asia and the west. In Asia there is still the concept of going out and shopping around for the best deal available. In the west that has been replaced by the concept of convenience. If I spend less time shopping then I have more time for either more productive pursuits or for more leisure.
This is the major reason why the western gamer prefers auction houses (or proper EVE style markets) over the micro-transaction style 1001 shops. We come from a culture where most of the goods a person needs to live on are available in quantity and at a reasonable price and the family income is (mostly) able to afford them. So unless you're going for hand crafted quality shopping is a waste of time better spent on something else.
Anyways, After that I went and did some local guildleves and managed to get some crafting jobs up. My lowest level crafting/gathering job is now 14.
I finished Saturday evening off looking for things to craft, since I had once again run out of wind shards by the end of all that crafting. After perusing some recipes and noticing my archery job was now the lowest job I had I decided that looking into Ammo was the way to go. One of the trickiest operations in this new game is making ammo for the Archer job. You start to see the problem when the level 3 arrow needs level 21~ish Carpentry to make the actual arrow shafts. However some careful perusing of the synth list revealed that Fang Arrows were withing reach.
Fang Arrows
I was at Rank 14 Carpentry. The hardest synth should be the making of the arrowwood shafts. Humm... Let's take a closer look. Hempen Thread - got in inventory, check. Animal Glue - also in inventory, check. Dodo Fletching - made from Dodo Feathers (level 15 synth) and Dodos are plentiful in the La Noscea region. Arrowwood Shafts - although I've gotten plenty of Arrowwood Branches in the past in the La Noscea region, they are also available from an NPC vendor in Gridania. And I'm going to want master support for the synth. So, may cost me a bit, but it will be do-able. Fang Arrowheads... These come from bat fangs... Well I've vendor-ed some in the past but this will probably be the sticky part...
Thus at the end of Saturday evening I start the epic quest to get... 4 bat fangs...
I head out near camp Emerald Moss. Find a cave with some moles. I know that alternate pops for the moles in this cavern are Cave Bats. With the occasional Spriggan thrown in. And I start killing. For most of my play time Sunday, I kill, and I kill, and I kill, and I pass the 2000 mob mark, and I kill some more. I started the session off with Pugilist. It dings and the Bone Hora wear out (reached 50% of durability). I switch to Lancer. It dings and wears out. Thaumaturge. Same. Finally about half way thru Conjurer the 4th bat fang drops... To put this in perspective I ended up with 34 plain Formic Acids (you don't want to think about the thrown +1's and +2's. Remember the bats were only an occasional pop and even then they didn't always drop the fangs... Great way to level my other combat jobs though.
When I finally got the 4 fangs, I was lucky and HQ'ed the result. So I ended up with 16 Fang Arrowheads. Woot. Then it was off to Gridania sell off most of my drops and to buy and process the Arrowwood Branches. 2/3 successes so vendor the over supply and keep 16 shafts. I kept some stacks of drops for various linkshell members that were going to use the goods (namely someone wanted the two full stacks of Formic Acid and someone else wanted the full stack of Limonite. Then it was off to Limsa for the last element in the recipe - Dodo Feathers.
After some equipment repair work, I notice that Faeye, the destination for the Limonite, was in Limsa working on some Blacksmithing. So off to the blacksmith I go (to drop off the Limonite and get a slot back). When I get there Faeye had a new eye-patch. Funky:
After that it was off to the road up to the Skull Valley area to go kill Dodos. It took a bit of time, but no were as long as for the bat fangs to get 6 dodo feathers. Some quick crafting and I had enough Dodo Fetching to go around.
The final synth was very nice actually. Only used 2 shards (one earth, one wind) and I got about 175 Carpenter exp per synth at level 14. No failures so I figure it was a level 12 or so synth (the exp rate would bear that out). If I can find a better, steady supply of bat fangs, I may ride this synth for a few more levels. It'll be cheaper than processing logs which uses ungodly amounts of wind shards. In the end I ended up with 512 Fang Arrows
Look! Fang Arrows!
And so I become the first crafter in my LS to make a supply of arrows. All that killing, the local leves and the crafting did good things to my overall ranks over the weekend though. And I still have some dodo skins to process.
Physical: 35, Hand to hand: 10, Sword: 16, Axe: 10, Archery: 7, Polearm: 11: , Shield: 9, Thaumaturgy: 11, Conjury: 12, Woodworking: 14, Smithing: 14, Armorcraft: 14, Goldsmithing: 14, Leatherworking: 15, Clothcraft: 16, Alchemy: 17, Cooking 14, Mining: 15, Botany14: , Fishing: 14.
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