Imbuing: a Training Guide

By Basara, March 2010

Notes:

Tests used a character with a crafted soulforge. For Training, human is a better option, as items are of higher difficulty, at lower skill.
Similarly, it is better to avoid the public soulforges (regular and Queen’s) during training, except perhaps when unraveling after 75 skill (when you are going for ingredients, not skill gains).

Gains, 0 to 75.

If you so choose, you can start a new character with the skill, up to 50, or on the normal-ruleset shards, buy it up to 40. HOWEVER, I recommend that you do NOT buy any points in the skill at all.

The reason for not buying is simple. You can start unraveling, and getting gains and residue, at 0 skill. You will NEED those residue, once your skill gets over 75. All buying the skill, or starting with points in it for a new character, is REDUCE your supplies for later training.

No gains off fails – only off successes. Gains work like cooking gains (1 gain check per item, if using the “unravel container” option of the craft window, so you can get multiple multi-point gains from one
container of items).

Note that what gives gains for you, using this guide, might be different slightly from what works for someone else, due to combinations of character race, forge used, Power Scroll used, and what you perceive to by your optimum gain range.

0 – 75 Skill: unravel items by the bag-load.

Note: Residue returned will vary, and one can unravel items made of special material (so making junk with runics, or enhanced with special materials, are a way to try for the higher ingredients).
Starting from 0 skill, you are likely to get 500-1000 magical residue from junk items (monster loot, crafted stuff that qualifies as special enough for unraveling, etc.) by the time you hit 25 skill.

At 50.1 skill, you will start having the ability to get enchanted essence.

You will need Magical Residue to all of your training; probably in the neighborhood of 15,000 to 20,000, to complete training.

You will need 500 Enchanted Essence to get your 120 Scroll of Power for Imbuing. You will do this by getting 10 115 Scrolls of Power for Imbuing, then using a Scroll Binder (an item made by Scribes, using wood pulp made by Cooks) to combine the 10 115 scrolls into a single 120 scroll. Trust me, while there is a quest for the 120 scroll directly, it is NOT worth the price of the Relic Fragments it takes.

Once you reach the 70s, your skill gains from unraveling will have diminished, but will continue into the mid to high 70s.

Unraveling items that give essence can give gains close to 100, and relic-giving items can give gains all the way to 120 – but gaining that way is insanely slow.

By This time, you probably have close to 10,000 Residue. It is now time to start to use these to imbue items for skill gains.

Training after 70-75 Skill.

Preparation:

You will need to have a Blacksmith with Grandmaster or better skills, to reliably make your target items. The target items will be EXCEPTIONAL QUALITY PLATEMAIL JINGASA.

The Jingasa are chosen for their ease of manufacture, and the automatic Mage Armor property that Samurai Empire expansion metal armor has when made exceptional. This gives you a base of 100% intensity to add additional  properties to, at no cost. I suggest the “Light Platemail Jingasa” as 20 of them fit nicely in a backpack/pouch (4 columns of 5) or box (5 columns of 4). You will probably need only about 200-300 of these to get to 115 skill from 75, though you will only work on 20 or 40 at a time. AAs gains get progressively slower after 115, you will probably get 10 or
less gains per container of 20 as you near 120, so the variance on the total amount needed will differ from person to person.

Each item can have TWENTY successful Imbues. Typically, you’ll do one high-end imbue one time, per item, followed by one mid or high level imbue or a second (third, with Mage Armor) property, and the remaining 18 all low-level imbues of a last property.

Training:

The following methods use only Amber (LRC) and Citrine (Luck, Reflect Physical), with Residue.

First Imbue: Add 89 Luck* to each Jingasa (4 Residue, 8 Citrine). (or 90, using 1 citrine more than 89, to lessen setup time and give a slight increase to difficulty). Choose an intensity that puts you in the 40% to 50% skill range** that uses the least amount of materials, but eventually you’ll get to where even 89 luck is outside the normal “optimum gain range”. Even as you get into the 110s, you’ll still occasionally get a rare gain in this part of the process, but they will only be common below 100 skill. Use Imbue Last Property to switch between items (hitting reimbue on failures,
until success) to get all 20 items in the container imbued with this property. I typically set up 2 or 3 containers of Jingasa at once, to keep things rolling (and to maximize the chance of a rare gain in set-up)

Second Imbue: At this point, go back to the first item in the container. Choose “Reflect Physical Damage”. Again, choose an intensity that puts you in the 40% to 50% skill range** that uses the least amount of materials.
Add this ONCE. You can take this as high as 13%, without using special materials, and will probably do so, near the end of your training.
Switch between items in set-up as in First Imbue.

When first starting out in the 70s, you can actually skip this step, and go directly to LRC, up to the point where one would have to use 2 or more amber per imbue for LRC, to go with the 89/90 Luck (somewhere in the 90s). Note that this, too, will go up fairly quickly, so don’t do more than one container at a time with RPD, so you can adjust the amount you add for the next container of 20 (without having to reimbue).

Third Imbue: In the “Casting” Section, choose “Lower Reagent Cost”. Typically, you’ll want to keep the LRC imbue in the 1-3% range, where your success chance is between 40% & 50%**, but eventually, once you hit 13% RPD on the
second step, you may need to go up to 7% LRC (or higher, if you so choose) to stay near the low end of the “optimum range”. Start with the first item in the bag.

Fourth through Twentieth Imbues: Repeat 3rd Imbue on the SAME item, until you hit the 20th Imbue (often, you’ll know only by seeing the indication that you’re going past the 20th), as that’s where reimbue gains of the same item drop off (but can still happen). At that point, move the finished item over into a convenient other container,
and switch to the next item in line, using “Imbue Last Property”, and doing the 3rd through 20th Imbues on it. Lather, Rinse, Repeat, adding materials into you backpack as necessary.

Eventually, the Second & Third Imbues will creep high enough to where you might gain better with a maxed normal material (13%) second imbue, and higher cost LRC Imbues.

When all the items in the training batch done: Unravel the bag you moved all the 20-times-imbued items to, to reclaim a small amount of residue from them. You can now grab a bag or two of fresh Jingasa to start again (double-checking your success chances when setting the difficulty between each bag – will be more common early on), or make new items for the bags, or go buy more stuff for the next few rounds. Try not to hit training burn-out, by getting out and doing things (like trying to raise your loyalty high enough for the Queen’s forge, or sending a purely combat  character out to Swoop, Miasma or something to haul back bags of loot to unravel).

Notes:

*89 Luck: Choose “Luck” Property from the “Misc.” category, then hit the far right “triple” arrow to take it to 100, then the middle left “double” arrow once to back it down to 90, then the single left arrow once to go to 89. As noted, if you are comfortable with the extra spending, you can leave out the last one and spend more ingredients, to go to 90. Note that between 70 & 90 skill, you will start at some lower level of luck (ending in 9 for max efficiency in gains), slowly working your way up to 89 or 90.

**Perhaps into the 50% to 60% range – some people seem to gain better in different parts of the 40% to 60% range – gain chances go down closer to 60%, but you waste less per attempt – the extra attempts required to gain at higher skills may or may not balance out with the reduction in failures. Choose your own comfort zone, after testing the waters.

Sources of stuff to use in Training:

Ingots (for making the Jingasa): Mine them yourself (if a crafter, you may already have the several thousand iron ingots you’ll need, on hand, from your miner), or go to the Random Gypsy Camp Spawns in Ilshenar. The random ones come and go, but the Vagabond and Iron Worker NPCs at the Random sites always respawn at default price (8 GP each for the first 1000, +1 GP each per additional 1000, on regular shards), so there will be a regular source of default
price ingots, if you go looking, even if all the permanent Ilshenar Gypsies and the smiths of the other five facets are all overpriced.

Gems: You can get some from mining, or fighting elementals, dragons, gargoyles, etc. But, that can take way too long, unless you were hoarding looted gems from before Stygian Abyss launched. Your second-best option will be the  Jewelers in various cities (including vagabonds in the permanent Gypsy camps). But, like with the Smiths, these can get overpriced real quick.

Your best bet, again, are the Vagabonds that can occur at the Random Gypsy Camp Spawns. They respawn at  default gem prices, when they occur.
And, because of the sheer cost of buying 500 gems at a time, gem purchases of such size (including from normal Jewelers) will auto-deduct from the gold in your bank (unlike the ingot purchases), so long as the gold is in Coin form (if not, use the gypsy banker at the site to break your check).

Magical Residue: If you’re working up loyalty, the Ter Mur Toxic Sliths give decent loyalty, are fairly easy to kill, usually have 2 or more pieces of junk to unravel (up to 5, maybe more), and additionally are things that a quest from Percolem wants you to kill, for which he will give a backpack with 10 Enchanted Essence, gems, and more junk to
unravel. He also gives a quest for the normal Sliths, which don’t have as good loot, but the quest for them gives Residue in the bag, instead of Essence, so both are good to accept (and both have cool-downs, so you will probably do both, one after the other, in any given night.

If gathering with another of your characters, any good spawn of crappy equipment will do (especially if you can get away with riding a Giant Beetle while doing it). Swoops and Miasma are favorites (but about anything named from Mondain’s Legacy, will usually do), and the leftover junk in Peerless & Spawn Champ bosses also are a pretty good haul.
Typically, you’ll average 1 Residue per 2 stone of junk loot (plus some essence, and the rare relic).

A last source, if you have a tailor, might be using low-end BOD reward runics. Spined Kits are especially good for this. 45 leather caps made of normal leather will produce a lot of Residue (and a few essence) for just 90 leather and 1 Spined kit, while making the items with spined leather will produce less Residue, and several times more essence than
using normal leather would have done.

Gypsy Camp Spawns are located HERE. (the first section of numbers – ignore the permanent camps, unless the
permanent vendors on the shard have also reset recently, in which case you probably wouldn’t be looking for the Gypsies for about a week, anyways) Note that not every random camp will have a Vagabond or an Iron Worker (in fact, the only two NPCs guaranteed at each will be the Banker and the healer/mage hybrid, the Fortune Teller), and typically
only 3-5 spots of the 10 or so random spawn locations (there were a couple more not listed, but they have not been active since Mondain’s Legacy was released) will be active at any given time.

Note that altering the order of the first 3 imbues is an option, but I find that having a 20-range (steps of 5 intensity) imbue in the last step is more convenient.

Also, having the two Citrine-based imbues occurring first and second, helps keep gem prices more balanced. If you use Luck or RPD as the third (and repeat) imbue, you will end up using several times more Citrines than Amber. If you use LRC as the third and repeat imbue, however, the amounts used of the two gems stay relatively close to each other (though roughly the same total number of gems bought), thereby keeping the non-Gypsy Jeweler prices more in  balance for you, as well as other shoppers.

Some people seem to have greater difficulty than others in making the items needed for training. The following list is of suggested steps, by cost. Choose one for the range you are currently training.

These Assume you are using Mage Armor exceptional SE armor, such as Jingasa.

Luck (done as the first imbue of all steps)

19 Luck = 1 Residue, 1 Citrine
29 Luck = 1 Residue, 2 Citrine

39 Luck = 1 Residue, 3 Citrine

49 Luck = 2 Residue, 4 Citrine

59 Luck = 2 Residue, 5 Citrine

69 Luck = 3 Residue, 6 Citrine

79 Luck = 3 Residue, 7 Citrine

89 Luck = 4 Residue, 8 Citrine

90 Luck = 4 Residue, 9 Citrine

Choose this as the first step. For some people, this will need to be one of the steps under 89. For example, 59 Luck will probably sufficient at 80 skill. However, by 90 skill, you’ll be doing 89 luck as the first step, and since gains are  REALLY quick in this area, don’t prepare more than 10 at any given luck amount under 89, until you see you need more (as it only took me about 40 total Jingasa to go from 76 to 91 skill).

LRC – either the second step (without RPD) or third step. Don’t add Reflect Physical in as the second step, until you’ve hit where 3% LRC (1 residue and 1 amber) becomes too slow in giving gains.

1%, 2%, 3% LRC = 1 Residue, 1 Amber

4%, 5% LRC = 1 Residue, 2 Amber

6%, 7% LRC = 1 Residue, 3 Amber

8%, 9% LRC = 2 Residue, 4 Amber

10%, 11% LRC = 2 Residue, 5 Amber

Note that for the best gain range, as you get near 120 skill, you’ll end up choosing a number in the 4-11% range (probably 7%, to conserve residue) to go with the 89-90 luck and 13% RPD, for your actual training.

Reflect Physical Damage (step 2, at higher levels)

You start doing this as a second imbue (moving LRC to 3rd through 20th, instead of 2nd – 20th), once you decide avoiding the extra amber cost is worth the extra step.

1-2 RPD = 1 Residue, 1 Citrine

3-4 RPD = 1 Residue, 2 Citrine

5 RPD = 1 Residue, 3 Citrine

6-7 RPD = 2 Residue, 4 Citrine

8 RPD = 2 Residue, 5 Citrine

9-10 RPD = 3 Residue, 6 Citrine

11 RPD = 3 Residue, 7 Citrine

12-13 RPD = 4 Residue, 8 Citrine

How costs add up: an example of a late-training expenditure

89 Luck: 4 Residue, 8 Citrine

13 RPD: 4 Residue, 8 Citrine (plus any failures)

5 LRC: 1 Residue, 2 Amber (plus any failures) (times 18 successes)

Successes would cost 26 Residue, 16 Citrine, 36 Amber total, plus losses in failures, to completely train through one item.