Arrow Heads, qty per ingot

[Faldred]

Dorganath - 7/25/2006  12:13 PM    The time required in alchemy is, arguably, even higher than that for fletching, given how much time it takes to gather parts for healing potions, for example, and how quickly one can go through them in a single adventure.
  In real life, someone might spend a few hours preparing a meal that will be consumed in less than 30 minutes.   This will always be true for consumable items.  

 Of course, the flip side is that, in theory, there's always a market for consumables, whereas for durable goods, saturation can happen quickly.  In practice, however, people seem (from my limited experience) to participate in fletching and alchemy primarily for making their own supplies.

[lonnarin]

aye, though that one ring will still be with you after 2 minutes of battle (about what 20 arrows gives you gameplay-time)

As a frantic gemcrafter who's aaaaalmost in the top 10 now, (Topple Goldwin, Topple!) I find ring crafting to be fun and don't worry about the one ingot vanishing.  You can load up on gems and molds easily, not much weight there, and one ingot/attempt 2 for amulets is both realistic and reasonable.  I made it to about oak arrows with silver tips on fletching with Bjorn, and while the XP was very decent (5 trials per 99 stack lead to quick crafting levels)  the sheer fact that I spent hours just to make a stack and a half of arrows a very slow and thankless job, especially for dex-based ranger types.  5 ingots for a 99-pack that's gone in 10 minutes is scary compared to 1 ingot for a ring that lasts forever... or 6 ingots in a chain shirt.  If one were to recylce/resmelt a valuable chain shirt, I'd hope that they at least got 10 minutes of disposable arrowheads for it.

Hence the uphill-climb of fletching.  To a dedicated crafter or marksman, it feels like that mountain of Gehenna in Dante's Inferno where you roll that massive boulder uphill for hours and hours, only to have it roll back down to the bottom again.  Then you must try-try again for all eternity.  By that point, one literally salivates for arcane archerhood.

[Faldred]

Dorganath - 7/25/2006  8:38 AM    If arrowheads climb to 40 arrowheads/ingot, are you willing to give up the mangled metal on failure?  Because really, getting back the mangled metal is a pretty nice parting gift for failure....there's NO risk of losing materials at all, except for molds, which are pretty simple even for low-level tinkerers, and which already go away regardless of success.

For the sake of argument... what about 80 arrowheads/2 ingots/2 molds, return 1 mangled metal on failure?