A quick explanation of Cultural Armor vs. Cultural Augments

[Guiscard]

I sometimes get asked about using cultural stuff for skill ups or about the quests needed to do cultural, and for some reason, I have a lot of trouble explaining that there are important differences b/w Cultural Armor and Cultural Augments.

1) Race

Cultural Armor, the actual items you put in your armor slots and the only items with a Slot 11 on them, are race-based. You cannot wear them if you are not the proper race and you also cannot MAKE them unless you are the proper race. Wood Elves make Wirewood (for chain), Brambleborn (for leather) and Wealdstone (for plate).

Cultural Augments, that you put into the slot 11, are deity-based BUT anyone can make them. You need the appropriate deity-water, but as a Tunare worshipping wood elf, I can make any augment (aka Symbol) for anyone.

2) Quests.

This is the biggest difference, and I have trouble conveying how important it is. To make cultural armor, there is only one quest. You DO NOT do a different quest to make Expert's vs Master's vs Grandmaster's. The quest is generally very simple (for wood elves we need two no-drops from trash mobs in Crushbone, plus two drops from undead in the Estate of Unrest). WHile it can be annoying to farm greens, it's a minor annoyance.

For Augments, each level requires a different quest. They are long and involved. I have only done the GM quest, as I didn't see a lot of value in killing hundred of mobs in Acrylia Caverns just to make alt-gear. The one quest I had to do to make GM level augments required me to loot 80 of a particular item in Thundercrest (instances only), which took a LOT of Creator Missions to finish. But I got the ability to make 200 of each augment and 400 wrist augments, GM-level only.

3) Skill ups

I used (expert's and master's) cultural ARMOR (not augments) for my tailoring from 216 to 300 and for my smithing from 222 to 290. I never once used an augment for it, because i didn't want to do a long, involved pre-quest to be able to make master's augments, and b/c the armor path was there for the taking.

Both Augs and Armor, however, give a 5 point boost to your skill up chance for master's and a 10 point boost to your skill up chance for GM level. So if you will skill up at, say a 4% rate on a high-end tailoring combine, you have a 9% chance on master's cultural tailoring and 14% on Gm-level. I chose the master's route b/c the ingredients for me were 200-300pp per item (and farmable at a dozen an hour) vs. 25K for the GM ingredients.

So if you happen to be lucky enough to be of a race that uses, say, Shissar Scales, for Master's cultural tailoring, it is hand's down the best way to skill up. There is a guaranteed nerf of some of the easier race's recipes, that Sony has promised to do once they get around to it, so if you are a race that has an easy path, and you care to skill up, I cannot emphasize enough how much happier you will be to get your points now before the nerf. That was the only reason I rushed my tailoring -- I hate wasting game time to farm ingredients, but I wanted to beat the nerf bat.


Anyway, if you want ANY level of wood-elf armor (leather, chain, or plate -- we don't wear/make silk) or any deity of GM symbols, I can do it for you and generally don't charge anymore than the ingredient costs (bring me the other stuff and I don't even charge for the 50pp or so of junk ingredients).. But I cannot make master's symbols, or other races' armor. And for the last time, the Quest to make your own race's ARMOR is probably not that hard.

Finally: If you get Bazu stone on a raid, you're going to want one item of cultural armor (people tend to like bracers, boots, or hats, depending on what else they have there) AND one cultural augment, in addition to the Bazu-based augment and a Slot 7 augment. So you will need to find a smith (plate/chain) or tailor (silk/leather) of your RACE to make the armor and then anyone (and it can be smith or tailored) to make the augment. However, since the ingredients for the tailored version of the augment are generally rarer than for the smithed version, a smith is a cheaper route to go. Even if you have a glossy hide, you are btter off selling that (or trading it) and using the proceeds to buy a metallic drake scale (and pocketing the profit, or giving it to your friendly smith). Save the tailoring stuff for armor, where there is no smithed version.

[Zephur]

However, since the ingredients for the tailored version of the augment are generally rarer than for the smithed version, a smith is a cheaper route to go. Even if you have a glossy hide, you are btter off selling that (or trading it) and using the proceeds to buy a metallic drake scale (and pocketing the profit, or giving it to your friendly smith). Save the tailoring stuff for armor, where there is no smithed version.

From my experience, this is not true. The glossy hides are generally less desired and usually run 5-10k less in the bazaar.

The ARMOR requires a specific type of item. Metallic drake scale for plate and chain, glossy for leather, and coarse silk for silk armor. The SYMBOL does not matter which you use. You can make the SYMBOL from glossy drake hides (or coarse silk but much too rare) with tailoring and from metallic drake scales with smithing.

Just because you cant make your ARMOR from the glossy hides, dont give them away thinking they are useless to you. They can be used for the symbol.

[Guiscard]

I stand corrected -- Zeph probably knows the Bazaar market better than I do these days.

In either case, do realize that you can use either to make your symbol, and that sometimes a trade can make you and a friend better off, depending on what you have and what he/she needs.

[Zephur]

BTW I am 300 smithing and tailoring with all the AAs as well and can do Gnome armor and master or GM symbols.

[Guiscard]

One last item:


GM cultural armor (not sure about augments) has a hard cap on the success rate. So while something with a trivial of that level would normally be a 95% success rate, the trading community has figured out that the success rate EVEN WITH MAXED EVERYTHING is:

Curiass+Greaves (trivial = 386): 62%
Sleeves (trivial = 368): 68.75%
Helm+Boots+Gloves (trivial = 334): 81.5%
Armband (trivial = 316): 88.25%

(this ends up meaning that the tradeskill mastery AAs are worthless for cultural combines if you have maxed skill and/or a decent trophy (or that the trophy is useless if you have skill & AAs, etc.), but Salvage is still very important)