Looking for a Few Good Orks

[Ruvanal]

Can anything really of any use be made by tailoring?

Bags.  Perhaps someone can take this skill and use it till we're all "bagged up" and then trade it in.

If that is all you are looking to it for, it may be worth more to get the bags from one of the other guild members for the early part of the adventures. You can contact Vrak/Kraytok for requesting some 6 slot bags currently if you need them. You may need to help supply some linen or light leather for their fabrication. Also if you have not done so, get the bag quest (6 slot bag as reward) that is available in Razor Hill (top of tower above the smithy).

For that matter I'm not sure on the mechanics of how First aid helps.

Me neither. There is a discussion of this in the trade skills forum but there is no clear answer.

First Aid allows you to make bandages from some of the cloth scraps that drop from the humanoid type mobs. To apply the bandage, the user enters into a 'crafting state' similar to when skinning. If you are hit during this the process is interupted but the bandage is not used. Fairly useless for using in battle unless you have some way to avoid getting interupted. Also there is a cooldown time after the user applies the bandage before they can apply another bandage to anyone. This means that one first aid user cannot go around the group and quickly apply bandages to several different people; but on the other hand several first aid users could all apply their skill to one recipient.

Survival skill has changed some from the first beta push. When learning the skill it no longer lists you as learning apprentice then other levels after that. There are only 2 listings at the trainer, making a campfire (5 skill points iirc) and making a big campfire (req skill of 75 in Survival and 50 or 75 skill point cost, I forget).

Food and Cooking
In the beta1 push the values on what food did for you were fairly accurate in terms of what you would recover. You would actually recover a bit more due to factors like regeneration and the effect of spirit and that while sitting you had a boosted recovery rate.

In the beta2 push they messed around with the way the natural recovery and spirit values affect this. Also it is easier to keep a players spirit maxed by using the more readily available skill points compared to having use talent points in the beta1 push. This boost in recovery can be enough to make mild to moderate damage not something to have to do a special stop for if there is already a pause for things like looting some corpses, skinning, picking herbs/mining ore being done at times. Also these boosts in the recovery rates are having some effect on the way the food works. The numbers do not accurately reflect what you will recover in a given time period.

When playing with Vrak, I was trying to use up some of the more marginal food and noticed the difference. i then took some time to get some rough measurements of what he could expect to recover and found that if using a 98hp over 21 sec food, he acually ended up recover somewhere between 300 and 350 hp during the span of those 21 sec. The recovery has been so fast with this type of low quality food that a low hp character like Kraytok barely needs to sit down for more than 4 seconds to get fully healed in most cases. This has meant that for Vrak at least (current level 20), the need to aquire more food than is normally getting dropped from teh mobs has not really been needed. Even to the point of usually selling the lowest quality food supplies back to the vendors.

The changes that they have done to way recovery works has effectively undermined the value of cooking compared to way it was in the beta1 push.