Tradeskilling

[Roo]

Usefulness of crafted items aside, I'm trying to raise my leatherworking skill and finding the color-codes (i.e. Orange=definately, Yellow=maybe, Green=probably not, Grey=time to move on) to be insufficient to determine my best item to grind on.

The best item to grind on is the one that uses the least amount of materials easily acquired and has the highest skill-up potential.

I have observed that a pattern that "just went yellow" is more likely to grant a point than one that is "about to go green", so it seems likely that there is a ramp down per skill point rather than steps.  My objective, therefore, is to create a table of percent chance to grant a skill point per resource, per pattern, per skill level.  This would give me an at-a-glance indication of the most efficient pattern to grind on, disregarding all secondary materials.

Welcome to the human need to perceive order in chaos. I've personally seen strings of 10 consectutive skill-ups on a green level craft and 10 consectutive failures on a yellow level craft. Those results would be tough to fit into the data model you describe.

My assumption is that the yellow and green levels are determined by the percent chance to grant a point per item, so something like:

Orange = 100%
Yellow = 50 - 99%
Green = 1 - 49%
Grey = 0%

My experience shows the chance to grant a skill point is a fixed percentage possibility such as:

Orange = 0% failure
Yellow = 33% failure
Green = 67% failure
Grey = 100% failure

I believe the skill-up level data is contained within the .MPQ files(client side).

As far as crafting goes here are several things to keep in mind:

1. There is not a great deal of uniformity on when a craft will go from orange to gray, some crafts can go through that range within 10 skill points, while another craft might be 30, even though they both become available at "175 skill". I suspect this is because someone did a rough pass at "balancing" the crafts based upon desirability of the craft and materials required for it. There are some cheesy skill-up points in all the crafting lines, look for them.

2. Crafting in WoW is not particularly geared toward efficiencies. Yes, you may be able to find a route from 0 to 300 with the absolute minimum amount of materials, but the brute force method of going out farming up the materials may prove just as viable and much quicker too. Pursuing a green craft with abundant quickly farmable materials can be easier than an orange craft with much rarer materials until you can find the next cheesy crafting point.