Master Goldsmither

Before I get to the fun part of the thread, let's go over the past week in review. On Saturday I went to Dynamis-Bastok and was disappointed to see one of our lowest attendances ever. We didn't even beat the zone because of time constraints (1 pull away), I think we have quite a few people being closet depressed or something since the holidays, or simply a large number of people not interested in doing city zones anymore since most of the LS has all their Relic armour needed. I hope these people begin to understand that we cannot run northlands more then four times a month because of scheduling constrictions. And furthermore if we don't have good attendance and good currency drop rates in city zones then we will be too broke in the long run to do northlands zones as often as we do.

On Sunday I got up early for my first taste of Salvage. We were only in the zone for about 10 minutes as we were trying a new strategy with only 1 monk and got our asses handed to us. However we know what to do for this Sunday and that won't happen again. We then headed for Sea to do some quick farming, spent about 2hrs trying to spawn Jailer of Temperance and then went to Ix'DRK for a quick kill.

After this we had a short LS meeting to go over some pressing issues of the past month or so and then had the rest of the night off.

Yesterday we had Dynamis-Sandoria which we got a small attendance boost from our Tuesday only members but were still undermanned for what we would of liked. Fortunately we killed the final extension with just minutes to spare and got the full 180 minute run out of the night. Was a decent night for relic armour and currency drops as well as a single 100c. The best part of the night was wiping to one of the Orc NM's after it used charmga three times within 30-45 seconds. Being as I was one of the few to actually pay attention and stay out of range of charmga I was spared being the Orc's bitch for a minute but after seeing a few people rushing to kill me I decided to blow up on Motley.

Today was the best day I've had in a long time, but I still don't really feel that excited. It just seems like any other day but with less weight on my shoulders. First thing, we claimed King Behemoth on the 3rd window. I think it was only day one for KB but we got lucky, seems we have claimed KB more then Behemoth since Element was formed.

I got Behemoth Tongue on free lot. I've always debated leveling MNK, it might be something I do down the line when I have more money and am finished with the jobs I'm already leveling. Congratulations to Aced on our first pair of Zenith Pumps and Rikumaru on Pixie Earring.

After KB I warped to Whitegate to synth a couple rings for Stubbs since he wanted to take advantage of my free synths while I'm skilling up. I started off by synthing the ingredients I bought for my own ring synths, it was a horrible start as you can see.

But then the sky's finally opened and I was finished.

Here is a screenshot of the current state of my crafts just for proof.

Still got to work on that Leathercraft skill but that's for another day. As far as the road to get here it has indeed been a long one. I started leveling Goldsmithing in December 2004 and only just finished today (yes that's over 2yrs). I know this is probably pretty slow for most Goldsmiths but I never really believed in power leveling it and losing a load of gil in the process, I kept track of all my expenses/profit from the skillup path and not including money synths (which don't yield skillups) I finished with a debt of 32,375,000g. This is fairly good for Goldsmithing though as most will tell you, I accredit this low debt to gardening almost all my platinum ingots (from nuggets) through the 60-70 stage, and benefiting from a good elemental bead market (when people actually bought beads on the auction house). I also started doing my skillups at Lv95 (almost 10 months ago) when Lv74 rings were still selling for 200-500k profit which they continued to sell for until I hit Lv99, because of this I made a lot of money back in this stage.

Below is a complete breakdown of how much gil I had spent at each level of goldsmithing. I have an even more detailed list in excel but that list is hundreds of lines long.

14: +$69,100
20: +$192,000
22: +$203,000
27: +$203,400
31: +$204,700
32: +$191,800
43: +$355,600
47: +$548,000
53: +$920,000
56: +$1,820,000
63: +$543,000
64: +$3,836,000
67: +$2,900,000
70: +$6,150,000
76: -$16,900,000
80: -$27,430,000
87: -$29,600,000
92: -$50,335,000
93: -$51,370,000
95: -$57,130,000

Somewhere between 95-96 I hit my largest debt of -$61,700,000 before selling the stuff I had made.

96: -$57,800,000
97: -$52,500,000
98: -$39,240,000
99: -$32,450,000

At 99.8 I had got my debt to it's lowest ever in a long time of -$30,120,000 but bad luck and several breaks ended up putting me down to my debt's final resting place.

100: -$32,375,000