Feldon 
You’ve likely heard whispers of just how powerful Refined and Experimented items can be, but until you’ve seen the final “as delivered” stats on the best examples of said items, either in a screenshot, or by examining another player in-game, it’s hard to know just how awesome these processes are.
A Refining/Experimentation Primer
If you grasped everything in Niami‘s EQ2Traders primer on the subject back when the Chains of Eternity expansion was new, then you already know the how-to and formulas at work here, but if not…
- A Refined item is a Mastercrafted weapon, armor, or piece of jewelry which has been created using a Purified rare. Instead of just crafting an item with an [eq2u]osmium cluster[/eq2u], if you first refine that rare into a [eq2u]purified osmium cluster[/eq2u]. When you then craft the item with this improved rare, nearly all of the item’s stats will be increased by 10%. A few stats are only improved by 5%, and others aren’t impacted at all. View a complete list of Refined stats.
- Meanwhile, Experimentation allows a skilled crafter to “boost” or increase a chosen stat on a crafted item. Experimented items gain a name “prefix” which changes with each experiment, with 5 successful experiments granting a prefix of “Visionary”. Boosting a single stat once increases it by 10%, but if you boost the same stat multiple times, you receive diminishing returns. Boosting the same stat sees an increase of 10%, 15%, 17.5%, 18.5%, and, at the max, 19% (10+5+2.5+1+0.5). Suffice it to say, most people spread their boosts around rather than stacking them all into a single stat.
To know just how powerful Refining, Reforging, and Experimentation can be, one need look no further than top tier raid guilds who, until they acquire their Plane of War mythical cloaks, often wear these Experimented/Refined/Reforged crafted cloaks to the exclusion of most other dropped cloaks.
EQ2U Support
So with all that said, and a number of months after the launch of Chains of Eternity, we now have the necessary data to support displaying Refined and Experimented items in the Character View on EQ2U! Once we got the data (shortly before SOE Live), Dethdlr and I started brainstorming, then discussing, and finally debating the most logical, optimal way to display this data!
The in-game display of Refined and Experimented stats has always left us wondering which stats were boosted by what, so we wanted to improve on this and present the information in an unambiguous way. After much philosophizing, we have arrived at the view shown above. The popup window shows the final boosted stats, with the specific Experimented boosts marked in orange.
If you forget the exact percentages from Refining and Experimentation, you only need only mouseover the new Refined gem (
) and Experimented flask (
) icons, which join the existing Reforged hammer (
) icon and Item Upgrade Search (
) button.
If you made it this far reading this article, then here’s a little bonus: In addition to Loot Table data, I can report that Quest, Collectible, and Recipe data are also in development. Since shortly before SOE Live, there has been someone working on getting all these things out to EQ2 Census in a usable form. I think we’ll owe him a pallet of a decent IPA by the time this is all up and running. The EQ2 team have been very supportive of sites like EQ2U, DA, Rostermaster (and even a couple mobile apps!), and want us to continue to succeed!
This is awesome! Thank you for the hard work.
Only thing I noticed is that the experimented popups don’t work if you hover over the item in a multiple character gear report. But you can still just click on the character’s name and view their gear directly.
I may have to completely rearchitect Gear Report to support Reforging, Refining, and Experimenting.
Liking how you show the experimenting on the ability stats!
very nice
it amazes me how much easer it is to look at my characters Out of game then it is In game.
Thank you for providing this service to all of us.
You guys never cease to amaze me. Do you have plans to incorporate the procs that are able to be added to pieces via the experimenting process as well?
I will look into supporting the Augments / Blessings, if the data supports it that is!
UPDATE: Looks like the data isn’t there. So for now, it will just show 4 boosts and “Ingenious”. 🙁
One thing I have problems with occasionally is incomplete search terms. Say if I want to look up the Scaled Cloak of the Archmagus, but I forgot what the last word was … searching for Scaled Cloak will work, but Scale Cloak does not.
Sorry, it’s a phrase search. Some day I’d like to re-architect our search page to be more like Google, where we could allow you to search for multiple keywords.
Oh, I found an inconsistency. If the item is Visionary but you have an Augmented Blessing on it, the item will be listed as Ingenious and doesn’t list the proc.
I will look into supporting the Augments / Blessings, if the data supports it that is!
UPDATE: Looks like the data isn’t there. So for now, it will just show 4 boosts and “Ingenious”. 🙁
One last note. Did you notice that when you have a Refined item with yellow and red adorns, that the 10% bonus also applies to them? I have bracers with 3.5% and 5% reuse adorns in them. In-game, the item says it has 9.4% reuse instead of 8.5%.
This is applying to green adorns to. I’m guessing it’s unintended. 😉
That sounds like a job to offload to the client if a reasonable way is known unless your server has lots of idle cpu time.
I hope people don’t miss the last line ‘The EQ2 team have been very supportive of sites like EQ2U, DA, Rostermaster (and even a couple mobile apps!), and want us to continue to succeed!”
that speaks well of sony and the team working on eq2
ALL THESE COLORS CONFUSE ME.
WHERE AM I?
I THINK I NEED AN ADULT.
Srsly though, great job. Keep it up
Very cool!
I’m probably even more excited that SOE finally shows reforging on rings and necks, though 🙂
This is a little bit off topic but still somewhat relevant, when searching for an item usually the reason I am searching for it is because i want to know how to get one. This usually means I have seen one in game and have an examine screen up in game and want to know where to get it from. Most items are lacking where i can get one. please add something so that I can see where to get it, even if that is a space for eq2u fans to submit where it drops. Thanks a bunch.
We will be getting item drop and quest reward information from SOE very shortly. Then it won’t be player-submitted. It will be data from the game like Zam used to get (but displayed in a clearer way).
/doing the snoopy happy dance right now.
@Feldon
have you thought of a way to handle upgrade searches once procs become the differentiator of quality for type (solo, group, raid) and power (common, rare, ultra rare, etc.)?
😉
We can find items based on proc name. It’s not a fast search but it works. Maybe something we can look into for the expansion.