Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Merchant Shopping

    • 259 posts
    July 5, 2018 6:14 AM PDT

    As I have been leveling up my Tailoring tradeskill in EQ/P99, I have needed many spiderling and spider silk, along with many ruined, low quality, medium quality and high quality animal skins. With most MMO's you must go out exploring to find the animals that you need to kill and harvest for these tradeskill items. This is of course the same in EQ/P99 and will be the same in some form or fashion in Pantheon. With the release of EverQuest also came something I had never seen before, the option to buy items from any merchant where player characters had sold their items previously. This allowed you to not only check the merchants inventory for normally purchasable items but to also search the inventory of player sold items. In EverQuest this practice became known as Merchant Shopping. You could think of it like browsing and shopping at a big flea market. It's great to see Merchant Shopping still alive and well in P99.

    You may be wondering what if anything this has to do with tradeskills. Crafters found that this practice could help them tremendously finding items they used to craft with. Although you could usually find all the easiest items that you would normally hunt, kill and harvest for, they found that with Merchant Shopping you had a chance, though a very slim one, to find some of those very rare items that are not easily gathered. For an example, my tailor needs high quality bear skins to make 10% weight reduction, 8 slot backpacks. Not only can you not use cat or wolf skin's, but high quality skins are the rarest of the animal skins. So, you are hunting and searching for the rarest of only one type of skin. If you are willing to take some time away from adventuring and gathering to go Merchant Shopping a couple of times a week, you will find some of those rare items needed by crafter's because some non-crafting players have no use for the items and sell them to the merchants.

    I have been able to find 6 high quality skins in the last week which adds to my normal harvesting of skins. This is a huge help to me because of how rare they are. It has already been confirmed by VR that Pantheon will absolutely have Merchant Shopping available. I'm very excited about this as I am very fond of the practice for my tradeskills. Have you ever been Merchant Shopping with your characters? If you haven't, do you think you will give it a try when Pantheon is released?

    • 75 posts
    July 5, 2018 9:41 AM PDT

    I guess I might but people usually hold on to stuff like that these days so if it isn't fruitful then I would probably stop.

    • 255 posts
    July 7, 2018 6:15 PM PDT

    They have said they intend to have the ability to buy stuff from merchants that other players have sold to them beforehand.

    I am curious to see how they do the drops for tradeskills. As we go down the mordern style of MMO's with nodes for this and that, then you will have skinning skills to get these items. They won't be random drops where you kill 50 mods and get 10 skins as a random drop. I would think depending on skinning skill you would end up with a higher rate of gathering from the mobs killed.