Does anyone take Tinker III?

[Aquillion]

There are a few more things in it now, but given the difficulty of building them, their fairly narrow utility, and the massive investment in otherwise limited-use Intelligence required to reach Tinker III, it doesn't seem viable at all.

Worse, finding data disks for it is hard and they're often expensive; you get one for free but there's a risk it could be the relatively-useless Hand-E-Nuke, the much less important antimatter cell, or the obtainable-elsewhere phase cannon.

There's so few things that Tinker III makes that I'm tempted to suggest that it should have a warning put on it for now indicating that it's only partially implemented (of the sort Confusion used to have.)

[Sentient_Toaster]

It really doesn't look worth it for the reasons you mention.

[McFuzz]

All the good injectors, grenades, small spheres of negative weight, and fuel cells are in either Tinker 1 or 2. The few weapons or extremely rare gear that you need Tinker 3 for, you can find in other places. I've never taken it.

[Aquillion]

I mean just compare the amount of stuff in each:

Tinker I[cavesofqud.gamepedia.com]

Tinker II[cavesofqud.gamepedia.com]

Tinker III[cavesofqud.gamepedia.com]

[McFuzz]

Originally posted by Aquillion:

I mean just compare the amount of stuff in each:

Tinker I[cavesofqud.gamepedia.com]

Tinker II[cavesofqud.gamepedia.com]

Tinker III[cavesofqud.gamepedia.com]

The worst part is that the list there says Small Sphere of Negative weight is Tinker 3, and I know it's Tinker 2 cuz I was making them yesterday. So that list is even one less than it is in game lol.

[surplus_newt]

Your Tinkering skill doesn't have anything to do with what objects count as "too complex" for Psychometry, does it?

[Anxarcule]

Better to go for reverse engineering and use the sphinx tonic to disassemble the important items (e.g. sphere of negative weight). The skill point investment for TInker III is too steep IMO

[Aquillion]

It's not even the skill points, it's the 29 Intelligence.

Taking 29 in most other stats is a reasonable build because they provide you with supreme capability in some area that will help keep you alive, usually in a way that compounds the higher you get it - 29 Agility makes you flawlessly accurate and very hard to hit; 29 Strength lets you crush enemies with ease; 29 Toughness makes you almost impossible to kill; 29 Ego makes you a mind-wrecking Esper; and even 29 Willpower has its uses with the right activated abilities.

29 Intelligence is almost worthless. Skill points, unlike the rewards for all the other abilities, yield diminishing returns - you're going to buy the best skills for your build first, so by the time you have 29 Intelligence you're investing them in dregs that no longer help you. Pouring that much into one stat weakens you at everything else, and with Intelligence you're not getting anything useful to make up for it. Similarly, by the time you're at 29 Intelligence, identifying items has long since become trivial.

The fact that Tinker III is mostly not that valuable anyway just compounds the problem.

Basically Intelligence needs to scale to something more important if dedicated tinkers will be a thing - something you can actually rely on to keep you alive as your core combat trick, not a minor fringe benefit. Because the reality is that when you invest that much in one stat, you are giving up most of your other combat capabilities, and since the game is mostly combat, that means that investing 29 in Intelligence and not getting a basic combat style in return leaves you with a build that often just doesn't feel viable.

[Anxarcule]

Ah yes my bad, it was the 29 int that was what made it unrealistic to take, not the skill points (been awhile since i played Qud and I forgot). I did remember that for the vast majority of builds it didn't make any sense building to get tinker 3... very few items in that class need to be made en masse and you'll end up finding it naturally in the world by the time you reach those stats.

[Nebnii]

Originally posted by Aquillion:

It's not even the skill points, it's the 29 Intelligence.

Taking 29 in most other stats is a reasonable build because they provide you with supreme capability in some area that will help keep you alive, usually in a way that compounds the higher you get it - 29 Agility makes you flawlessly accurate and very hard to hit; 29 Strength lets you crush enemies with ease; 29 Toughness makes you almost impossible to kill; 29 Ego makes you a mind-wrecking Esper; and even 29 Willpower has its uses with the right activated abilities.

29 Intelligence is almost worthless. Skill points, unlike the rewards for all the other abilities, yield diminishing returns - you're going to buy the best skills for your build first, so by the time you have 29 Intelligence you're investing them in dregs that no longer help you. Pouring that much into one stat weakens you at everything else, and with Intelligence you're not getting anything useful to make up for it. Similarly, by the time you're at 29 Intelligence, identifying items has long since become trivial.

The fact that Tinker III is mostly not that valuable anyway just compounds the problem.

Basically Intelligence needs to scale to something more important if dedicated tinkers will be a thing - something you can actually rely on to keep you alive as your core combat trick, not a minor fringe benefit. Because the reality is that when you invest that much in one stat, you are giving up most of your other combat capabilities, and since the game is mostly combat, that means that investing 29 in Intelligence and not getting a basic combat style in return leaves you with a build that often just doesn't feel viable.

Inteligence would help you stay alive by providing you with better artifacts and crafting in general, i think that's what they went with. But ye the stat defintely need a boost, or at least the inteligence skills. Tinker 1,2,3 would feel alot better if it gave you a 3 choices of a recipe or a random one upon every level you get like mutations. And some rework to turrets, maybe give them infinite amunition that they can use from their own hp like some other turrets

The biggest problem with tinker 3 imo is that even if you put all the points and invest into it hard, you will never find the materials needed for it, or you better off just finding the item itself

[EternalEllipsis]

I think it'd more in theme for there to be more high intelligence skills rather then have it directly scale with something.

Maybe flesh out first aid and tactics more?

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by Nebnii:

Inteligence would help you stay alive by providing you with better artifacts and crafting in general, i think that's what they went with.

Unfortuantely, it doesn't do this at all. Nothing about Intelligence allows you to build or find better items at all; it does nothing to improve your crafting whatsoever aside from making you better at identifying stuff and being a prerequisite to crafting skills.

The biggest problem with tinker 3 imo is that even if you put all the points and invest into it hard, you will never find the materials needed for it, or you better off just finding the item itself

This is also a problem, yes. High-level crafting ingredients are as rare as the items you build with them, if not rarer (Antimatter Cells and Phase Cannons in particular are far easier to find than the bits they're made out of, to the point where it makes sense to use them as your source for tier 8 bits - except that they're two of the main things you'd want to build, so if you have access to them then you don't need Tinker III at all!

[McFuzz]

Originally posted by Aquillion:

Originally posted by Nebnii:

Inteligence would help you stay alive by providing you with better artifacts and crafting in general, i think that's what they went with.

Unfortuantely, it doesn't do this at all. Nothing about Intelligence allows you to build or find better items at all; it does nothing to improve your crafting whatsoever aside from making you better at identifying stuff and being a prerequisite to crafting skills.

The biggest problem with tinker 3 imo is that even if you put all the points and invest into it hard, you will never find the materials needed for it, or you better off just finding the item itself

This is also a problem, yes. High-level crafting ingredients are as rare as the items you build with them, if not rarer (Antimatter Cells and Phase Cannons in particular are far easier to find than the bits they're made out of, to the point where it makes sense to use them as your source for tier 8 bits - except that they're two of the main things you'd want to build, so if you have access to them then you don't need Tinker III at all!

Additionally to this, once you get a powered toolkit, even with a dumb characters your chance of failing becomes jack diddly, AND, even if you DO fail, it's like 4-10 drams to repair an item or try again, which is entirely affordable.

Tinker 3 should allow you to combine random components and see what comes out, much like cooking does. It should allow you do do this without a recipe, therefore making the cost of Tinker 3 at least somewhat worth it. Give me something to do without my hundreds of bits if I don't feel like spamming grenades lol.

[surplus_newt]

Aquillion has it; it's really that marginal skill points just aren't all that useful. They're like a "win more" thing as opposed to something that's going to make the difference between life and death. A lot of higher level Tinker recipes feel the same way; if you can reliably get the materials for them, they're not the thing that's keeping you alive.