Hall Resource requirement reduction

[Shur]

well, teh recent resource requirement reduction was awesome, except for the fact that it excluded halls. yes, i know halls are supposed to be long projects, but good *** they take forever. been building a T2 hall, have been for over a month, and even with my mate helping me dig resources it'll probably take another 3 weeks to finish at the present rate of progress. and that's -after- you factor in the novians i got from tearing out my T1 hall to upgrade it! you know, it really blows to spend an hour digging for a one-point-fracking-two percent increase in progress on a room! when i started on the hall i was having a great time lairshaping with someone i care about, now that i am ~75% done with it, i just wish it were finished so i could move on to something else, and have for the past two weeks (IE, when it reached 60%), all the fun has gone out of it and it feels like work now....

[CallakDW]

There are several aspects IMO to dragon laircrafting that need to be taken into consideration. First, it takes 5 classes to build a biped hall, it takes only 1 to build a dragon hall. Now I'm not trying to get back into a dragon vs biped thing that I've seen so many times before, that is not my intention, but here's the thing. Because biped structures require so many different construction skills, you usually require groups of players working on them, which makes them seem to go up faster. Us dragons are usually left to our own lone wolf devices to build our lairs, unless, of course you have other neborly dragons helping out. The problem is, they are usually busy working on their own lair too, and who wants to take time on someone else's if you don't have your own finished? It's just in the mechanics of being a dragon. I love that they reduced the resource requirements, but I think if they reduce them any more, they may loose the balance between dragon structures and biped structure building that I think they are trying to maintane, and someone is going to complain.

[Shian]

Right, but it dosen't take a group of bipeds as long as it does for the lonewolf dragon to build it. Even if you count a mate and a hatchling that can do the T1-2 work, it is still going to take a few months....

Edit: Is there a dragon here that can sufficiently say thier lair is finished? If so, how many years of playtime do you have?

[Zexoin]

Dorrin has finished is lair a while ago. In January if I remember well. And he has T6 library(ies?) and a 120x120x144 lair.

Edit : oh and he finished it before the ressource requirment was lowered.

[CallakDW]

Right, but it dosen't take a group of bipeds as long as it does for the lonewolf dragon to build it. Even if you count a mate and a hatchling that can do the T1-2 work, it is still going to take a few months....

But that's exactly what I'm saying? You HAVE to have several bipeds working on plots and thus it WILL go faster. In most cases, even in your case, you have a much smaller number of dragons working on a single lair. It's going to go slower, even if it's comperable to a biped plot in needed materials.

[Kerech]

I've built 3 T2 halls in my dragon's lairshaping life. The first one took forever, simply because I didn't work efficiently, and I wasn't optimal on the resources I was working. The 2nd one went much faster because I learned to work more efficiently.

The last one was a guild mate's lair I helped build and it went really well, the hall was completed in just a few days with just the two of us working on it, and this included *long* transport times taking materials out to Drakul.

My advice to anyone who is serious about lairshaping (take it for what it's worth - most of it was passed down to me by more experienced dragons):

Get to adulthood. Being able to fly really makes a difference. I tried lairshaping as a hatchling, and while it is certainly possible, the power of flight makes it much, much easier.

Level crafting up to the point where you are optimal on whatever base materials you are working with. If you're 4:1 on slate bricks or iron bars, it's going to take twice as long to do something as if you're 2:1. And with the insane amount of materials needed to build a hall, this makes a real difference.

Make as much as you can in the field and only transport finished materials. I see so many people dragging disks of raw ore halfway across the world to process it. At higher levels, this may be necessary, but at T1/T2 you can usually make your lairshaping finished items right in the field. The less trips you have to make to haul "stuff" the quicker the project will go.

Increase your carrying capacity as much as possible. Always make sure you have your Dimensional Pocket quests up to date (every 10th level). Make sure you are using the highest level cargo disk/backpack you can. The more you carry, the less trips you make. If you take my first piece of advice and level crafting up (I took it to 100), you can use a much higher level disk which really helps speed things up.

If your lair is in a remote location, it makes things more difficult (like Trandalar, Drakul, etc.), but there are things you can do to help. First, if there is a vault anywhere near your lair, you can use this to your advantage. Clean out your vault. Dump all the level 1 comps and forms you are holding 'just in case' and use your vault to haul stuff. Make sure you do the vault upgrade quests that you can do at your level so you have the maximum space available. Make finished materials out in the field, dump them in your vault, then recall/port/run to your lair and get them from the vault there - saves a long disk drag.

Also, if you build a T1/T2 hall right off the bat, you can bind in your lair. If there's a vault nearby this can help a lot, but it's not practical if you don't have a portal nearby to get back out quickly.

I'm sure there's more, but that'll help. No matter what you do, making hundreds of flowstones/maelstones is not going to be pleasant, but make the job as easy on yourself as you can.

[Shur]

I've built 3 T2 halls in my dragon's lairshaping life. The first one took forever, simply because I didn't work efficiently, and I wasn't optimal on the resources I was working. The 2nd one went much faster because I learned to work more efficiently.

The last one was a guild mate's lair I helped build and it went really well, the hall was completed in just a few days with just the two of us working on it, and this included *long* transport times taking materials out to Drakul.

My advice to anyone who is serious about lairshaping (take it for what it's worth - most of it was passed down to me by more experienced dragons):

Get to adulthood. Being able to fly really makes a difference. I tried lairshaping as a hatchling, and while it is certainly possible, the power of flight makes it much, much easier.

Level crafting up to the point where you are optimal on whatever base materials you are working with. If you're 4:1 on slate bricks or iron bars, it's going to take twice as long to do something as if you're 2:1. And with the insane amount of materials needed to build a hall, this makes a real difference.

Make as much as you can in the field and only transport finished materials. I see so many people dragging disks of raw ore halfway across the world to process it. At higher levels, this may be necessary, but at T1/T2 you can usually make your lairshaping finished items right in the field. The less trips you have to make to haul "stuff" the quicker the project will go.

Increase your carrying capacity as much as possible. Always make sure you have your Dimensional Pocket quests up to date (every 10th level). Make sure you are using the highest level cargo disk/backpack you can. The more you carry, the less trips you make. If you take my first piece of advice and level crafting up (I took it to 100), you can use a much higher level disk which really helps speed things up.

If your lair is in a remote location, it makes things more difficult (like Trandalar, Drakul, etc.), but there are things you can do to help. First, if there is a vault anywhere near your lair, you can use this to your advantage. Clean out your vault. Dump all the level 1 comps and forms you are holding 'just in case' and use your vault to haul stuff. Make sure you do the vault upgrade quests that you can do at your level so you have the maximum space available. Make finished materials out in the field, dump them in your vault, then recall/port/run to your lair and get them from the vault there - saves a long disk drag.

Also, if you build a T1/T2 hall right off the bat, you can bind in your lair. If there's a vault nearby this can help a lot, but it's not practical if you don't have a portal nearby to get back out quickly.

I'm sure there's more, but that'll help. No matter what you do, making hundreds of flowstones/maelstones is not going to be pleasant, but make the job as easy on yourself as you can.

O.O two days? you must've worked around the clock to do it, or the lair you did it on has all the resources right beside it....

anyhow, i am at t3 optimal (LS) and t4 opt (craft), so effeciency of resources is not an issue. I process as many resources in the field as possible, when i fill a disk i bring them to a guild-owned lair and dump 'em in a silo, then i assemble the final mats, dump them in my vault, and recall to my lair (it's in Soklifak on Drakul, faaarrr too long a flight for a disk, and since the outbound portal is up now, this way is faster) to apply them. my mate is still 3:1 on t2 resources, so she gathers the simpler half of the complex resources while i do the complex half (IE: she does metal bars while i do cast stones, then i make flowstones). but it is still -painfully- slow progress. i average between an hour and an hour and a half for a full load of lair resources (Full vault+full inv, yes i have vault VII and a marble pack and dim pocket maxed) and that full load gets about 1.2 percent increase on the hall. If you know of a t2 field with metal/stone/essence and machines/storage that is the only thing i can think of that would speed things up, but even then not by much, i only spend about 10 minutes total running for each full load, most of the time is sucked up just -digging- when you need fourteen -thousand- raw slate, it just takes forever..... just making things like cast stones 2 essence and 1 brick instead of 2 ess and 2 brick would greatly improve the strain, without making it "easy"