tutanbriarpaw wrote:
Seems the hardest to make so far has been /con blue items, especially armor and weapons. THose things jsut don't want to get to pristine, even with me carefully timing the buffs.
You have to get extremely lucky to make a pristine before you get to level 10. At that point you get a new set of buffs that add durability, and the getting pristine percentage turns on it's head - it's almost impossible not to get it. The ones you have now only add progress, and one of them comes at the expense of durability.
When you get the new buffs, keep the old ones up so you can move progress when your duirability is good. This is my standard buffing pattern: You can tell when you have a new round when your bars move and the numbers float up over the crafting station. You can hit up to 3 buffs here and have all of them take effect. Then stop and wait for the next round. At this point I start out by hitting all 3 of the buffs for either progress or durability, depending on my condition. I start by using all progress and switch to durability when the last durability bar goes below 30 - 40%. If progress gets to the third bar and durability is over 50% on the last, I go all progress to sprint to finished.
The beginning of a new round is when you'll see an event possibly pop up. That's why it's good to wait for each new round to hit your buffs. You don't want to get a failure or miss a rare event because you spammed the wrong buff. Hit the matching buff first to react, and wait for it to poof grey before hitting anything else. If the reaction required the last buff you had been spamming in your pattern, you might not have time to get all three out. Seeing an event and reacting to it correctly is a good thing becasue it's supposed to guarantee you a good round. I say supposed to because it only works 95% of the time - possibly due to lag.
When I'm low on power I switch to using only the two buffs that use no power to let it come back, unless I'm in an emergency durability situation. As always, remove all power enhancing gear and do anything possible to improve power regen, like using good drink or grouping with a bard or enchanter.