From The EQMac Wiki

[edit] Geerloks and other Skill Adjusting Items

Your chance of success when making a tradeskill item is directly based off your skill. See the section below for the details. Increasing your skill raises your success rate, so it is advantageous to do so. You increase your skill in two ways:

• Practicing the skill so as to get skillups
• Equipping items that give you a skill increase while the item is equipped

Tinkerers can make devices you equip that will offer you a 5% skill increase to a single tradeskill. These are referred to as geerloks. To use it, you equip the proper geerlok in your primary hand while doing tradeskilling.

Let's say that your unadjusted skill is 100 and you equip a geerlok. Your adjusted skill is now 105 so you have a better 5% chance of succeeding on combines (see complete details below). At skill 200 with a geerlok you're at 210, so you have a 10% better chance of success.

EQTraders has a nice chart of the available devices here: http://www.eqtraders.com/articles/article_page.php?article=g178

Note that their information is for EQ-PC so we may not have every single item.

[edit] Success Rates

Success rates on a combine are calculated by these two formulae:

Success = Skill - 0.75*Trivial + 51.5 (rounded up, for Trivial>= 68)

Success = Skill - Trivial + 66 (for Trivial < 68)

These are as percentages. From this we use a minimum success rate of 5% and a maximum rate of 95%. Thus, you always have a chance to succeed even for a recipe far far higher than your skill level. But similarly, grandmasters can fail very easy recipes 5% of the time.

Your skill is your adjusted skill. If you have a geerlok (which adds 5% to your skill) equipped and your unadjusted skill (as reported in the Skills window for your character) is 200, then you have an adjusted skill of 210. Adjusted skills are capped at 252, so there's no advantage to skilling up past 241 assuming you'll use a geerlock or grandmaster trophy.

Let's use an example. Let's say that you're a skill 200 baker using a geerlock. Adjusted skill is 210. You want to make justice fruit pies with a trivial of 282. Plugging into the formula above:

210 - 0.75 * 282 + 51.5

We get an expected success rate of exactly 50%.

If you look at the formula you can see that your success rate increases by 1% for every skillup you get up to the max of 95%.

If you want to know when the optimal time is to make something (that is, when your success rate will be maxed at 95%) you can rewrite the formula.

Best Skill = 95 - 51.5 + 0.75 * Trivial

Plugging this in for the example above:

95 - 51.5 + 0.75 * 282 = 255

Because adjusted skills are capped at 252, you'll never achieve 95% success rates on Justice Fruit Pies.

Let's use another example: Leatherfoot Haversacks, the 10-slot, 100% weight reducing bags that Halflings can make. Trivial is 252. If your tailoring is 200 and you have a geerlock, your success rate is:

210 - 0.75 * 252 + 51.5 = 72.5%

(They probably round down.)

If you want to know when it's best to make them if you don't want to waste ingredients:

95 - 51.5 + 0.75 * 252 = 232.5

That's adjusted skill so we can divide by 1.05 due to the geerlok we're using, meaning don't make them until skill 221 if you can't abide failures. Of course, given what a pain it can be to get to 221, you may get a little impatient...

[edit] Efficient Skilling Up

Your chance for a skillup for most tradeskills is related to your int or your wis, whichever is higher. In addition, smithing can alternatively use your strength, fletching and poisonmaking on dex. Thus, when doing tradeskills, it is advantageous to make sure you max one of these as appropriate.

Added to that you have a 100% better chance of a skillup on a success than a failure. For that reason, you want to pick recipes that you have a high chance of success. Don't start baking by doing combines from PoP.

Thus, the sweet zone would be doing combines where your skill leaves you with a 95% success rate while of course still being below the trivial for the item. From the examples listed above in the Success Rates section, you could use Leatherfoot Haversacks for skillups once your skill is 221 (with a geerlok).

Of course, other factors come into play. You want to also consider the cost of ingredients. Leatherfoot haversacks have a particularly obnoxious list of ingredients in the recipe. You'll shell out 630 pp for platinum thread plus farm blue diamonds and a bunch of other stuff. You can flawless rockhopper hides for about 250pp in the bazaar (when available), so making those might be a lot cheaper.

So you need to do what makes sense for you. For me -- I can farm cash and spider silk a lot faster than I can farm flawless rockhopper hides. Thus, I make ceremonial solstice robes for tailoring skillups after 188. They cost me about 93 plat for a failure and 350 plat for a success (but I can sell the successes in the bazaar at a profit). This gives me more skillups per hour invested than if I farm flawless rockhopper hides, even though my success rate at skill 195 is a lot lower.

Thus, doing the most efficient route will be a combination of:

• doing recipes that you have a high success rate for
• doing recipes that yield better sellback prices (or sell to players readily)
• doing recipes for which the ingredients are cheap or easily obtained

In the tailoring example, I do not have a high success rate making the robes and the cost of combines is somewhat high. However, the robes sell at a slow but regular rate and I can obtain the cash and silk needed more efficiently than the other choices.

Your milage may vary.