Post by OT on May 13, 2018 16:02:08 GMT -5
In the spirit of theorycrafting (which I still enjoy even when I don't play), I thought I'd make the counterpart to the Best use of extended subguilds thread. Here's the best 0-karma characters thread, for all you rogue players who live off the proverbial grid.
I hated the extended subguilds when they were implemented. It's an added element of inequality between characters, and it took away something beautiful that Armageddon once had: stats aside, every character is created equal. Your human warrior could be as great as that max-karma player's human warrior if you played your cards right. Extended subguilds put an end to that, and have compelled everyone to care too much about karma. I don't think it's a coincidence that the blind sycophancy that has infested the playerbase did so around the time when staff truly made it impossible to be a 0-karma player without objective disadvantages. Ever since then, you're a distinctly second-rate player without it.
Nevertheless, some don't want to lick boots, and there are some character types you can make with 0 karma who don't miss out on too much. So, the first consideration is opportunity cost. Which guilds lose the least from not having an extended subguild? What's the best character you can make as a pariah (or just a new player) without karma? I'll talk about each class in no particular order.
Ranger
Ah, the Swiss army knife of Zalanthas. Many players love their rangers. They can become combat powerhouses, but they have so much more in their toolkit than warriors. This class is, in fact, quite well-suited to 0-karma play.
There's only one extended subguild that gives anything truly major when paired with ranger, and that's the protector. This subguild gives you master parry and master shield use. That's really strong. It puts a ranger quite close to a warrior in sheer combat prowess as rangers normally cap parry at advanced and shield use at... apprentice or something; too low to even be usable. Protector changes that, on top of letting you start with parry instead of having to spend like 20 days trying to even branch this crucial skill.
So why is this guild suitable for 0-karma play if there's an extended sub that benefits it so much? It's because of the perils of starting with parry. The combat code is highly nebulous, but there's wide consensus that your innate defense skill (which gives bonuses to every passive defensive action) does not increase properly while there's another defensive skill "in the way." In other words, if you have parry and are wielding a weapon (or have shield use and are holding a shield), your hidden defense skill does not improve properly.
So if you start with parry, you have to do a shitload of unarmed fighting in order to raise your defense properly. This is hugely impractical. While ideally the perfect ranger might have the protector sub and spent hundreds of hours brawling for skillgains, this just isn't practical. Make no mistake, doing so would yield potentially the strongest mundane character possible in the game, but it's just not feasible for any but the most devoted twink.
Furthermore, it's a matter of what the protector doesn't give. It gives you none of the active combat skills: disarm, bash and kick. Alright, you can pretty much ignore kick because it's the lesser of the three, but having the disarm and bash skills gives you a good degree of protection against disarm and bash attempts. This is very valuable to a ranger. The gladiator subguild gives journeyman in all three skills, which is enough to leave you reasonably well-protected. Ranger/gladitor is a great combo.
So the gladiator is a great addition to the ranger guild. There are extended subguilds that give the same skills, but they don't give much more of them. The aggressor/bruiser/etc. extended subs give journeyman disarm and bash as well, but you gain nothing from the advanced level that these subs give in their respective weapon skills. That's the meaning of a low opportunity cost. Only protector gives anything major, and it has its problems.
Beyond gladiator, there's one other basic subguild that pairs well with ranger: thief. Thief gives you city stealth, which is a big deal for rangers who want to be a bit roguish. Normally, rangers can't hide and sneak properly in the city, but they can with the right subguild. What would be the ideal extended sub for this? The rogue, since they also get journeyman pick--enough to break into very apartment in Allanak with a high-quality pick. But you can live without that. Does your ranger really need to pick locks? No. The thief subguild gives almost all the same benefits at no cost. This is a solid choice.
The city/wilderness distinction on stealth is a binary concept. You just get a flag based on your guild and subguild to determine whether or not you can do it in either environment. The thief subguild gives you full city stealth, with the crowd bonus. If you wanted to play something like a spice smuggler or a rinth crossbowman, this is a great choice. Any ranger who expects to do any PvP in the city should consider taking this subguild. On top of actual city play, there's all manner of places out there that are coded as non-wilderness. Want to hide in the desert elf outpost or something? You need city hide for that.
Warrior
The warrior is the bread and butter of Armageddon combat. Most of the extended subguilds don't give them much, but there's undeniably a couple that do. If you take rogue to get advanced sneak and hide which, with the crowd bonus (+25) lets you hide somewhat reliably in city streets. This is a really useful ability. Slipknife even gives master hide and sneak, although I don't find the advanced backstab to be too useful; and while the poisoning skill is nice enough, anyone with access to heramide or peraine surely knows somebody who can apply it to their weapons for them.
So what does this tell us? Don't go for a 0-karma stealth warrior. Thief only gives journeyman hide/sneak, which isn't enough to be worth using. While the con artist subguild gives advanced hide, it does not actually give warriors the crowd bonus for some reason. You will not enjoy the +25 to hide chance in city streets, so it isn't useful. As such, forget about the sneaky warrior if you're a 0-karma pariah.
Instead, we have to look at what else the warrior doesn't normally get. There's two things that stand out: climb, and high-level riding which lets you ride without a free hand. Warriors get neither on their own, and there are basic subguilds that help with that. These are two options for warriors that just about rival anything an advanced subguild gives.
Climb comes from the outlaw subguild. As an added bonus, it also gives advanced direction sense which lets you move through sandstorms with a pretty good degree of surety. They also get spearmaking to advanced, and if your weapon skill of choice is piercing, you may eventually branch into the special weapon skill of tridents. Advanced spearmaking lets you craft spider-fang tridents which means you don't have to contact Salarr to get a weapon for your special weapon skill. Why is this important? Because most of these orders have to go through staff, and when staff sees an order for a special weapon type, they'll check your skills. If you were a bad boy and grinded your skills up in some unsavory way, they may punish you.
Next up is ride. Several basic subs give this at a high enough level to ride without a free hand. A recent code update implies that riding with a weapon and shield has become easier, but if you want to dual-wield or use a two-handed weapon, you presumably still need a special subguild for this. If you intend to play the desert warrior, this bonus is as valuable as anything that an extended sub could give you. Do not underestimate the usefulness of this ability.
Here are the basic subs that give advanced ride: hunter, mercenary, nomad and caravan guide. We can already cross out caravan guide because it pretty much doesn't get anything else, so it's all about the other three.
While hunter seems at first glance to be distinctly inferior to the outdoorsman extended sub, outdoorsman does not in fact give ride. This means a warrior/outdoorsman must rely on riding gloves and spurs, and possibly a high agility score in order to ride properly. Hunter lets you do it without those requirments, and gives most (not all) of the benfits of outdoorsman. See, while outdoorsman is nice and all, many of its skills aren't that useful to a warrior. Advanced hide/sneak is okay in areas that give you the foliage bonus, but that's not everywhere, and you shouldn't need this too often. Skinning is pretty shrugworthy, so getting master skinning is whatever. Advanced scan is fairly useless, and they both get the same level of hunt. Outdoorsman gives advanced archery, but warriors get that natively. Outdoorsman does give advanced direction sense while hunter gives only journeyman, however, and journeyman is not reliable if you want to live around Red Storm.
Next is the mercenary. They also get advanced ride, but they only get the same journeyman direction sense as hunter and not much else. Unless you're irrationally interested in repairing armor or drinking a lot of liquor, there's no great advantage to the mercenary sub. They do get journeyman watch which is more than the warrior gets by default. On a guild without scan, this can be marginally useful, but it's not that big of a deal.
Then we get to nomad. They get advanced ride and direction sense; already they have the two main things that you want in a traveling warrior. They also get the advanced spearmaking that lets you make your own tridents if you intend to branch that skill without catching staff's attention. Journeyman haggle is whatever--doesn't hurt, doesn't matter. While bendune and the tribal accent carry no coded advantages, they're nice roleplaying props and give you an excuse to be this roaming warrior. I recommend the nomad subguild to those so inclined.
So what do you miss out on by taking a basic riding subguild? There's the grebber extended sub, which gives master hunt and foraging, neither of which is that big of a deal. It gives advanced ride and direction sense, same as nomad, and journeyman climb. So the opportunity cost of playing a 0-karma roaming warrior is that you have to choose between adv ride/dsense and climb, while an extended sub gives both. Not a huge cost. Most climbing tasks can be accomplished with a rope and some climbing gloves or ankle spikes.
Assassin
The assassin is the coolest guild in the game. I don't give a fuck. It's the most unique and focused type of character you can play. Nobody else gets master backstab, and that's what this guild is all about. But what complements it best? There's two main factors to consider: disarm/bash, and wilderness stealth.
For disarm and bash, you go gladiator, same as the ranger. Both of these skills are a big threat to the guilds that don't get them, and especially the assassin. The main counter to assassins is warriors who, after being backstabbed, have time to disarm you twice and then bash you. If you have none of these skills, a long-lived warrior will likely succeed them all and destroy you. So if intend to play a city-bound assassin - which is frankly the only rational chouce - the gladiator sub is fantastic. There's no extended sub that gives anything noteworthy here, because while protector would grant you master parry and shield use, it's not as though an assassin really needs to rely on these. Unlike the ranger, you branch parry semi-easily and have no real reason to use a shield.
The second consideration is wilderness stealth. This is if, for some reason, you chose to play a Kuraci assassin or something like that. I don't recommend it, but there's always the distant possibility that you want to prey on desert elves or defilers or whatever. Anyway, outlaw is the only basic sub that gives wilderness stealth to the assassin. It's not bad, it's not great, and it's only meant for those who specifically intend to travel the world with their assassin character. It's unwise, but it has its situational merit.
Pickpocket
This is probably the one guild that suffers the least from having no karma. Anyone can be the best thief in the world. There's no extended subguild that gives anything major here. Technically you could go with the rogue sub and get your journeyman pick, which lets you pick any apartment door in the game, but are you really trying to be that much of a criminal? Surely master steal and unlatch is enough. Rogue doesn't get pickmaking anyway, so in order to have a steady supply of picks, you'd have to know someone who can make them--and that person is either an assassin or burglar who can pick those doors himself, so if you ever need a door opened, you'd know who to talk to anyway. The scarce amount of picks available from black market shops (of which there are so few as to barely warrant mention) is not enough to let you be an apartment infiltrator without connections to an actual pickmaking PC.
In any case, there are two basic subs that give something of note to the pickpocket: outlaw for wilderness stealth and con artist for advanced watch.
Now, the outlaw's wilderness stealth doesn't mean you should play a travelling pickpocket. That makes no sense at all. Please don't do that. However, there may be the occasional weirdly-flagged room here and there that is marked as wilderness. This could be a garden in a noble estate that you're robbing, and lacking wilderness stealth could cause your hide to break when sneaking through such a room. Or maybe you're shadowing someone who's going out to pick bimbal leaves just outside town. Either way, since the opportunity cost for pickpockets is so low, wilderness stealth is a genuine consideration even if you're city-bound.
The other option is advanced watch. It comes from con artist, which otherwise gives you nothing except for the minute benefit of starting with hide instead of having to branch it from sneak. Pay no mind to that, sneak is so easy to raise. However, all guilds natively cap their watch skill at a miserable apprentice level. Getting advanced watch is a big thing. Whenever someone uses a "sneaky" action, your chance to notice is dependent on your level in that skill. This includes watch, and watch is the bane of pickpockets. This means that if you have advanced watch, you have a very good chance to notice when someone starts watching you. This is a legitimate asset, and it's worth it.
Burglar
Assuming you're not some idiot trying to play a burglar as an actual combat character, there's frankly no subguild that gives anything significant to this guild. You could go for wilderness stealth if for some bizarre reason you're trying to pick one of the three locked doors that exist outside of cities. This is not a guild that gets anything noteworth from a basic subguild. You could take con artist to get advanced watch for the same reason pickpockets would, but burglars don't worry so much about being watched because they don't rely on stealing from an actual person. So, subguild scarcely matters.
Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of extended subguilds is pretty big because the magicker subs are so powerful for a burglar. The ability to pick any door means you could have chosen a magick sub with a powerful damage spell and been a legitimate killer. Instead, the mundane burglar is no such thing and should not be played as such. This makes the burglar a guild that does not benefit much from 0-karma subguild and misses out on noteworthy special powers from having no extended subguild. Do not recommend.
Merchant
Who gives a flying fuck? Crafting isn't powerful. Basic merchant gets access to all crafting skills, doesn't do combat, and has no noteworthy use of stealth. I guess if you're really worried about your strictly non-combat character getting PKed you could take rogue or slipknife for the dependable street-level hide, but are you really gonna go there? Whatever. If you're particularly interested in a specific type of crafting that base merchant doesn't get from the start, pick a sub that gets it. You can make like 10k sid in a RL week if you make a merchant/tailor in Red Storm. That's about as much as anything matters for this guild.
I hated the extended subguilds when they were implemented. It's an added element of inequality between characters, and it took away something beautiful that Armageddon once had: stats aside, every character is created equal. Your human warrior could be as great as that max-karma player's human warrior if you played your cards right. Extended subguilds put an end to that, and have compelled everyone to care too much about karma. I don't think it's a coincidence that the blind sycophancy that has infested the playerbase did so around the time when staff truly made it impossible to be a 0-karma player without objective disadvantages. Ever since then, you're a distinctly second-rate player without it.
Nevertheless, some don't want to lick boots, and there are some character types you can make with 0 karma who don't miss out on too much. So, the first consideration is opportunity cost. Which guilds lose the least from not having an extended subguild? What's the best character you can make as a pariah (or just a new player) without karma? I'll talk about each class in no particular order.
Ranger
Ah, the Swiss army knife of Zalanthas. Many players love their rangers. They can become combat powerhouses, but they have so much more in their toolkit than warriors. This class is, in fact, quite well-suited to 0-karma play.
There's only one extended subguild that gives anything truly major when paired with ranger, and that's the protector. This subguild gives you master parry and master shield use. That's really strong. It puts a ranger quite close to a warrior in sheer combat prowess as rangers normally cap parry at advanced and shield use at... apprentice or something; too low to even be usable. Protector changes that, on top of letting you start with parry instead of having to spend like 20 days trying to even branch this crucial skill.
So why is this guild suitable for 0-karma play if there's an extended sub that benefits it so much? It's because of the perils of starting with parry. The combat code is highly nebulous, but there's wide consensus that your innate defense skill (which gives bonuses to every passive defensive action) does not increase properly while there's another defensive skill "in the way." In other words, if you have parry and are wielding a weapon (or have shield use and are holding a shield), your hidden defense skill does not improve properly.
So if you start with parry, you have to do a shitload of unarmed fighting in order to raise your defense properly. This is hugely impractical. While ideally the perfect ranger might have the protector sub and spent hundreds of hours brawling for skillgains, this just isn't practical. Make no mistake, doing so would yield potentially the strongest mundane character possible in the game, but it's just not feasible for any but the most devoted twink.
Furthermore, it's a matter of what the protector doesn't give. It gives you none of the active combat skills: disarm, bash and kick. Alright, you can pretty much ignore kick because it's the lesser of the three, but having the disarm and bash skills gives you a good degree of protection against disarm and bash attempts. This is very valuable to a ranger. The gladiator subguild gives journeyman in all three skills, which is enough to leave you reasonably well-protected. Ranger/gladitor is a great combo.
So the gladiator is a great addition to the ranger guild. There are extended subguilds that give the same skills, but they don't give much more of them. The aggressor/bruiser/etc. extended subs give journeyman disarm and bash as well, but you gain nothing from the advanced level that these subs give in their respective weapon skills. That's the meaning of a low opportunity cost. Only protector gives anything major, and it has its problems.
Beyond gladiator, there's one other basic subguild that pairs well with ranger: thief. Thief gives you city stealth, which is a big deal for rangers who want to be a bit roguish. Normally, rangers can't hide and sneak properly in the city, but they can with the right subguild. What would be the ideal extended sub for this? The rogue, since they also get journeyman pick--enough to break into very apartment in Allanak with a high-quality pick. But you can live without that. Does your ranger really need to pick locks? No. The thief subguild gives almost all the same benefits at no cost. This is a solid choice.
The city/wilderness distinction on stealth is a binary concept. You just get a flag based on your guild and subguild to determine whether or not you can do it in either environment. The thief subguild gives you full city stealth, with the crowd bonus. If you wanted to play something like a spice smuggler or a rinth crossbowman, this is a great choice. Any ranger who expects to do any PvP in the city should consider taking this subguild. On top of actual city play, there's all manner of places out there that are coded as non-wilderness. Want to hide in the desert elf outpost or something? You need city hide for that.
Warrior
The warrior is the bread and butter of Armageddon combat. Most of the extended subguilds don't give them much, but there's undeniably a couple that do. If you take rogue to get advanced sneak and hide which, with the crowd bonus (+25) lets you hide somewhat reliably in city streets. This is a really useful ability. Slipknife even gives master hide and sneak, although I don't find the advanced backstab to be too useful; and while the poisoning skill is nice enough, anyone with access to heramide or peraine surely knows somebody who can apply it to their weapons for them.
So what does this tell us? Don't go for a 0-karma stealth warrior. Thief only gives journeyman hide/sneak, which isn't enough to be worth using. While the con artist subguild gives advanced hide, it does not actually give warriors the crowd bonus for some reason. You will not enjoy the +25 to hide chance in city streets, so it isn't useful. As such, forget about the sneaky warrior if you're a 0-karma pariah.
Instead, we have to look at what else the warrior doesn't normally get. There's two things that stand out: climb, and high-level riding which lets you ride without a free hand. Warriors get neither on their own, and there are basic subguilds that help with that. These are two options for warriors that just about rival anything an advanced subguild gives.
Climb comes from the outlaw subguild. As an added bonus, it also gives advanced direction sense which lets you move through sandstorms with a pretty good degree of surety. They also get spearmaking to advanced, and if your weapon skill of choice is piercing, you may eventually branch into the special weapon skill of tridents. Advanced spearmaking lets you craft spider-fang tridents which means you don't have to contact Salarr to get a weapon for your special weapon skill. Why is this important? Because most of these orders have to go through staff, and when staff sees an order for a special weapon type, they'll check your skills. If you were a bad boy and grinded your skills up in some unsavory way, they may punish you.
Next up is ride. Several basic subs give this at a high enough level to ride without a free hand. A recent code update implies that riding with a weapon and shield has become easier, but if you want to dual-wield or use a two-handed weapon, you presumably still need a special subguild for this. If you intend to play the desert warrior, this bonus is as valuable as anything that an extended sub could give you. Do not underestimate the usefulness of this ability.
Here are the basic subs that give advanced ride: hunter, mercenary, nomad and caravan guide. We can already cross out caravan guide because it pretty much doesn't get anything else, so it's all about the other three.
While hunter seems at first glance to be distinctly inferior to the outdoorsman extended sub, outdoorsman does not in fact give ride. This means a warrior/outdoorsman must rely on riding gloves and spurs, and possibly a high agility score in order to ride properly. Hunter lets you do it without those requirments, and gives most (not all) of the benfits of outdoorsman. See, while outdoorsman is nice and all, many of its skills aren't that useful to a warrior. Advanced hide/sneak is okay in areas that give you the foliage bonus, but that's not everywhere, and you shouldn't need this too often. Skinning is pretty shrugworthy, so getting master skinning is whatever. Advanced scan is fairly useless, and they both get the same level of hunt. Outdoorsman gives advanced archery, but warriors get that natively. Outdoorsman does give advanced direction sense while hunter gives only journeyman, however, and journeyman is not reliable if you want to live around Red Storm.
Next is the mercenary. They also get advanced ride, but they only get the same journeyman direction sense as hunter and not much else. Unless you're irrationally interested in repairing armor or drinking a lot of liquor, there's no great advantage to the mercenary sub. They do get journeyman watch which is more than the warrior gets by default. On a guild without scan, this can be marginally useful, but it's not that big of a deal.
Then we get to nomad. They get advanced ride and direction sense; already they have the two main things that you want in a traveling warrior. They also get the advanced spearmaking that lets you make your own tridents if you intend to branch that skill without catching staff's attention. Journeyman haggle is whatever--doesn't hurt, doesn't matter. While bendune and the tribal accent carry no coded advantages, they're nice roleplaying props and give you an excuse to be this roaming warrior. I recommend the nomad subguild to those so inclined.
So what do you miss out on by taking a basic riding subguild? There's the grebber extended sub, which gives master hunt and foraging, neither of which is that big of a deal. It gives advanced ride and direction sense, same as nomad, and journeyman climb. So the opportunity cost of playing a 0-karma roaming warrior is that you have to choose between adv ride/dsense and climb, while an extended sub gives both. Not a huge cost. Most climbing tasks can be accomplished with a rope and some climbing gloves or ankle spikes.
Assassin
The assassin is the coolest guild in the game. I don't give a fuck. It's the most unique and focused type of character you can play. Nobody else gets master backstab, and that's what this guild is all about. But what complements it best? There's two main factors to consider: disarm/bash, and wilderness stealth.
For disarm and bash, you go gladiator, same as the ranger. Both of these skills are a big threat to the guilds that don't get them, and especially the assassin. The main counter to assassins is warriors who, after being backstabbed, have time to disarm you twice and then bash you. If you have none of these skills, a long-lived warrior will likely succeed them all and destroy you. So if intend to play a city-bound assassin - which is frankly the only rational chouce - the gladiator sub is fantastic. There's no extended sub that gives anything noteworthy here, because while protector would grant you master parry and shield use, it's not as though an assassin really needs to rely on these. Unlike the ranger, you branch parry semi-easily and have no real reason to use a shield.
The second consideration is wilderness stealth. This is if, for some reason, you chose to play a Kuraci assassin or something like that. I don't recommend it, but there's always the distant possibility that you want to prey on desert elves or defilers or whatever. Anyway, outlaw is the only basic sub that gives wilderness stealth to the assassin. It's not bad, it's not great, and it's only meant for those who specifically intend to travel the world with their assassin character. It's unwise, but it has its situational merit.
Pickpocket
This is probably the one guild that suffers the least from having no karma. Anyone can be the best thief in the world. There's no extended subguild that gives anything major here. Technically you could go with the rogue sub and get your journeyman pick, which lets you pick any apartment door in the game, but are you really trying to be that much of a criminal? Surely master steal and unlatch is enough. Rogue doesn't get pickmaking anyway, so in order to have a steady supply of picks, you'd have to know someone who can make them--and that person is either an assassin or burglar who can pick those doors himself, so if you ever need a door opened, you'd know who to talk to anyway. The scarce amount of picks available from black market shops (of which there are so few as to barely warrant mention) is not enough to let you be an apartment infiltrator without connections to an actual pickmaking PC.
In any case, there are two basic subs that give something of note to the pickpocket: outlaw for wilderness stealth and con artist for advanced watch.
Now, the outlaw's wilderness stealth doesn't mean you should play a travelling pickpocket. That makes no sense at all. Please don't do that. However, there may be the occasional weirdly-flagged room here and there that is marked as wilderness. This could be a garden in a noble estate that you're robbing, and lacking wilderness stealth could cause your hide to break when sneaking through such a room. Or maybe you're shadowing someone who's going out to pick bimbal leaves just outside town. Either way, since the opportunity cost for pickpockets is so low, wilderness stealth is a genuine consideration even if you're city-bound.
The other option is advanced watch. It comes from con artist, which otherwise gives you nothing except for the minute benefit of starting with hide instead of having to branch it from sneak. Pay no mind to that, sneak is so easy to raise. However, all guilds natively cap their watch skill at a miserable apprentice level. Getting advanced watch is a big thing. Whenever someone uses a "sneaky" action, your chance to notice is dependent on your level in that skill. This includes watch, and watch is the bane of pickpockets. This means that if you have advanced watch, you have a very good chance to notice when someone starts watching you. This is a legitimate asset, and it's worth it.
Burglar
Assuming you're not some idiot trying to play a burglar as an actual combat character, there's frankly no subguild that gives anything significant to this guild. You could go for wilderness stealth if for some bizarre reason you're trying to pick one of the three locked doors that exist outside of cities. This is not a guild that gets anything noteworth from a basic subguild. You could take con artist to get advanced watch for the same reason pickpockets would, but burglars don't worry so much about being watched because they don't rely on stealing from an actual person. So, subguild scarcely matters.
Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of extended subguilds is pretty big because the magicker subs are so powerful for a burglar. The ability to pick any door means you could have chosen a magick sub with a powerful damage spell and been a legitimate killer. Instead, the mundane burglar is no such thing and should not be played as such. This makes the burglar a guild that does not benefit much from 0-karma subguild and misses out on noteworthy special powers from having no extended subguild. Do not recommend.
Merchant
Who gives a flying fuck? Crafting isn't powerful. Basic merchant gets access to all crafting skills, doesn't do combat, and has no noteworthy use of stealth. I guess if you're really worried about your strictly non-combat character getting PKed you could take rogue or slipknife for the dependable street-level hide, but are you really gonna go there? Whatever. If you're particularly interested in a specific type of crafting that base merchant doesn't get from the start, pick a sub that gets it. You can make like 10k sid in a RL week if you make a merchant/tailor in Red Storm. That's about as much as anything matters for this guild.
