Thread: Armourer = no way to farm flax fibers?

I have been out of the game for a very long time. Upon my return I have discovered that farming the materials needed for a critical success for my tailor are unobtainable as an armourer. Am I confused, or, is the only way for my armourer, who is not a forester, able to gather Flax Fibers is by killing humanoid mobs hoping for the rare drop? This seems like a ridiculous oversight if this is truly the case. It seems like hide dropping mobs should be dropping tailor crit materilas, not wood!!! Any thoughts?

Originally Posted by zbenz

I have been out of the game for a very long time. Upon my return I have discovered that farming the materials needed for a critical success for my tailor are unobtainable as an armourer. Am I confused, or, is the only way for my armourer, who is not a forester, able to gather Flax Fibers is by killing humanoid mobs hoping for the rare drop? This seems like a ridiculous oversight if this is truly the case. It seems like hide dropping mobs should be dropping tailor crit materilas, not wood!!! Any thoughts?

It's been brought up in one form or another since the change to these crit items; I don't believe there's been ANY dev response.

I just rolled a new Armourer 10 days ago and have come out with a stack (or more) of Flax Fiber for each Tier throughout the normal course of adventuring. They may have just come from mob drops, but they certainly are more plentiful than gathering them from Wood Nodes. EDIT: Let me repeat "You get *FAR* more Flax Fibers from normal adventuring than a Forester does tapping Wood Nodes!"

I suspect the Devs snuck in a change in the last Update that increased the Drop Rate for them to fix their scarcity.

So, all an Armourer needs to farm Flax Fibers is to find the nearest humanoid mob and roll them for what is in their pocketsess. Eventually you'll find plenty of your precioussss Flax Fibersss. EDIT: As with many things, you'll find more Flax Fibers on Goblins and Orcs than you will any other type of mob...but maybe that's also because both types of mobs are ubiquitous in Middle-Earth and you can't go 50 yards without running into one or the other.

Originally Posted by TsarithArcher

I just rolled a new Armourer 10 days ago and have come out with a stack (or more) of Flax Fiber for each Tier throughout the normal course of adventuring. They may have just come from mob drops, but they certainly are more plentiful than gathering them from Wood Nodes. EDIT: Let me repeat "You get *FAR* more Flax Fibers from normal adventuring than a Forester does tapping Wood Nodes!"

I suspect the Devs snuck in a change in the last Update that increased the Drop Rate for them to fix their scarcity.

So, all an Armourer needs to farm Flax Fibers is to find the nearest humanoid mob and roll them for what is in their pocketsess. Eventually you'll find plenty of your precioussss Flax Fibersss. EDIT: As with many things, you'll find more Flax Fibers on Goblins and Orcs than you will any other type of mob...but maybe that's also because both types of mobs are ubiquitous in Middle-Earth and you can't go 50 yards without running into one or the other.

We just started a new kin on Vilya a few weeks ago and, by far, the rarest of all our crit components is flax. We're especially sensitive to this shortage because we're all in need of new crit armour as we level up (slowly because we are playing permadeath ). At least for the first three tiers, we have been almost relying solely on our explorers to provide flax to our tailors. Humanoids are dropping it, but not nearly as often as we're finding it in wood nodes.

Hopefully this balances out in the higher tiers.

Originally Posted by TsarithArcher

I just rolled a new Armourer 10 days ago and have come out with a stack (or more) of Flax Fiber for each Tier throughout the normal course of adventuring. They may have just come from mob drops, but they certainly are more plentiful than gathering them from Wood Nodes. EDIT: Let me repeat "You get *FAR* more Flax Fibers from normal adventuring than a Forester does tapping Wood Nodes!"

I suspect the Devs snuck in a change in the last Update that increased the Drop Rate for them to fix their scarcity.

So, all an Armourer needs to farm Flax Fibers is to find the nearest humanoid mob and roll them for what is in their pocketsess. Eventually you'll find plenty of your precioussss Flax Fibersss. EDIT: As with many things, you'll find more Flax Fibers on Goblins and Orcs than you will any other type of mob...but maybe that's also because both types of mobs are ubiquitous in Middle-Earth and you can't go 50 yards without running into one or the other.

L18 RK that's done these humanoid deeds (IIRC, 90 kills per completion) in the last week (actually, 90% of these was this past weekend).
Goblins in Ered Luin
Dwarfs in Ered Luin
Goblins in Shire
Bandits in Shire

360 Kills, minimum

I have a total of 10 T1 fibers, 2 T2 fibers. This also includes any thing I may have found (i know of 1 for sure, but not really something I was watching) farming wood (he's an explorer and has farmed 200+ of Rowan, 100+ of ash, and a handful of Yew (when I did the T2 tailor quest lol)).


I'm not really sure what that says lol.

Edit: Another interesting tidbit: after running 7 new chars to the intro (yea.. didn't skip any lol) I also noticed that I did not get any crafting items at all. Of course, this could be simply because non of the humanoids (5 chars in Ered Luin fighting goblins, 2 in Archet fighting humans) were above L10...

If I recall correctly, just after the new crit items were introduced, someone ran the numbers for farming flax vs farming hide. What it amounted to was that your time was much better spent farming a mountain of hide and brute-forcing your crits (using only tools and scrolls). If you have flax, sure, use it, but if you must have crits and you don't have flax, just keep assembling until you get what you want.

Found it:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=280560

Originally Posted by MCorey

If I recall correctly, just after the new crit items were introduced, someone ran the numbers for farming flax vs farming hide. What it amounted to was that your time was much better spent farming a mountain of hide and brute-forcing your crits (using only tools and scrolls). If you have flax, sure, use it, but if you must have crits and you don't have flax, just keep assembling until you get what you want.

Found it:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=280560

LOL, that actually coincides with one of my "let me try this game again" periods, and I did end up just bulling through some tailoring crafts for my baby RK and warden. It seems I'll be doing something similar this time around

Originally Posted by MCorey

If I recall correctly, just after the new crit items were introduced, someone ran the numbers for farming flax vs farming hide. What it amounted to was that your time was much better spent farming a mountain of hide and brute-forcing your crits (using only tools and scrolls). If you have flax, sure, use it, but if you must have crits and you don't have flax, just keep assembling until you get what you want.

Found it:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=280560

But that costs money for threads or cloth. Brute-forcing the 5-10% crit chance while paying for cotton or whatever might not come out cheaper than buying flax on the AH. Also costs money on both the foresting tools and the tailor tools, and obviously you use expensive tailor tools here, and those have high repair cost.

I ran my forester around looking at flax and yes it is a very rare drop. Might be more efficient to kill two-legged mobs as it drops other nice stuff.

Originally Posted by MCorey

If I recall correctly, just after the new crit items were introduced, someone ran the numbers for farming flax vs farming hide. What it amounted to was that your time was much better spent farming a mountain of hide and brute-forcing your crits (using only tools and scrolls). If you have flax, sure, use it, but if you must have crits and you don't have flax, just keep assembling until you get what you want.

Found it:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=280560

I'm not sure when, but they seem to have drastically increased the drop rate of crit items on resource nodes since that post. I normally hang on to all my crit items for crafting and kin (probably now have at least 50+ if not 100+ for every craft at every level).

With the last character I ran through the North Downs for a few hours questing, I looted at least 20-30+ each of woodworking and Tailoring. Contrasting that to the 3-5 scholar crit items, it definitely is much easier to grab resource nodes.

Isn't there a way to get it from skirmishing? I don't have a use for the stuff myself so I never bothered to look if it's among the stuff you can buy with skirmish pts, but i'm guessing it's there.

You can barter for them at a Skirmish vendor, I believe the craft vendor. I've gotten several that way.

I watch the auctions very closely and check all flax specifically whenever I log on; prices on my server haven't changed since SoM was released and craft crit items introduced into the skirmish vendors (crafting vendor, yes). Paying 100s-ish for flax (of any tier) is a bit much, so I also get my flax from the skirmish vendor if there's nothing reasonable on auction. I don't know if this means that the combination of availability and demand are still off-kilter or what--AFAIK, other crafting crit items are still far cheaper on the market than flax.