User:Zosymandias/HowToTS

To increase your fletching skill to the point where you can make some of the nice bows shown above, you must make lots and lots and lots of arrows. If the arrow you are making has a higher complexity rating than your current skill, you have a chance of increasing your fletching skill. Note that you don’t necessarily have to be successful in a particular attempt in order to gain a skill level.

A couple of tips will help:

1. The game will use the higher of your INTELLIGENCE or WISDOM to determine the chance for increasing your fletching skill on any given combine attempt. So spend some money and buy the necessary jewelry to buff up your INT or WIS rating.

1. For a long time, people believed that a higher WISDOM value would give you a better chance at having a successful combine attempt. However, this does not seem to be true, and certainly wasn't one of the items listed when Verant recently (April 2000) posted information clarifying the effects of many statistics in the game.

1. When you get to a higher level of fletching and the arrows you are making are expensive, a higher CHARISMA value will limit the economic damage to your bank account. I’ve even heard that some players can buff their CHA values up to the point where they actually make money making the more expensive arrows and selling them back to the merchant.

1. Use Ctrl-Click to select and move 1 component at a time into your fletch kit. This tip alone will save you vast amounts of aggravation.

1. This particular tip is arguably the most useful one in this list, so let me say that once again: USE CTRL-CLICK TO SELECT AND MOVE ARROW COMPONENTS INTO THE FLETCHING KIT!

1. Use Shift-Click to purchase components from the vendor in stack of 20, rather than singly.

1. Do your fletching in a zone without too much lag. It drives me crazy to do it in East Commons, for example, while it’s usually pretty speedy in Surefall Glade.

The complexity of the arrow in question is driven from the complexity of the most complex component. That means that when fletching for skill, you should be using the single component which will yield an arrow with a complexity which exceeds your fletching skill, and the cheapest things available for the other 3 components. In general the complexity value of the components increases in direct relation to their individual costs, although there is an exception or two at the upper end of the pricing scale. The trivial values for the individual components are shown below, in order of increasing cost.

In general when fletching for skill, you would like to use the single component necessary to create an arrow with sufficient complexity to exceed your own fletching skill, and the cheapest components everywhere else. However, this will usually lead to an arrow with such poor statistics that you would never willingly use it in combat, and so you just sell them back to the vendor at about a 10 to 15% loss (why in the world any vendor would be willing to buy these things back from us is a complete mystery!). However, it is often possible to spend just a little more, and create an arrow that can be used for both skill AND production. While these arrows are often not the most economic combinations for a given statistic, they at least serve the purpose of allowing you to simultaneously fletch for skill AND production. Note that the cost values shown here may differ slightly from those shown in other portions of this article - these represent the absolute cheapest prices I was able to obtain through faction and charisma.