Personally I made a cartographer as my third character, after a tamer and a PvP character. I planned on hitting up doing treasure maps I found from farming with my tamer. However after finishing up my cartographer to an acceptable level to do treasure maps, I quickly found the rewards are far better from doing... well.. almost anything else. Mobs here drop a lot of magic weapons, gold, plat. It's easy to just farm on a bard or tamer and get lots of these things. Perhaps the only thing that doesn't drop much is wands, which can easily be found in lockpicking chests (carto not needed). The quality of loot in treasure chests is too low to bother exclusively running tmaps for magic weapons/gold etc. I was looking at the skill list the other day and I see we have around 120 GM tamers, which is not a particularly easy skill to GM (a lot of manual effort). Cartography on the other hand is very simple to raise (you can macro it to 99.5 pretty cheap), yet the shard only has 10 GM cartographers - one of which is probably Telamon (he is the player showing GM skills in stuff like focus, which isn't here, so I assume he also shows up as a GM carto). Does cartography need a bit of a revamp here? Maps sell for far less than any other shard I've seen and the skill just seems unattractive... other than level 6 chests which sell for a ton, and are very rare to find.
Cartography is a pain to macro, IMO, and it only gets you to 99.0. I found it harder to macro up to 99.0 than Taming. Additionally, going from 99.0 to 100.0 is both painful and pointless. I know at least at 99.2, you can decode a level 6 map given enough time. I'm at 99.7 right now, and just haven't bothered to GM (just letting it get there naturally). I suspect many others are in a similar boat. IMO, this shard has had very safe dungeons for a long time, so I think that's part of why people have gravitated there. On prior shards with more PKs, I looked at maps as a slightly less profitable activity, that was 10x as safe. If the scales tip here, maps might become more desirable to complete.
Were you macroing cart in a dungeon or something? I'm at 99.xx cart and it super simple to macro. It may be one of the easiest skills to macro besides eval, anatomy, hiding tracking those types of skills.
I found it a pain to buy up the cartographers to 160+ maps, keep yourself under 125 items, sell/drop all of the completed maps, etc. And deceptively expensive. I'd actually say it's one of the hardest to macro unattended. But if you find it easy, maybe write a guide?
I think T-Maps are fine where they are considering you can solo them (except a lvl 6, never solo'd one of those). I used to have a system to do lvl 4's because, IMO, they were pretty damn easy and quick to do in the routine I used. A level 4 chest, if you "milk" it, nets you ~20k in raw gold. Someone that can use all 3 accounts will find a very quick profit when compared to farming. As Dalavar mentioned with PK's. It's not their yet, but it's going to get to the point where I'm not going to step foot in a dungeon with a slayer that's almost irreplaceable. I'd rather go out in the middle of nowhere and dig up a chest. Will PK's search there? Sure, some will, some day... but not anytime soon. (So I hold on to all my maps.)
Somewhere in the world of uor so sharia is a tower called bio chemical warfare. Somebody there clearly trained carto at some point because they have over 125 maps under the eave of their tower. Why do I know this? Because after I randomly stumbled upon it I return their to get maps to document my patrol route!
Yeah, Dalavar, you made it hard on yourself It's very easy to find the scrolls/macro. It was a pain to buy maps in T2A ruleset.
Yeah Larry LaLonde has been high 90s for ages. No point to really GM it and yet, I do agree the loot is pretty lackluster. I'd like to see decreasing chances for plat on lower level maps (like lower level mobs, etc) and an equal chance for all slayer type weapons, along with the other types out there. As it stands, no one really keeps sub-Power level weaponry because they are just NPC sales fodder really.
Having a chance for all slayer weapons would instantly make tmap chests more desirable. Even at appropriate/similar drop rates to monsters and such (but, spread across all slayer types), I think it would be a nice change.
I have like 500+ treasure maps and I do not know what to do with them... I have never made a treasure hunter and I am contemplating it here. However, this thread depresses the whole idea for me....
I've heard tell of a level five dungeon chest in a future patch and also a level 7 treasure map. I'll bet that's going to require GM Carto.
