I used a few "Grandmaster repair contract deeds" on an item, at the moonglow blacksmith shop near the bank, the first few I used failed to repair the item. Character using them had 0 smithing.
Interesting. Did it consume the deed on the failure as well? I'll run some tests but I think this is the first someone reported this. However we only fixed the naming on these items in the last patch so its possible they were not widely used.
Perhaps the item was beyond repair? I know even as a GM smithy, I can fail to repair items that are 'rather flimsy and about to fall apart' according to Arms Lore. On 'other' shards I have failed to repair an irreparable item numerous times without any result. Based on what I know of the process, every attempt to repair, successful or not, removes 1 point of overall durability.
This is quite possible. I was using the same weapon for a long time, and I did not know that fortification powder doesn't fully repair an item (+10/+10 ?). So it was most likely well worn. It eventually repaired though, it just took a few contracts. I just figured that Blaise gave me some dud-deeds.
*shakes fist* Damn it, foiled again! I must have let a legit repair deed slip into the bag. If you have the item currently equipped on a character let's take a look at the data on my.uorenaissance.com and see how the overall durability suffered. Then again, if you hit it with fort powder, those numbers are gonna be off anyway.
