How much skill does image support add?

[hatey]

Okay, I was wondering how much does image support and advanced image support raise your skill temporarily. From what I can tell I think adv img support is 2.0 in your skill and img support is 1.0. There are two reasons I think adv img is 2.0. One is that when I skill up and use adv img support when I'm 2 levels below trivial I generally get less skill. Also, you need to be 10.1 above trivial to HQ at all consistently. There are products such as mamushito +1 which trivial at 91. You'd need 101.1 alchemy to HQ these consistently yet there is a consistent market for them. So adv image support has to add a minimum of 1.1, but I'm pretty sure it's 2.0 or more even. Anyone have any solid info on this?

[Silke]

Cant say for sure but from what I have read it seems to be about 3lvls for andvanced support and 1 lvl for free support.

[hatey]

Thanks for your info, hope there are more that can verify this or give me any information they have, thanks.

[ninvampire]

While I've never had any first-hand experience (so don't crucify me) with HQ, I've heard plenty of accounts of people getting HQ synths even below the skill-cap of the synth they're doing. This would make sense because being 10.1 above the cap adds to your chances of an HQ synth.

Actually, now that I think about it, I have had some experience with HQ in that I've received the HQ synth animation a number of times, just the recipe I was crafting didn't have HQ results. And these instances have come from when I was still skilling-up with the recipe.

[hatey]

I really hate when people do this but "bump". Any information would be appreciated greatly. Thanks.

[Tan'o]

I'd have to day anywhere from 2.0 to 4.0. On my mule in Windurst I bought a load of grass thread and earth crystals. I got the Advanced Imagaing and started crafting Grass Cloth from level 0 skill. I didn't fail once and I took it to 4 in like 30 min. Of course I was crafting on Lightsday.

[Mithrael]

I have no hard evidence (link, quote from a s-e employee, etc.), but my best estimation is 5 levels of skill for Advanced Support (I neve use regular support).

My success/failure rate is similar with advanced support to having no support at all, as is the frequency of skill gains. I'm pretty certain it gives more than 2 or 3 levels of support, as if you were to try making something 7-8 levels above your current level without support, your results would not be favorable, while 10 levels below with support is generally ok.

4 is a reasonable possibility.

[Icemage]

No hard evidence here, but my experience mirror's Mithrael's.

On a formula 10 levels higher than you are:
Without advanced support = forget it, almost 100% failure.
With advanced, you'll succeed around 15% of the time, and almost always show a skill gain of .2 or .3 when you do succeed.

Advanced support stops being useful to me once I get within 6 levels or so, so I'm guessing it adds around 4 levels to your skill.

At 6 levels below the cap for a given formula, I generally switch to free support. This lets me lose less money per synth, and pushes me up to about 80-90% success rate while maintaining reasonably fast skill gains. Sometimes I will continue using advanced support if the synth is very expensive, or the materials are too rare to waste this way.

At 3 levels below I usually stop using support altogether, unless the synth is so expensive, or reasonably profitable. If either is the case, I will continue using free support to minimize losses.


Icemage

[Thoronas]

Do any other crafters find that image support sometimes slows down their skill ups? Maybe I've just had some bad runs of luck but I seem to get less skill ups when I use image support then when I don't.

[Mithrael]

Thoronas,
I've always struggled with this question. For the longest time, I thought it was impossible to gain skill using advanced support when you were one or two levels beneath the recipe. Ironically, what got me from lv.62-63 (after well over a month being stuck at 62 with 0 skill gains) was a lv.63 recipe that i made on a whim with advanced support on. So in 63+35 levels, I've only seen a skill gain with advanced support on (really close to the recipe cap) once.

For me, the "Sweet Spot" seems to be about 4 levels beneath a recipe with no support, or 6-8 levels with advanced support. That's where I get my fastest skill gains.

[Borshel]

I've taken a recipe to the cap using advanced support quite often when I started crafting. Nowadays, I don't use any support when I hit 3 below the cap, unless I can't afford to lose any ingredients from a failure. And I hate free support since it lasts like only 2 minutes.