Armorsmith Archive

• a lot of my guild wants the BH armor and are out searching for schematics. I offer to make a 7000/6000/5000 suit for them in exchange for their extra schematics. most end up with 17-18 before they get enough for an entire suit. That leaves me with about 7 schematics for everysuit I craft


• standing offer for schematics (see link in sig). People are starting to figure out that I have standing offer for them. There are a fair amount of BH just doing the missions for the WS componets and are selling me all their schematics.


• occasional vendor sells, forum purchases, etc


• I have a BH alt

• flat fee for crafting the armor if they just bring me the schematic (50-500k per core depending on what they want)


• starting to stock energy layered on vendor (usually just stock helmets, then they come back to me for full suits)


• Making full health enhanced suits and full suits of energy layered and selling for a ton of profit (but they take forever to make when health enhanced)


• I have a RIS only vendor, just been throwing them on there

I do mine all on the spot.While reading text for my classes, I just set my toon in a busy area and offer to make armor on the spot. I already have the resources I need for just about any armor and I do it right there when I get a tell. I keep my prices on bio. I don't buy schematics for BH, but I charge per core to convert them into armor. It's a good hands on approach that has been good for repeat and word of mouth, because the customers know I'm approachable for special requests.

I have been thinking about the same thing alt wise... I think when I hit Master Ranger and get the Badge start giving up the skills for BH keeping scout for Harvesting... Or maybe I'll use my Token respec to get rid of that annoying popup...

I have found a per-core pricing system works great for BH armor when the customer provides schems and for RIS pieces. A rough calculation yielded 120k or so per core to be my break even point with regards to resources assuming my final work was worth 100 cpu. However, considering about 1/3 of my resources are worth that prior to being touched, I found I was short-changing myself (and had a 1 week backlog of orders after a day of crafting bh suits), so I raised my price to about 180k per core. I am still getting far too many orders to fill, so I may start passively turning people away with yet higher prices rather than having to actively do it with low prices. In short, it is a great system, but balancing demand is tricky. I currently feel like an armor factory, and as a small custom order smith who works more like a tailor, this is not fun.

yea 250k per core works out around 2.5 mill once i charge for boots/gloves/belts

With thier schems: 250k flat fee for unlayered, 500k for primus. (I dont do energy)

well i think i better start charging more as i charge only 100k for each core and manufacture, ok my stuff aint uber stats, but its very good, i do a mix of 2xprim/2xen or 4xpri or 4x en in the cores, been buying enhancers for health as well may have to re-think my pricing schemes.

I never figured out my per core charge, but per suit im charging 775k for unlayered full set, and 1,050,000 for layered full sets. With harvesting my own resources, im finding that a happy medium keeps repeat customers returning. Im sure I could get more, but why do so, because by charging the bare min, im assured no smith is going to be able to undercut me.

---

freedomwarrior wrote:
I never figured out my per core charge, but per suit im charging 775k for unlayered full set, and 1,050,000 for layered full sets. With harvesting my own resources, im finding that a happy medium keeps repeat customers returning. Im sure I could get more, but why do so, because by charging the bare min, im assured no smith is going to be able to undercut me.

---

unless you didn't figure it out, you are the undercutter

hehe

---

MonKaiku wrote:

---

freedomwarrior wrote:
I never figured out my per core charge, but per suit im charging 775k for unlayered full set, and 1,050,000 for layered full sets. With harvesting my own resources, im finding that a happy medium keeps repeat customers returning. Im sure I could get more, but why do so, because by charging the bare min, im assured no smith is going to be able to undercut me.

---

unless you didn't figure it out, you are the undercutter

hehe

---

Yea, it could be construed that way indeed. But I look at it this way, im able to provide a quality product at a fair market price because of low overheads. I obtained these lower overheads because im able to drop 50 miners at any given time on any resource. This allows me to be able to stock pile the needed resources for a very low cost, in which turn this is passed to the consumer. IE, walmart or kmart could be used as examples of this marketing strategy.

In the end, im able to sell between 50 to 70 sets of armor in a 3 to 4 day period and the consumer returns because they know that im always stocked. On a normal basis, you will never find less than 300 armor items on my vendor so this also goes a long way to getting the consumer to me as well.

As far as the bh armor is concerned, I actually used to do it for the cost of armors, ie 325k for non layered and 750k for layered, but was so inundated with orders that I had to add a 50k per peice surcharge to the peices to allow me to maintain my other stocks. I mean, all I was out was the cores anyway as they are bringing me the schematics. I do the same with my ris armors. They bring me the gdk, the gurk hides and the harrower bone and get ris armor for only 600k. This allows players to be able to wear the normally rare armors for a decent price and im not outlaying a ton of credits to get the resources needed. Its a win/win for both involved.

---

ravingbantha wrote:

I charge the same for making BH armor as I do for anything else, if they bring me the schematics. I see no point in charging more, I use the exact same ammount of resources to make a BH suit as I would a suit of Comp, so no point in price gouging. Not like I had to do a quest or find some hard to get really weird resource to make them.

---

Normally I agree with you 110%, but when I was getting 50 to 60 orders(no lie) a night for bh armor, I wasnt able to maintain, so I had to make it more condusive to having only the ones who truely wanted it would seek me out.

First, great post and good ideas. Yeah, I had to raise my prices to keep things under control as well. I was charging $2M for the best energy layered stuff in my galaxy, but I couildn't make the cores fast enough ... so I upped the price to $3M. I still can't make the cores fast enough. I've had multiple repeat customers and enough word of mouth advertising to keep me as busy as I want to be. Recently, one AS beat my stats, but that hasn't changed much. We'll see how long this lasts, but for now it's sustaining my business very well. I may start to think about trading / buying/ selling schems, that seems like a good idea.