We have mining missions available at the quarry office. I get a lot of people asking me which reward to choose so i thought I'd post here for those getting those missions and uncertain which reward to get. For ores, the reward is a choice of Prospecting or mining skill. Prospecting skill is for operating your finder. Mining is for operating your excavator. You can find out what skills are involved in which professions by looking at Skills on Entropedia.info. There are a few people who would want to go for mining skill (if they're trying to use a faster excavator) but for new players I would always recommend that you take prospecting skill because the faster you skill up to use a deeper finder, the faster you can access the higher MU ores and profit (or at least, lose less!). If you're mining unamped, you will probably continue using the TT excavator (Rock Ripper 1) forever... the faster models are really only useful for miners who are amping or mining among mobs or in PVP zones (where they need to get ores out fast or risk armor decay or death). The Rock Ripper 1 is extremely eco and not too slow either. The same goes for the treasure missions and the (soon to be released) enmatter missions. Always choose the Prospecting/Surveying/Treasure Sense rather than Mining/Drilling/Artefact Preservation unless you know why you want to take the excavator skills. Also while I'm on the topic of excavators, i should clarify some basic info about them... you will always bring up the same amount of ore from a claim, no matter which model you use. They vary only in speed (stones per use and uses per minute) and decay per use. On entropedia, you can compare the "eco"ness by looking at the "efficiency per pec" number. "Efficiency" in regard to excavators just means the number of stones it brings up per use. So think of eff/pec as the number of stones per pec.
Thanks, that's something that's still been flummoxing me with every mission that gives a choice of skill rewards. Receiving conflicting recommendations confuses me; so usually I end up choosing the skill that looks the most familiar (eg. that I've seen in 'green lines' often). But I'm aware that's probably a rather naive way of deciding. :huh: So thanks for explaining the mining part of it.
Anytime you're unsure what skills to pick, you can also look at the typical markup of the skill in auction (usually at caly where most skills are sold). Skills that have higher MUs are generally more valuable to have. Entropedia and the chipping optimizer are also great for figuring out which skills are most valuable to build your target professions.
Thanks, someone did give me that link before, but (since there are so many tools available,) I did put it on the 'for future use only' pile. Because I thought it was purely for calculating ESI's. I took a closer look now, and seems more straightforward than Entropedia for professions, so I'll be able to use and understand it. My bad: guess I should check out the other tools more carefully too.
