One of the nifty aspects of trade skills in Lord of the Rings Online is that, once you have mastered a given tier of a skill, you have a small percent chance to get a critical success that will give you a better result than you expect.
I have seen this happen a few times with the prospector or forrester skills, which ends up yielding a few more ingots, hides, or wood.
The other night though, I finally hit a critical success making an actual item. Gaff’s guardian was rolling along towards level 15, the point where he would be able to wear heavy armor.
Since I have the armor smith for the guild, I got some supplies together to get a suit ready for him. Since Nomu, the armor smith, has made quite a bit of armor, he has mastered the first two tiers so far.
The first item I went to make was the Heavy Bronze Armour chest piece, which has the following stats:
Instead, I got a critical success and ended up with Hardened Bronze Armour, which has some nicer stats indeed:
For comparison, the base armor smith recipe for level 15 is Bronze Armour:
While the next tier, which comes up quickly at level 18, has Iron Armour as a base:
And Heavy Iron Armour as upscale version:
As you can see, I didn’t bother making the any iron armor for him, as the hardened bronze was the best of the bunch.
However, as much as he was hoping, I did not get another such critical success and he had to settle for Heavy Bronze for the rest of his suit.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 