How do other players do with the MASSIVE amount of armor refinement items coming as loot from the Rising Tide content ?
They do not stack and they are too many !!
Perhaps some special boxes or container to hold them all reducing their item count is much urgently needed ?
When I bothered to even loot them at all, I would amalgamate them all into Invul pieces. Very time consuming and I ended up turning them all in for points anyway.
trade in points. problem solved.
I would like to see that entire refinement process streamlined and simplified. As it is, I don't use it since it really only applies to melee chars (non-medable gear) and I have none. I do like the artwork on them, though. Would be nice if they were stackable, and vendorable on the NM stalls.
IMO they just need to stack, I use them a lot in crafting, including the lesser ones. Though the suggestion to simplify the categorizing to just say tailored/smithed/carp'd armor would have my vote too.
I have 3 chests in my house - 1 for all the deflection types, one for all the reinforcement types, and one for new arrivals. (this is CC - and it works better with the new container gumps enabled)
The first two have 3 containers for sorting by their graphic, with sub-container in each for the specific armor type whose refinement looks that way (so, there's one with 4 tailor armor type boxes, one with the 6 smith types, and one with woodland and gargish stone refinement boxes)
Then, in each sub-container, there's 4 rows for Defense, Protection, hardening and fortification.
As the first two containers only have post-amalgamation refinements in them, then the box for, say, hide deflection refinements would have at MOST 10 items in it (1 defense, 2 protection, 3 hardening, 4 fortification).
I then collect refinements in Box 3 (along with 4 amalgamators), until I get about 100 of them.
Then, I amalgamate the heck out of them, combining the old and new. Invulnerability refinements go onto my vendor.
The last time, I had about 75-80 items in each of boxes 1 & 2, plus 16 sub-containers. Box 3 had 110 refinements and 4 amalgamators. AFTER amalgamation, I was back down to 65-75 in each of the two storage boxes, 8 or so new invulnerability refinements, and an empty "incoming refinements" (not counting the 4 amalgamators - I have 4 in case there's a bug or misidentified one that results in an incomplete amalgamation, and I had as many of 3 "oops" at the same time at one point).
I have had times were adding 1 defense refinement EMPTIED a box for an armor type (though I usually had more to put in after); 1 new Defense added to a box with 1 defense, 2 protection, 3 hardening, and 4 fortification, amalgamating as I could.
2 Defense = 1 Protection. Added to the existing 2 protection becomes 1 Hardening. Adding that to the existing 3 hardening creates 1 Fortification. And, with the 4 fortification already possessed, creates an invulnerability, and empties the box completely.
The secret to keeping the Refinement numbers down is simply to amalgamate to create better ones whenever possible.