I thought I would walk through some numbers to get a picture on what would be involved in making the perfect woodland armor pieces under the current system using imbue and enhance to acheive the most powerful item possible. If anyone has information that corrects any of my assumptions, or sees a problem with my math, please don't hesitate to provide correction. I would like this to be as accurate as possible:
I. Crafting: Start by crafting woodland gauntlets from REGULAR WOOD exceptional items with minimum resists in one or two categories that you plan to imbue. I do not want balance as it costs you resist point on the imbue. I prefer a piece as imbalanced as possible as imbue works up from the base resist for the item type and negates any points that were added from being exceptional and from arms lore. These are simply lost points unless they are in a resist you are not going to imbue. The points added by exceptional and arms lore do not count toward your overall imbue score or as one of your five properties.
II. PoF : use powder to raise the durability of your gauntlets. On average it will take two per item.
III. Imbue : You should be imbuing your increased resists, plus an additional 300 points of properties
IV. Enhance. For the sake of this example I am enhancing with heartwood.
Example: Woodland Guantlets Base Resists 5/3/2/3/2 (Base 15 Resist Points)
Random "EAL" Resist Points (20 Max)
Points available from Exceptional: 15 randomly distributed points
Points available from Arms Lore: 1 additional point per 20 points of arms lore for a total of 5 randomly distributed points
If you are crafting exceptional items with 100 Arms Lore, the items will have 35 resist points, 20 of these points randomly distributed. If you enhance a resist without regard to the random point distribution, you lose an average of 4 points per imbue. If you are adding one imbue of 15 points, an average imbue without regard to random points would add 15 points and lose 4, for a total of 46 resist points out of a possible 50. If you added two resist properties, which is what I generally shoot for, you would be adding 30 resist points and losing 8 for a total of 57 out of a possible 65 total resist points. It's really hard to get a piece with two minimum resists.
If you screen for two minimum resists prior to imbue, the rate of return on crafting for two minimum resists is one in 16,666. At 15 boards and 4 bark per piece this would mean 249,990 boards and 66,664 bark fragments if you could craft exceptional items 100% of the time. You can bring that up to 1 in 10,000 (150,000 boards and 40,000 bark) by giving up 2 points of overall resist, but you get the point. Unfortunately a GM carpenter only crafts exceptional woodland gauntlets at a rate of 35%. Assuming you have a decent talisman, you can increase this to 50% to 55%. It's really hard to preserve the points on your piece and you should count on giving up 3-4 total resist points prior to enhancing.
Enhancing: Heartwood adds 2/3/2/7/2, so the new "base" for heartwood woodland gauntlets is 7/6/4/10/4, provided the enhance occurs after any imbue increases as imbue eliminates points that are added from special material. If we assume 2 lost EAL points, full strength imbue on Physical and Fire, and even distribution of the remaining 18 EAL points between the other three resists, the piece might look like this: 22/21/10/16/10 for a total of 79 total resist points.
According to Stratics the rate of success on the enhance based only on the resists as a percentage is 20 + Current Resist -1% if you are GM. The rate of succes on our example is approximately 15%, with the rate for failure that doesn't break the item adding an additional 10%. This means you would destroy the item on three out of four attempts to enhance. Based on the rate for the initial attempt and the rate at which items are destroyed, the overall rate of success is around 18%. This rate of return means that in general you should count on crafting five gauntlets to end up with one piece of armor.
Stratics has no information on the success/breakage rate based on the additional properties that can be added other than luck, durability and lower requirements.
Heartwood adds one of seven properties at random: Luck 40, Durability 50%, Lower Requirements 20%, Damage Increase 10%, Lower Weight 50%, Hit Chance Increase 5%, Mage Armor
Based on this information, the perfect set of gauntlets would require:
2,499,900 wooden boards
666,640 bark
10 Powder of Fortifying
100 Boura Pelts
100 Diamonds
100 Rubies
200 Magical Residue
75ish Heartwood
Multiply these numbers by seven if you are looking for a specific random Heartwood property.
Using this process this would be possible* in a set of woodland gauntlets (or some other variation):
5% HCI
8% LMC (110 intensity points)
+8 Stam (100 intensity points)
18% LRC (90 intensity points)
81 Total Resists
*And would cost a king's ransom in ingredients...
If you are willing to give up six points off of the total and get a piece with 75 total resists by getting two resists within three of the minimum, then you will average making 1250 pieces to get one.
By way of comparison, you should only need to make 100 pieces to get one with a single resist at the minimum, which would leave you four more properties and 66 total resists. I am not sure its worth the extra resources.
to give a poster a reputation bump!