Just spent 60k on materials, lvl 68 alchemy and lvl 20 gold. I got the message that this was beyond my current craft level. Grrrrr....guess I'll go put the gold ignot back up on AH and hope that someone in our dying economy buys it. The way the economy has been going I bet this gold ignot will only be worth 10k by the time I finish this message and walk back to the AH and put it up for auction.
OK this is an awsome GP item, for 70k you get 7360 GPs if your new thats still awsome ratio for gil / GP granted if you dont have gs your kinda screwed, but if you do you always hope for this item, also sells to players for 100k at the alchemy guide turn in point. ^^ and even for 100k its worth it to me.
I can confirm this is level 39. I was making this for alchemy guild quest at levels 83 Alchemy, 34 Goldsmithing. Failed the first one and got .1 skillup (no I didn't lose the gold ingot). Since I got a skillup on failure, I believe that means I had to be within 5 levels of the cap. On second synth I succeed and got .2 skillup.
Extra data: Was wearing both Alchemy club and apron. Had advanced goldsmith support, and it was Lightnings day facing North. Fingers on left hand were crossed and I gasped when I saw the failure, but cheered when I saw that I only last a chunk of cement.
I get skill ups off of fails even if i am 10 levels lower than the cap. I don't think this is sufficient evidence of the level cap, especially since you had avanced synth support from goldsmithing. But, your are definately within 10 levels of the synth, and of the right skill tier, so that's a start.
This is the worst guild point item ever, unless you have a Hanger lying around,
you need to spend about 45-50 K on gold ingot and 10K on cermet chunks, the sword itself costs 60K and hasnt been sold for awhile. Waste of a guild point day =P
Unless I'm mistaken, a level of 0 here in the forums as a sub-skill level cap indicates that we know the sub-skill is used, but not the level it caps at. In other words, the alchemy level is probably correct, but whoever played with this synthesis already had Goldsmithing level X, where X is very high, and thus did not know how high his Goldsmithing really needed to be.
You could experiment by raising Goldsmithing one level at a time, and as soon as you are allowed to do the synthesis, you'd know the cap on Goldsmithing was coming up. I'm not sure how much lower than the cap your sub-skill can be to be allowed to attempt the synthesis, though, and chances are experimenting with this synthesis would net a significant number of failures.