Crafting Alts

Rylic

Hi All,

My wife and I just recently returned to ESO after a long absense, and decided to create new main characters due to new classes we wanted to try, and so far we are happy with our new mains.

This brings up a few questions we have in regards to our old characters. (Note: These questions are probably noobish, so our apologies in advance)

Our old characters are lvl 34, and have skills in crafting.

Originally, we split the crafting professions between us both for our old characters, where my wife has level 50 in Provisioning, 36 in Alchemy, and 6 in Woodworking. My old character is level 27 in Clothing, 26 in enchanting, and 5 in Blacksmithing.

I should also mention that our old characters have had both their skill and attribute points reset while we were away, and we have yet to reassign them to anything.

So, that all being said, here are our questions:

1. Is it worth it to use our old characters as crafting alts for our mains, or is it best to start fresh with our new mains, and level crafting again with them?
2. If we use our alts, and eventually level them up to 50 for each crafting profession, will they require to be level 50 in their class in order to craft champion gear in the future, or can they craft champion gear with just being level 50 in a crafting profession?
3. If we use our mains instead, is there a use for the old characters? At this time, we both have ESO plus, so at this time inventory space is not an issue to use them as pack mules.
4. My wife is very interested in furniture crafting, but from my understanding, crafting furniture requires things from different crafting professions. Is it possible to still divide up the crafting professions between us both, where I can craft components she requires to make furniture? Or does she need to create them herself, and level in all required crafting professions?

Regards,
Rylic

Auricle

If you are going to split up the crafting professions between you, I would do clothing, blacksmithing and woodworking on one, so that you have one toon that gets all your motif/style pages.

You can craft gear of any level once your profession reaches 50 and you have the necessary points invested. Furniture crafting does often require having certain levels in all disciplines, but it differs recipe to recipe. It's not very difficult to re-level your professions-- just decon everything as you go, so she could always just level everything and not put points into the crafts until she a) has enough spare points or b) needs a craft for a recipe she's excited about.

Crafting alts are totally a thing, but I always like to have the crafts on a character that I main so that I have easy access to all the locations on the map where I might want to go to craft set armor. It's fine either way. Just my preference.

fioskal

RE: Furnishing, you must have all the skills on one toon. I highly recommend just deconning everything you find and leveling all the skills on at least one toon (I personally prefer to level every crafting skill on every toon for crafting writs).

PS4_ZeColmeia

So my main is the only character I play on and my main crafter. I also have 8 crafting alts with all crafting lines maxed.

IMHO, there is no reason to not do all crafting on one character, unless you are just trying to reduce the skill points required to craft and play on one character (I only have 21 skill points left in the game to get on my main and just recently got to the point I feel like I'm just buying nice to have skills). I also can spec into any role on this character so YMMV on how long it takes you to get to this point.

Back to the crafting, IMHO you should do all crafting on all of your crafting characters. It benefits you in maximizing RNG on writs, surveys, and gold upgrades. I would do as the other person said on focusing your motifs to one character so you minimize the searching on who has what which will make master writs easier to complete.

NoTimeToWait

I have a main character for PVP\PVE\Quests (so he gets achievements for achievement furniture) and have a trader\crafter\furnisher as secondary char which does everything else. I find them both very useful, and didn't find any inconveniences in splitting the roles and not doing everything on one character. Plus, it saved me some time collecting skyshards, since my main got all the points he needs from dungeon quests and leveling.

I would suggest continue developing your old chars as crafters while progressing with your new characters.

Concerning furniture, many recipes require mastery in multiple crafting branches, so you won't be able to split roles when trying to craft furniture.

All my other chars are just plain thieves, except one, who got himself into reading. And that's all he does, can't get his nose up from the book. Damn the lot, I didn't raise them to be useless miscreants and public embarassment. Not a drop of heroic blood in them, but anyway I like them all the same.

SpAEkus

I also recommend using the old characters as Main Crafters and eventually putting all the crafts on the one farthest along.

Mainly because you are going to be really focused on your new characters and unless you play the old ones, they just aren't going to get more loot from questing/grinding to continue leveling crafts.

Your new characters can totally focus on leveling and just feed loot, even low-level at first, to the crafters that can just sit and decon to clear your bags/bank when needed.

Also hopefully your main BS-WW-Cloth crafter has been researching traits. That is the one real-time crafting activity that you won't want to waste progress on. It doesn't take any skill points to decon so your main crafter can refund any extra craft skill points and put them towards research timer and extraction passives.

If your feeding gets the crafter higher and needs a few new skill points, you can just run them for skyshards as needed from time to time. Since they won't need combat points you can reapply any of those to crafting as well.

ghastley

The point about reaching the set crafting locations is a good one. You really have two choices there, and it could make a big difference to your decision. If you're in a guild that has attuned crafting stations collected in one location that you can easily reach, then the crafting character really doesn't have to venture into the wilderness. If you're not a member, you'd have to visit the original locations, which might be in Cyrodiil, or the Imperial City.

So if you're using cloned attuned stations, alt crafters are a lot more viable. If you're playing without guild support, craft on your mains.

Motifs can be collected by one player, and passed to another, so they shouldn't affect your choice. If you're intending to make furnishings, the combinations of skills needed by some plans mean that one character needs to know all the crafts.

---

I belong to a guild. All my characters craft at the highest level they can in all trades, but combat skills get advanced in preference to crafting ones when there's conflict. They do well enough by only taking combat skills they'll use (i.e. ignore weapons they don't use, armour they don't wear, etc.) This brings in a decent rate of master writs.

There's a hierarchy of hand-me-downs for duplicate motifs, recipes, etc. It doesn't hurt if more than one character knows a motif, or a recipe, indeed there are benefits from that, but the main character gets to complete their portfolio first. Complete styles give a better chance of getting those master writs. That one also does the master writs, even if another character received it, and I keep a storage chest for passing them.

Only one character makes furnishings, and any plans get passed across. If they're duplicate, they get sold. There are just too many different furnishing plans to spread it out, and try to track who makes what.

belial5221_ESO

I have a main crafter that knows/does it all.I use my other 3 just for crafting dailies for the xp,surveys,chances at gold mats,master writs,etc.,and only made them to get all the level up rewards.They also serve as a way during events to get more event reward boxes.

With all 4 max crafters I make about 16k gold per day,and about 20k xp(80k xp when enlightened) total just turning in crafting daily writs.So it's totally worth maxing all your chars crafting,even if they don't need to know all recipe/motifs in game.

You may want to use addons like writworthy to see if you can do/or worth doing master writs(best paired with being in trade guild and master merchant) ,dubon lazy crafter to auto craft dailies when you get to station,alchemy unknown to see icons of what the ingredients are to learn them faster,eso master recipe list to track which alt knows what recipe/blueprint, and lots more helpful ones out there.

LadySinflower

Currently I have 4 characters in total. I leveled character #1 to 50 in all crafting lines and gave her all style/ motif pages. All research is done for her first. Now that she is maxed, character #2 gets all things to be deconstructed and all duplicate motif pages. Only after #1 has researched a trait on an item does #2 get to research that trait on that item. And so it goes down the line for characters #3 and #4. I use a couple of android apps to keep track of who has what styles/ motifs and who has done what research. It takes a lot of attention to managing bank inventory and daily logging in of all 4 characters. #3 will get to deconstruct everything after #2 is leveled up. They all do daily crafting writs at their current levels but all surveys go to #1 so I collect max level materials from surveys. Each character makes potions, poisons, and glyphs for the one behind her because only #1 has the ability to craft those things at her own level. That way they all have supplies equivalent to their play level, not their crafting level (if that makes sense).

The reason I do it this way is because I would eventually like to have master crafters in all of my characters, but that won't happen for any of them if I just randomly distribute styles/ motifs and don't make sure that before #2 researches something she isn't taking a research piece away from #1, and so forth.

My opinion is that it isn't good to split crafting between two characters, especially over two different accounts. I like to be able to make whatever I need to make without having to switch characters. If you're making furnishings that will ask for skills from different skill lines, you always run the risk of the thing you want to make not having the right skill line leveled up on your current character. And master writs require that the character turning in the writ be the same character that made the item. If you don't want to each level up your own crafter, I would suggest investing your motifs, research, and deconstructing in the one that is the farthest advanced in all the crafting lines combined.

My SO and I also like to partner up as much as we can for quests and such, but each of us keeps our own skill lines up. He hasn't paid nearly as much attention to crafting as I have and as a result I make him a lot of armor and weapons. If we had split up our resources neither of us would be where I am now.

SpAEkus

LadySinflower wrote: »

Only after #1 has researched a trait on an item does #2 get to research that trait on that item

So you didn't finish traits on #1 yet?

If you had you could just give every alt the trait(s) and get them all done together.

But even with not finished, there shouldn't be a reason to not start all alts on traits at the same time. The timers are all going to run at the same time, just at different endings if you start now (#2 may have already used the shortest but #3 and #4 will start on shortest).

You can still get them fairly caught up if you use a sequence that gets the same trait on all pieces before going to second trait on any piece, especially if the other alts haven't used their shortest timers yet.

You can at least get them started on the traits #1 already knows and even go farther with just some cheap white items from guild stores that have all the same trait(s).



Trait knowledge is just one craft knowledge that increases Master Writ chances, but it is skill point free (until you desire to speed up with timer passives) and just runs while you play. You can still get Master Writs on non-motif crafters, it just won't be as high a chance w/o the other craft achievements like motifs and recipes. Alchemy and Enchant are easy enough after a while to complete as well.

LadySinflower

SpAEkus wrote: »

LadySinflower wrote: »

Only after #1 has researched a trait on an item does #2 get to research that trait on that item

So you didn't finish traits on #1 yet?

If you had you could just give every alt the trait(s) and get them all done together.

But even with not finished, there shouldn't be a reason to not start all alts on traits at the same time. The timers are all going to run at the same time, just at different endings if you start now (#2 may have already used the shortest but #3 and #4 will start on shortest).

You can still get them fairly caught up if you use a sequence that gets the same trait on all pieces before going to second trait on any piece, especially if the other alts haven't used their shortest timers yet.

You can at least get them started on the traits #1 already knows and even go farther with just some cheap white items from guild stores that have all the same trait(s).



Trait knowledge is just one craft knowledge that increases Master Writ chances, but it is skill point free (until you desire to speed up with timer passives) and just runs while you play. You can still get Master Writs on non-motif crafters, it just won't be as high a chance w/o the other craft achievements like motifs and recipes. Alchemy and Enchant are easy enough after a while to complete as well.

Hi! I didn't explain very well that character #1 was around for several months before any of the others were created. I've been researching traits on her from day 1 and even have nirnhoned learned on most of the pieces. But she hasn't yet finished researching everything yet; she hasn't had time. So there are lots of traits that #1 has learned that are available for the other three to learn. At this point I am almost done researching with #1 and only have about a dozen traits left to learn. I specifically went out and asked guildies to craft level 1 pieces for my #1 to research so I can get her complete. I don't want to take any of those specific pieces and give them to another character because I'd just have to ask somebody to make them for me again.

Also, only #1 is leveled up enough to have the passives for multiple research slots and shorter timers. While #1 can do up to 3 pieces per category at a time, the other three can only do one. I only heavily run the extra three characters during events to get extra reward boxes. I'm still a fairly new player to the game overall so haven't quite learned how to set a toon up as a tank, healer, or other specific purpose. Eventually that will happen when I'm a better player. Crafting is the only thing I feel like I've actually gotten a handle on.

Everybody is always researching something but I stagger the traits in favor of the higher leveled toons. Nobody is sitting around idle waiting for another character to finish a block of traits. I like your chart. Thanks very much for the advice.

Asha_11_ESO

I did similar to what Ladysinflower did with her characters.

I picked the character I was playing most to level all professions on. All traits are researched on it first, as well as all recipes, furnishing patterns, and motifs. It makes more sense to start it this way, because it's harder to acquire multiple motifs to spread amongst crafters.

Something to also consider - you'll probably need to take your crafter out and do some exploring/questing to get skill points to access all your crafting skills.

When I first started, I levelled with a friend, and we arranged it so one of us started out as the main armor and weapons crafter, and the other as the consumables crafter. All motifs, intricate and surplus gear and armor, and related raw materials would be funneled to the former, while all recipes and consumable mats would go to the latter. If there were duplicate recipes or motifs, we'd give it to the other.

FlopsyPrince

It would take too much tracking for me to pay attention to which alt is learning what. I just learn whatever is available and I have a lot of.

I am now getting tight on Woodcrafting, but I just swap around, make a piece with the needed trait, and continue. My main gets most patterns first and then I randomly give them to whoever else. I figure I will eventually get them everyplace, even if it takes a while. I don't have to track much here.

I am only getting some of the dailies, since I am still leveling characters and everything sucks time.

I don't have any nirnhoned, triune or swift yet, but that will hopefully come at some point.