Simple crafting question

acctingman69

Hello

JUST started playing again and I know nothing about crafting in ESO. I've never been much of a crafter. Did Alchemy in WOW and that's it.

Am I better off just buying player made gear and selling off mats I gather? Am I missing out if I bail on crafting?

VaranisArano

You don't have to craft, but I highly recommend it. There are a number of benefits to doing so depending on what you want to do in the game.

Easy question first: Selling materials to other players through a trading guild is a great way to make gold. Alchemy reagents are available at any level and sell very well because practically everyone uses potions. However, other crafting materials will appear 50% based on your level and 50% based on your Crafting skill points. So if you want to farm max level rubedite ore to sell to other players, you'll want to level up your Blacksmithing skill to 10/10.

What about player crafted gear?
You can buy all crafted gear from other players or pay a crafter to make it for you. Also, there's lots of good bind-on-equip gear and bind-on-pickup gear that you won't lack for gear if you choose not to craft.

What will you miss? Quite a lot of important stuff.

1. TRANSMUTATION
Transmutation allows you to change the trait of items you acquire so you can get the gear/weapon you want in the most powerful trait. In order to change the trait of an item, you must have first researched that trait, which is a part of crafting. The higher your crafting level in Blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking, and jewelry crafting, the faster you can research traits. Please note that Transmutation is the only way to acquire certain jewelry traits on non-crafted jewelry and the only way to get nirnhoned traits on anything that's not crafted or a specific quest reward. This is super useful with the stickerbook, since you can recreate set gear with any trait you have researched.

2. CRAFTING WRITS
Crafting Writs are a daily quests that asks players to craft certain items, and in turn rewards the items you need to improve your gear. If you do max tier writs (like 10/10 Blacksmithing) you'll be rewarded with Master Writs, a special quest for a specific item of a specific motif, trait, and quality. This quest rewards you with Voucher currency, which can be used to buy furnishings and items like training dummies and storage chests for housing. If you just want to sell stuff, the improvement materials from max tier writs sell very well. Also, it's a pretty steady stream of gold.

3. REFINEMENT and IMPROVING GEAR
The higher your level in a craft, you can use passives that increase your chance of refining the materials you need to improve your gear from raw materials. While this is not strictly necessary, if you don't, you'll be buying the improvement materials from other players and that can get expensive. Similarly, at a high level in crafting, you can greatly decrease the number of improvement materials you need to improve your gear/weapon to the next tier. This greatly reduces the cost of improving your gear/weapons and I highly recommend investing in those passives.

There are some other reasons to craft, but those are the big three I can think of.

You mention that you are new to crafting in ESO, so I'll offer some tips about leveling up your crafting.

One, start researching different gear and weapons as fast as you can because it starts short and gets longer very quickly. Training is great for leveling. Divines is a common trait in PVE group content. Impenetrable is a common trait in PVP. Sharpened and Precise are good traits for weapons. Nirnhoned is also good, but the trait material is rare so it may be too expensive to make a priority.

Two, unlike in other games, the gear crafting for ESO awards more experience (called "inspiration") for deconstructing items than it does for creating new gear. The idea is that we learn by taking apart what other people are making. You can just deconstruct any gear/weapons you pick up that you aren't using. You can also decontruct items with the "intricate" trait for extra crafting inspiration. Blacksmithing, Clothing, Woodworking, Jewelry crafting, and Enchanting all level this way.

Three, alchemy and provisioning both level up the normal way: by making lots of stuff. With Alchemy, I recommend farming a bunch of the same ingredient, then grabbing the next level water as you level it up. With provisioning, you can buy the recipes at your level from any NPC chef and brewer, and buy the ingredients very cheaply in bulk from guild traders, then spam the recipe at your level until you rank up, then repeat at the new level.

Hope that helps!