What gives more experience?

Daraji

Say you have 100 iron ingots to work with, for example. Which gives more experience: creating and extracting more low-level items, or creating and extracting fewer higher-leveling items?

Cheatingdeath23

I read an article that compared the raw numbers and much like Skyrim, the best way to level up blacksmithing is to make daggers. They compared all the different weapons/armor at different levels and the best "experience per ingot" is a Level 6 dagger.

Of course it costs $15 per dagger, so you could level it up to level 12 instead (and sell it for more than the $15), but I buy the crafting stone for $15 and sell the level 6 dagger for $13 and just accept the $2 loss each item.

Stonebreath

Deconstructing something that another character made is always more experience than you get from crafting and deconstructing on the same character. At level 4 of blacksmithing I found the most efficient way to level up to level 5 blacksmithing was to craft level 10 axes (7 ingots used) on an alt, and then deconstruct them on the main. Using 7, 8, or 9 ingots was very nearly the same amount of experience per ingot. Crafting with only 3 was (if I recall correctly) less than half as efficient as far as exp per ingot.

I don't know if the experienced gained changes when you level up though. My testing has not been that extensive yet. Furthermore, I didn't try this test with the various armors. I only tried varying the number of ingots used in crafting a weapon.