Raiding the Hollow City.

carljokl

I have taken to raiding all the gear in the stalls in the Hollow City as nothing there is classed as stealing. I feed those items to my crafter in training through my bank. The crafter is no where near advanced enough to be able to go to the Hollow City himself yet.

Is this a reasonable strategy? Given the crafter is only up to level 2 metal and woodwork and deconstructing quicksilver gear the experience gained though notably better than the iron/ steel gear around is still a bit underwhelming. This is the most effective / quick way I have found but is there a better strategy?

SolarCat02

Get ahold of Champion level Intricate gear, and deconstruct that.
If you have a lot of improvement materials available, improving them to green gets more experience than leaving them white.

Items you pick up that are not marked stolen but are worth 0g give as much experience as stolen items. So, not a lot.

Haxnschwammer

Intricate > player made (including other chars) > looted > self made > found > stolen
Found gear gives low expirience, not sure if it's as low as stolen but very low.

If you have the materials ugrade intircate items to maximize gained experience.
Upgraded give a lot more points than white ones.

Most reliable source is a crafting buddy so you can swap gears with, decon and forge anew.
There are material losses in that process.

High level gear xp is capped so a single weapon won't give several levels any more, but it is still
a good way to earn your way up.

Pandorii

I can guarantee from past experiences that the crafting experience you will get from deconstructing items from the hollow city is abysmal. What's more disappointing is that you will not get materials from the decon 9/10 times. = (

I do, however, love to pick up flowers, ingredients, and recipes from the hollow city. These are useful for two of the crafts you'll likely grind: provisioning and enchanting.

Pandorii

@carljokl I found myself naturally leveling woodworking, clothcraft, and blacksmithing along with my levels, as long as I remembered to pick up everything that I got from enemies. If I was going to be grinding, I made sure to invest on bag space upgrades for that character, and I'd have a buddy who I'd send stuff on the mail to with "R2S" on it: return to sender. That way, I wouldn't have to return to the city and ruin my grind. I also saved all the glyph drops, because enchanting always took me the longest to max out.

If I did that, I never had to take time out of my grind to level up my crafts. It might have not hit 50 when I did, but once you hit 50, you'll have the new undaunted grind. Dungeons drop a lot of deconstructable loot.

carljokl

I wonder what the tradeoff works out with the relative difficulty and time taken to find such gear vs deconstructing lots of the 0g items with meager results but being able to do so rapidly.

I guess ESO is careful to avoid any loopholes to easily level up.

Already finding the pain of focusing on crafting at the expense combat ability. Also as the material crafting capability goes up the raw materials become found in locations my crafter is too low level to survive in easily. Still I can get my main character to do the mining as mining and refining don't earn any smiting skill anyway.