PS4 Newbie Crafting question

tymarston

Hey all,

New to this and loving it so far. Just a quick question about how people manage crafting.

I'm leveling a main and an alt (who will eventually be a master crafter) right now, and I've been trying to figure out a schedule for crafting gear based on my levels. I'm outleveling my gear at least twice a day right now so it's getting increasingly expensive to do.

How often to people recraft? Is it even that big of a deal until you reach a certain point? Should I just be consolidating all my crafting on one character?

Any advice would be helpful, thanks!

IcyDeadPeople

If you are just leveling up by doing quests, tbh your gear doesn't really matter. You can get by with whatever random gear you find.

If you want to do group dungeons or PVP (or want to level faster with training trait armor), then I would make new gear every 6 - 10 levels. For example I made some "hand me down" sets for level 10, 16, 26, 36, 46 that I just keep passing on from one character to the others as I level them up.

As for whether to do one character for crafting, eventually if you want the best chance to get lots of master writs and gold mats, you will want to have all crafting skills maxed out on all 8 characters.

doslekis

I make training gear when I hit level 10, again when I hit level 30, then again at 160cp.

My first character I just used random drop pieces from delves and quests and such.

davey1107

So your question is more complicated than you probably thought...and a lot of vet players who haven’t leveled a character in a long time might not know exactly how the new system works. Doslekis’s schedule probably,won’t work for a new player leveling with no champion points.

When they updated the game to One Tamriel - the system that lets you go anywhere and fight anything in any zone - they made this possible by messing with the characters’ power and armor. In the old days, a level 3 toon hit for like 100 damage and a vet hit for like 8000...the monsters were set similarly. So low level characters couldn’t visit high level zones (without being slaughtered).

Enter One Tamriel. The idea is that Now every monster in the game is c160 level, and players are adjusted so that you can fight anywhere at any level. They accomplish this by giving characters a “handicap” the lower level they are. As you level up, these handicaps are removed. But to make up for that loss, you can equip higher level gear. For example, say you’re level 20 and a certain attack does 5000 damage. You level to 22 - that damage will fall to, say, 4,500 because some of the handicap comes off, EXCEPT that you can now equip a level 22 sword that has a higher damage rating, which will bring that attack’s damage back to 5,000.

SO

Under the new system, the bigger the gap between your players level and your gear level, the weaker you will become. If a level 40 tries to fight in level 20 gear, the game will have stripped them of a lot of their handicap bonus...which they’re not replacing by updating their gear. Such a toon will be as squishy as heck and hit for nothing.

As a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep your gear within about 6 levels of your character level. But if you feel too squishy, you might need to update more often...especially in the 40’s.

An exception is champion points...once a character is level 50, the handicap mechanic goes away and you don’t have to update your gear as often. When you hit vet you can make a vet set, then keep that until you hit c160, at which point you can start collecting max level gear.

Also, be aware that this system I’m talking about creates an odd effect in the game...the hardest character levels now are 45-50. As a new player, don’t be surprised if you feel weak and squishy right before your character goes vet.

Other tips that might help:

-Your crafter alt can invest in hirelings as they level their craft skills, which will bring in mats for your fighting character.

-Get that crafter doing daily writs. The rewards outweigh the costs...although you may want to raise some gold to but the mats for those writs if you don’t farm enough.

-There’s a semi-confusing system in play for what level mats your fighter picks up and what mats your crafter gets. I won’t go into it in detail, but I’ll mention it briefly in case you want to look it up. (Sunshine Daydreams guide to ESO crafting is AMAZING). Your fighter picks up mat types based on their level. Your crafter uses and earns mat types based on their rank in the first passive of each skill line. So when your fighter starts, they see iron nodes. When they hit level 16 they start seeing high iron nodes (which refines to steel). On your crafter, if they have 0 skill points in the first smith passive, they will earn iron from the hirelings and their writs will require iron. If you spend a skill point and go to rank 2, this becomes high iron / steel.

Therefore, since you have a fighter and a separate crafter, you might want to coordinate their levels so that your crafter is producing and using the level of mats your fighter earns and needs. You do this by slowly working up that first passive in the trade skills for your crafter as your fighter levels. You can level the lines themselves to 50 as quick as you like...but if you keep the rank on par with your fighter, the mats will match better between characters.

Hope that helps!

GimpyPorcupine

When I started out, I immediately used all of my character slots, using one as a main, one for each crafting profession, and one as a mule. That was also before craft bags, so each character held the materials for that particular profession. I played each to about level 20 and then respec'd, which gave me enough skill points to max out everything in that profession.

In retrospect, that was horribly tedious.

tymarston

@davey1107 That was hugely helpful. Thank you. I confirmed a lot of what I had been encountering in the game. I'd been soloing some public dungeons until the mid 40s and then kinda hit a wall then changed what I was doing with the crafting system and pushed through.

Now onto about 50CP. Maybe 51 cant quite remember. Gotta take a week off for work stuff, but then I'm back. Thank you again for all this info. My main is primary PvE so, from what I gather. Getting that baseline of Hundings and those 6 traits gears from crafting are pretty important for the DPS needed for endgame.

First MMO i've played in almost 10 years, but I take my gaming seriously so trying to gather as much info as I can.

Curragraigue

tymarston wrote: »

@davey1107 That was hugely helpful. Thank you. I confirmed a lot of what I had been encountering in the game. I'd been soloing some public dungeons until the mid 40s and then kinda hit a wall then changed what I was doing with the crafting system and pushed through.

Now onto about 50CP. Maybe 51 cant quite remember. Gotta take a week off for work stuff, but then I'm back. Thank you again for all this info. My main is primary PvE so, from what I gather. Getting that baseline of Hundings and those 6 traits gears from crafting are pretty important for the DPS needed for endgame.

First MMO i've played in almost 10 years, but I take my gaming seriously so trying to gather as much info as I can.

Yes Hunding's is a good starter craftable set for stam DPS. When you hit CP 160 is when you need to start focusing on drop sets and farming some new gear.

davey1107

You’re vet now and earning CPs...it’s all up hill from here, as they say.

You can probably stop recrafting gear now until you hit c160. Then you can collect a setup that’ll probably be semi-permanent. With the enlightenment system, you should hit 160 in a couple of weeks.

So when you hit 160, you’ll want to decide on a setup then start to improve it to (eventually) gold. That’s where you’ll draw a lot of power from as a vet. You can start thinking about setups and looking at end game builds on sites like alcasthq.com. (He always does a beginner setup, then best in slot, which is helpful).