OK so there are crafts where you can upgrade the quality of the crafted item (Blacksmithing, Woodcrafting, Clothing). For those you get most of your experience from deconstructing items you find or deconstructing items crafted by other players. Crafting items yields little experience. Deconning items you make on your account yields little experience. You tend to max these out a bit before cold harbor.

For these crafts you want to start researching traits asap. It takes around 50 days for a crafter with the research perks unlocked to fully research all of the traits for an item (ex, Ice Staffs, or Daggers). With fully unlocked research traits, you can research 3 traits at a time (for each craft). You need these researched to make set items. This is the long pole in the tent for the upgradable crafts. You can typically get players to make you traited items for 500g or less to research which is a good investment for the rarer traits.

Then there are two "consumables" crafts (Provisioning and Alchemy). Crafting yields solid xp. Just collect ingredients as you level up, craft and you can be capped by the mid 20's or maybe a bit later iirc.

Then their is the alien craft, Enchanting. For god's sakes don't try to level enchanting on your own. In general you get decent xp from deconning dropped glyphs up to around level 10-15 (you will only find white glyphs to decon from drops). After that you really need to find a partner to craft with. The best exchange of xp per costs is to trade green glyphs. The xp ratio for decon vs crafting is maybe 4-1 or worse. The xp values multiplier for color goes something like: white 1x, green 4x, blue 5x, purple 6x, yellow 7x. You can certainly craft and trade whites, but your xp will be limited. Crafting and trading greens is great since not many players want green glyphs. Crafting and trading blues works well. I was able to level enchanting without needed to buy many runes, but I had 3 VR1+ characters, all of who had collected runes while leveling. If you go it alone, you could end up at VR12 and enchanting only in the 30-40 range.

Nestor wrote: »

Do not discount the amount of Exp you get when Researching, especially when the times start taking 3.5 days or longer. It's a huge amount of experience, and it's fun to log in and see the message about one of your crafting skills increasing because research finished when you were logged off. You can get 1/3 to 1/2 a level just by researching an item that takes some time.

Ah I didn't realise that, I was wondering why I get crafting levels sometimes when I log in.
Cheers.