Do you know your Traits? If you have not been researching Traits, start now. You get plenty of Inspiration from that too.

And, you don't need to be any more than L40 to make the armor with Voidstone, so no need to really push it to L50 unless you want the last research passive. And, you don't need that until you start your 8th and 9th traits.

lol, Tamriel is full of thieves apparently.

agulus57 wrote: »

You can lvl faster by stealing and deconstructing. Everything u steal will be at your current character lvl so the XP gained from deconstructing is great and much faster than making items. Look for areas that have stores with w and armor and steal away. You can leave the area to another area and steal from there. Then go back to where you stole the first time and everything should have respawned. There is also the chance that some items will be green items as well as getting better tempers from deconstructing. You'll want to have put skill points in blacksmithing especially deconstructing. Dont waste skill points on miner hireling its worthless. Do this for clothing and woodworking as well and you'll be maxed out in no time. Research everything you can when u can if not look ay what you need and buy from a guild store or trader its much faster. Put skill points in lowering research times as well.

Stealing is one option. You also run the risk of having to deal with guards who will make you pay a fine and take back everything you've spent time stealing. Not worth it IMO. A much more effective way of farming ingots and leveling is by going into a lowbie humanoid delve and looting all weapon racks then logging out and logging back in to repopulate all items in the instance. It scales to your level. No running around from place to place. No guards. Very simple. Very efficient. You'll get the occasional green also.

Technically you won't receive as much Inspiration off of white items as you would from greens or blues, but the sheer number of weapons you can loot will net you fast levels.

As far as hirelings, yes, you want them. 2/3 points into hirelings nets you a good amount of rare improvement materials you would otherwise have to farm for hours to get...for no work at all. Better yet, make alts and powerlevel them to rank 3 in 3 different professions and have them all get hirelings then you'll be up to your eyes in mats like me! If you're worried about "wasting" 2 measly points for a hireling, chances are you're specced inefficiently. You can always go skyshard hunting if you need spare points also.

Lowering research times is fine, however, it might be prudent to actually look online and see what builds require what traits. If you're a tank for example, and all you do is tank and all you're ever going to do is tank, you probably don't need to research DPS-type traits. It really just depends on how you plan on using your smith. If it's just for gear for yourself you can put a couple points into research, but once you've got your go-to traits researched for weapons and armor there's zero reason to keep the points in there.

Just my two cents.