Well a couple things.

You probably will want to consolidate your crafting to one character. At least the equipment stuff. Motifs and researching on multiple characters becomes tiresome.

As you put points into your skill passives you will recover more and better items.

Leveling up your skill line takes time or a lot of very high level items to deconstruct.

Basically, take one of your crafters and level them up to about 40 or so. You need 66 to 75 skill points to max out equipment crafting on one character (depending on how many points you put into Keen Eye for each line). Then figure about 15 to 20 skill points if you want them to be able defend themselves while farming (or not, you can always park your crafters but some crafting stations you have to go through hostile mobs to get to) Come to think of it, you probably want to level your crafter to at least VR1 and finish the MQ so you have access to all the special crafting stations in the game.

While doing that, decon everything you get and you should level your crafting along with your character. Do the trait research while leveling. Once you get them ranked then you can respect them into a dedicated crafter.

I've been playing since XB1 release and am only 43 and have one character for adventuring and crafting. Provisioning is maxed with everything else around 25-30ish. I deconstruct nearly everything I find and have noticed that much of the gear I find in dungeons with no trait/enchantments....which I call baseline gear.....often gives me no materials. I do get some experience though. I'm not sure if this is relevant to what you asked, but it's an observation. As I've leveled to a point where I can get nearly 50-75 gold for those items...and I know they usually won't give me mats, I reconsider taking the xp over the gold.

I started out the game this way. I used my very first character in a long-abandoned alliance to turn into my crafter while I leveled up new characters in an alliance I had immigrated into for friends. It has severely screwed me over in the long run.

Firstly - this won't concern you much while you're still leveling up but in a month or so when you are at the level cap where you will remain for the rest of your playing life, you will run into the following BIG concerns:

1. Materials. You can run around with your current 'main' now and farm materials and send it to your 'crafters' to refine and craft. Once you reach veteran rank 16 - you can only farm the required material in two places - Cyrodiil and Orsinium. And you can only do that if you have crafting rank 10 in each associated crafting tree. So you can't play the way you're playing now. You can't run around Orsinium with your main character you enjoy playing because it has all the skills and gear to look for materials. You will have to park your main character (might as well delete it, as I'll explain below) and get your crafter into Orsinium, doesn't matter if you don't like the class, he has no skill points, gear or is still level 14.

You will be automatically 'scaled' to v16 (this means you will have the HP, magicka, stamina and spell/weapon damage of a moderate vet 16 but still only the 5 skills you've unlocked at level 14). And god forbid you split your crafting across multiple character - you will need to farm for materials separately for each. But you're thinking, 'that's not a big deal, how long does it take to grab 15-20 nodes to craft one thing?' Nope my friend. Only 1/3rd of the nodes you encounter will yield top tier stuff, the rest will yield one tier down. So for every 10 pieces of mats you need, you will need to farm roughly 30. Again this would be pretty bad but not the worst if not for the fact that a single piece of veteran 16 gear requires 10 times the number of materials. So if you're thinking, I get to play 2 hours a day - I can play on my crafter(s) for 30 minutes to farm materials and then switch to my main for the rest of the evening, consider that your effective farming requirements have roughly increased 300 times. You will end up farming materials for 90 minutes every evening for 1 week to make 1 new set of gear. And this is if you're lucky and assuming you don't have to compete with fellow farmers for every node.

Forget about grabbing 100 or so nodes while running around a zone doing your quests and upgrading your gear or trying out something new by the end of the evening. You need to farm roughly 300-450 raw nodes for 1 max level hat. Now you're thinking, what if just make gear one tier lower so I can actually play the game instead of farming - you can but don't expect to be able to remotely compete with people in top level gear. There will be a power differential of 15-20%.

2. Certain Motifs and style materials. You're a crafter, naturally you want to aim, at some reasonable point, to have most of the crafting styles available. Or you want to be able to craft unique motifs for players for a charge to cover the time and investment you put into all the effort. Surely, you'll be able to do this right? Weeeell, nope. Two hot new motifs introduced by Orsinium rely on motif knowledge to drop style materials effectively cutting your 'main' off from the rewards. If you run around Orsinium, you have a small chance to loot Casserite which is required for crafting in the Ancient Orc style. If you know pages of the style, you have a higher chance to loot Casserite. So naturally, your main character is again useless for farming for this important resource. So you think, okay. I'll use my crafter to do easier overland PvE content and do more challenging stuff like veteran dungeons (for the highly desirable monster helm sets) on my main. Wrong again. One of the more popular motifs is Mercenary, and its acquired by doing Veteran Dungeons. Fair enough you think, I can get it on my main and just have my crafter learn it. Wrong. Unless you know this style, you will never, ever see the style material - laurel, which only reliably drops from the final boss if you know 100% of the motif. You're thinking okay. It's inconvenient for sure, I'll just buy it from a guild store - wrong once more - it's Bound on Pickup and only the player who loots it can use it. Sure you can transfer it to your bank but unless your crafter is doing pledges, you're not going to see it. No problem you think, I'll level up my crafter to v1 and do pledges anyway until you do veteran White Gold Tower that one time on your crafter and get a helm at v1 when you've been trying for weeks and weeks to get it on your main.

I won't blame you if you sit and wonder why you bothered to have two characters. Go on. Delete that useless main now. There's no point.

Learn all your crafts, every single one of them, on your one main character . Don't ever level a second one because you will miss out on important loot if you ever make the mistake of logging into them. And with the extra time you have freed up, go out in the sunshine, read a book, play Witcher 3.

Whatever you do, don't level a separate crafter.

- Sincerely,

A crafter since April 2014

Lithium Flower wrote: »

I started out the game this way. I used my very first character in a long-abandoned alliance to turn into my crafter while I leveled up new characters in an alliance I had immigrated into for friends. It has severely screwed me over in the long run.

Firstly - this won't concern you much while you're still leveling up but in a month or so when you are at the level cap where you will remain for the rest of your playing life, you will run into the following BIG concerns:

1. Materials. You can run around with your current 'main' now and farm materials and send it to your 'crafters' to refine and craft. Once you reach veteran rank 16 - you can only farm the required material in two places - Cyrodiil and Orsinium. And you can only do that if you have crafting rank 10 in each associated crafting tree. So you can't play the way you're playing now. You can't run around Orsinium with your main character you enjoy playing because it has all the skills and gear to look for materials. You will have to park your main character (might as well delete it, as I'll explain below) and get your crafter into Orsinium, doesn't matter if you don't like the class, he has no skill points, gear or is still level 14.

You will be automatically 'scaled' to v16 (this means you will have the HP, magicka, stamina and spell/weapon damage of a moderate vet 16 but still only the 5 skills you've unlocked at level 14). And god forbid you split your crafting across multiple character - you will need to farm for materials separately for each. But you're thinking, 'that's not a big deal, how long does it take to grab 15-20 nodes to craft one thing?' Nope my friend. Only 1/3rd of the nodes you encounter will yield top tier stuff, the rest will yield one tier down. So for every 10 pieces of mats you need, you will need to farm roughly 30. Again this would be pretty bad but not the worst if not for the fact that a single piece of veteran 16 gear requires 10 times the number of materials. So if you're thinking, I get to play 2 hours a day - I can play on my crafter(s) for 30 minutes to farm materials and then switch to my main for the rest of the evening, consider that your effective farming requirements have roughly increased 300 times. You will end up farming materials for 90 minutes every evening for 1 week to make 1 new set of gear. And this is if you're lucky and assuming you don't have to compete with fellow farmers for every node.

Forget about grabbing 100 or so nodes while running around a zone doing your quests and upgrading your gear or trying out something new by the end of the evening. You need to farm roughly 300-450 raw nodes for 1 max level hat. Now you're thinking, what if just make gear one tier lower so I can actually play the game instead of farming - you can but don't expect to be able to remotely compete with people in top level gear. There will be a power differential of 15-20%.

2. Certain Motifs and style materials. You're a crafter, naturally you want to aim, at some reasonable point, to have most of the crafting styles available. Or you want to be able to craft unique motifs for players for a charge to cover the time and investment you put into all the effort. Surely, you'll be able to do this right? Weeeell, nope. Two hot new motifs introduced by Orsinium rely on motif knowledge to drop style materials effectively cutting your 'main' off from the rewards. If you run around Orsinium, you have a small chance to loot Casserite which is required for crafting in the Ancient Orc style. If you know pages of the style, you have a higher chance to loot Casserite. So naturally, your main character is again useless for farming for this important resource. So you think, okay. I'll use my crafter to do easier overland PvE content and do more challenging stuff like veteran dungeons (for the highly desirable monster helm sets) on my main. Wrong again. One of the more popular motifs is Mercenary, and its acquired by doing Veteran Dungeons. Fair enough you think, I can get it on my main and just have my crafter learn it. Wrong. Unless you know this style, you will never, ever see the style material - laurel, which only reliably drops from the final boss if you know 100% of the motif. You're thinking okay. It's inconvenient for sure, I'll just buy it from a guild store - wrong once more - it's Bound on Pickup and only the player who loots it can use it. Sure you can transfer it to your bank but unless your crafter is doing pledges, you're not going to see it. No problem you think, I'll level up my crafter to v1 and do pledges anyway until you do veteran White Gold Tower that one time on your crafter and get a helm at v1 when you've been trying for weeks and weeks to get it on your main.

I won't blame you if you sit and wonder why you bothered to have two characters. Go on. Delete that useless main now. There's no point.

Learn all your crafts, every single one of them, on your one main character . Don't ever level a second one because you will miss out on important loot if you ever make the mistake of logging into them. And with the extra time you have freed up, go out in the sunshine, read a book, play Witcher 3.

Whatever you do, don't level a separate crafter.

- Sincerely,

A crafter since April 2014

It's not quite as bad as it seems.

If you farm mats, you take your crafter to orsinium and farm mats. True the ultimate nodes do not drop 100% and v16 cost x100 v15. But it's not a huge difference in stats.

If you play your main, you will still get equipment drops which can be seconded on your crafter to get the new materials. It is not an ideal way. But it does add a nice perk to characters who play and craft.

I have maxed crafting on my crafter obviously and nearly maxed out my main. It's not too difficult to do and now I can get drops and nodes from my main.

The crafting skill level is the easy part. As a new crafter make sure to research traits asap. Last thing you want is to hit lvl 50 clothing and not be able to make a complete set. Research, research, research! Buy the item at a guild trader for the required trait if need be but try to always have a trait researching at all times. It takes so long to get 6 traits on 5 items. It takes even longer if you don't start now.

Helgish wrote: »

Sorry but there is probably hundreds of these threads and I just didn't find them in here, I googled and found threads on places like reddit but not here and not very recent either. Those I found were over 400 days old and things tend to change during a 400 day period.

So to the question and need of explanation:

The crafting system, rather the deconstruct mechanism. I have 3 alts, one for woodworking, one for clothing and one for blacksmithing. They are all adventure lvl 3 and somewhere around lvl 6-7 in their craft lvl.

With my main I send items around lvl 19 for them to deconstruct. The only problem is I get a VERY small amount of xp and NO resources at all, all I get is the message "No usable items found".

From what I read on other threads, people speculate in decon being influenced by your adventure lvl, which I along with the others in those threads find extremly stupid? Why the F-CK would your adventure level have anything todo with your crafting abillities?

I would definitely understand if I'm not able to decon lvl 19 items and get usable items when my crafting level is 6, but I certainly hope I will be able to decon those items when my crafting skill is higher?

How does the system work? Please explain this for me. What are the level caps before I start lose materials when deconning? Anyone who can explain it thoroughly for me?

Thank you very much, I really appriciate you taking the time to answer this

Simple...you get less materials salvaged and less experience from items you created. It doesn't matter if its on the same character or made on it one character and sent to another...you created it. If you want to level your crafting faster breaking things down then deconstruct drops you pick up or have a higher level crafter friend make items for you to deconstruct.