Since you're just starting out, I think the most useful hireling would be the Provisioner hireling, since there is a wide array of provisioning ingredients and they're not as easy to farm. You can go to dungeons that have a lot of provisioning containers, but the hireling helps to build up all those mats. Plus, you have a chance at the purple mats.
Plus, provisioning is one of the easier crafts to level, though you do need to find recipes first. When you hit level 5 (or 6? can't remember what level), go to the capital of the first zone (Davon's Watch for Ebonheart Pact, e.g.) and pick up the quest for the provisioning writ certification. Once completed, you will receive all the recipes to complete the writs for Tier 1. You can purchase the writ recipes from brewer and chef NPC vendors for the higher tier writs, and many green recipes can be purchased from other players at the guild traders. Plus you can loot some recipes from containers but these are usually owned containers, so you'll be stealing them. But enemies will occasionally drop recipes as well.
I don't think the other hirelings are quite as useful as a sources of mats. They are a decent supplement, but to get the most value, you need to spend all three points, and skill points are often at a premium on alts unless you level them and find skyshards for them.
I disagree slightly with the advice you got. I have ten characters...they all craft and do writs to some degree. My advice on your specific questions:
Crafting on your main: you can do this now with One Tamriel since you can reach all the sky shards whenever you need. If you don't mind hunting shards, your main is a good option. A second strategy is using a main for smith, wood and cloth and moving the consumables to an alt. Then your main learns motifs, and the alt holds all the junk for enchanting, provisioning and alchemy. There's not a lot of long term commitment in the consumables...no motifs, and no research. So you can pretty easily transfer these from a main to an alt or back any time you need to. If you start on your main and then feel,pressed for skill points, roll and alt and spend a few thousand gold,to recast your points.
Hirelings: it's very helpful to have a craft bag if you're going to use a lot of hirelings. If not, devise a storage system because the mats will ADD UP, lol. My system before the craft bag came along was to store items with an alt for raw mats, one for refined and style stones, one for enchanting, and one for alchemy and provision. I'd open the appropriate emails with the appropriate alt, and there you go. It's a bit of a pain, but once you get used to it the process isn't so bad.
The hirelings do pay off. Provisioning hirelings will bring you purple mats, which are quite valuable to sell. Enchanting is very helpful because runes are a pain to farm. And the craft skill hireling deliver a lot of purples...plus you'll get golds from refining all the raw mats they bring. So it's up to you. For me, skill points are cheap, and if it's a character I log into every day and I don't mind the inventory management...why not get free stuff?
Writs: daily writs are far more valuable than hirelings, and you control the influx of junk, lol. Once you're level 4-5ish in each of the trade lines, you can get certified by a specialist in the fighter and mage guild,in your starter city. Then once per day you can pick up a quest for that trade from a board in any major city. The writs ask you to make some junk and drop it off at a specific location. Some tips on writs:
- read a guide first, knowing the basics will save time and frustration.
- What you're asked to make and where you drop it is determined by the number of points spent in the first passive of that skill. If you keep these all leveled together, your writs will drop in the same place and be easier.
- Writs reward you "inspiration" (xp to level that line), quite a bit of gold (300-650 per writ), items to deconstruct for leveling, plus special rare rewards like gold mats, recipes, and surveys to special mega-nodes.
- writs eat up a lot of mats, but they pay a lot of gold. If you do them, you might need to invest some of your profits on mats in guild stores so you don't spend all your time farming.
Other random tips:
- during the birthday event daily writs reward a gold box with some really valuable stuff...rare mats, motifs, etc. Now is a great time to start! If you get addicted to the gold boxes, and if you're level ten and can get into Cyrodiil, the PVE dailies in the five towns also reward these and you can earn dozens a day. Just FYI.
- don't stress too much about crafting. If you want to learn it, go ahead. If you hate aspect of it, no worries. There's nothing imperative in the craft system and you can have a ton of fun playing it endlessly, or skipping it entirely.
- if you decide to be a crafter and want to make crafted armor sets, one of the longest grinds in the game is researching traits. It takes a year of real time to do it all. So start as soon as you figure the system out!
- when learning all the crafting crap i totally relied on an iOS / android app called ESO workbench. It's pretty simple...it tracks and times your research, has a potions/poison building section, and has a glyph building section. And a recipe list. It's main use is for that trait research...very helpful.
Wreuntzylla wrote: »My opinion falls closer to @davey1107
If you are in this game for the long haul, make as many alts as you are comfortable making up front and start researching on all of them. Funnel all your intricate traited gear to one toon at a time, switch to another when that one is capped.
The thing to realize is that it's tough to start but eventually you reach a tipping point where your crafting becomes a business that doesn't require much maintenance. Each max crafter, if running 6 writs per day, will bring in between 4k and 5k gold, up to 3 intricate traited items, repair kits, empty soul gems, mats, etc. So the more maxed crafters you have the more of everything that comes in. I started with two accounts to have one for PvP and one for PvE, but the resource river just gets bigger and bigger, and I just kept banking the intricate gear and spending a few minutes deconstructing on one toon. By the time you get to your 15th+ alt, you are sending it so much intricate gear every day that it will level super fast without you doing anything but writs. I know it seems counter intuitive at first, but the more crafters you have the easier things get until your crafting just expands on its own without much effort.
So how is this a low maintenance business? As it turns out, you can make writ product before getting a writ. Using alchemy as the example,you craft 100 stam pots, 100 magicka pots, 100 health pots and 100 ravage health pots for each maxed crafter. For a provisioner, trhere are 12 food/drink items used, make a stack of each of those. Get Dolgubon's add-on for the rest. I can run 12-15 writs in an hour and the time it takes to run through your premade pots and foods is, well, close to a year.
The time sink you do face is with keeping enough materials on hand for blacksmithing, tailoring and woodworking, but you can make the choice, as I did, to spend a portion of your earnings on mats and only harvest surveys. My only continuing issue is with nirnroot and ancestor silk, both of which are outrageously expensive on the guild traders and difficult to farm. (Alchemy requires 3 nirnroot and 1 pot per writ.) Wood and rubedo are almost free if you visit the right guild traders (use tamrieltradecentre.com) and rubedite just a bit more expensive, I'll typically go buy enough of those three once every couple of months, usually stocking up to 6k of each.
I save up the surveys and only run a survey when I have a few of the same one. When you have multiples of the same survey, you get multiple loads of mats. Once you harvest once, you walk away a sight distance and then come back. It repops, you harvest again, walk away, come back... So you make one trip to kill off several surveys in only slightly more time than it typically takes to farm one survey. When I am in PvP addiction mode, I'll only go get the surveys that are close to the wayshrines (use Lost Treasure addon) and let the distant ones pile up higher. I typically spend an hour or so a weekend on surveys.
Take the time to build one crafter per account for speed. I use jailbreaker and Fiords. My orc sprints faster than the average player using rapids on a maxed horse. It is unbelievable how much time you waste traveling and you really don't get a feel for it until you go collect survey materials or harvest something on a toon built for speed. It cuts the time sink by more than half.
You should run all your crafting alts through the Cyrodiil starter quest for the two skill points and invest one in rapids for speed at level 10. Even if you like quests and whatnot, its a godsend.
Now, if you followed me this far you'll realize that your bringing in alot of gold or sellable items every day for about an hours investment, much more than you need to buy mats (except nirnroot and ancestor silk). I use what I don't spend on mats to buy motifs the rest of the week (and frankly whatever else I want or need). So, again, once you reach the tipping point, your craft business fuels itself. I spend about 10 hours a week on the craft business including 1 hour a day for writs, but only now due to the anniversary event (I get 10-20 motifs a day from writs and another 10 or so from Cyrodiil dailies). I usually spend half that time during non-anniversary event time, and just run the capped crafters (capped = maxed skill + motifs + purple recipes + etc.)
Master writs are a far greater time sink and I don't even want to do the low writ value ones anymore, the value just isn't there for the time spent and mats you use.
One more note. While leveling up your crafters, if you run writs, keep the skill levels across all crafts equal. otherwise you have to go to multiple locations to turn in the writs. I have a couple I am bringing up now that I started running writs for the anniversary boxes, and going to more than one place soaks up way more time than I am willing to sink into non-PvP activity.
The only other real trick to this whole thing is farming skill points, I'll