What's the best form of crafting?

Torasi · April 2014

A simple question that should clearly have many answers. I myself am not much of a crafter and would certainly like to build my game more in that direction, even create a toon simply for crafting. I would love to hear some of the pros and cons to each crafting, and all the personal opinions that come with crafting.

amanfr01 · April 2014

I think the 'best form' of crafting is what suits you and your class's focus. Say you're a Nightblade that dual wields and wears medium armor. That's a perfect excuse to level your blacksmithing and clothing lines. In terms of enchanting/alchemy, if you're willing to spend more skill points into a third crafting line, then I recommend picking one of the two.

It's ultimately up to you. You could go nuts and level ALL of your crafting, but you might want to focus on 2-3.

huntgod_ESO · April 2014

To max out a specific craft line you will need:

10pts - material (so you can work with all the available ores up to VR)

So feasibly you could do this on any toon, though I'd run them up to lvl 10, so you can at least run through cyrodil for shards to help round things out.

Now, I'd also strongly recommend:

3pt - Hireling (worth it as you level up)
3pt - Extraction (you need this for efficiency)
3pt - Research (handy, but you can respec and drop this once you have everything you need)
3pt - Improvement (those honing stones and dwarven oils are costly, so use as few as possible)

So all total - 22pts per craft skill, 19 if you drop the researcher

Of course you will need someone gathering for you...

Food4Thought · April 2014

Food is easy to level and can make you some coin when vendor selling the cooked goods.

Blacksmithing, clothier, and woodworking, are about equal in difficulty. But some people complain about leather being only gatherable by killing critters or deconstructing found items. it is recommended to partner with someone leveling all three.

Alchemy can be slow to level and when you fail to make a potion you gain no crafting experience.

Enchanting is by far the worse. Ta's and the like tend to be few and far between and the need to constantly look for resources gets discouraging.

Some people say there is no money in crafting only in resource gathering and selling to vendors. I don't agree with this belief. There is money to be made but you have to work to earn it. Your customers won't jump out of the woodwork to knock on your door.

Inventory space can be pressed with crafting. It is not recommended that you take on all of the crafting at the same time. Enchanting and Provisioning tend to take up the most space.

SadisticSavior · April 2014

Torasi wrote: »

A simple question that should clearly have many answers. I myself am not much of a crafter and would certainly like to build my game more in that direction, even create a toon simply for crafting. I would love to hear some of the pros and cons to each crafting, and all the personal opinions that come with crafting.

1) Alts are largely superfluous in the game and might even slow your crafting progress. You do not have to make the same compromises for crafting in this game as in other MMOs.
2) The most immediately useful is probably Tailoring or Blacksmith. The easiest to level is probably provisioning followed by Alchemy. The hardest is Enchanting.

What is most useful to you personally will depend on your character. For a sorcerer (for example) Tailoring and Woodworking are what I'd start with. For a DK, Blacksmithing.

Chirru · April 2014

The Best form of Crafting?
I assume that you are after the most useful crafting professions...

The most useful professions are those who
a) directly benefit your Character Class
b) are most useful to your character in general.
c) are relatively easy to level.

With that in mind... my personal conclusion is:

a) Armor and weapon producing crafts according to your Class.
b) Provisioning
These are the most beneficial and also the most easy and quickly to level

Enchanting and Alchemy I recommend only if you are a 'friend-group player'.
What do I mean by this? A guild person.

The most experience in crafting comes NOT from creating items but from destroying items not created by your own Character. This figures...someone in (my personal opinion) Z-Max has fallen onto his or her head.

The most item articles found in the game are dedicated toward the weapon and armor producing professions. Hence these Crafts are relatively easy to level.

Enchanting and Alchemy however depend on just as many resources without being as readily available. Yes, there are harvesting nodes where you get these items. However, they do not drop not at all...or rarely as loot that can be taken apart.

The result is that someone else has to create the items and ship them to you so as for you to take these items apart so as to gain reasonable experience. A (in my opinion) highly convoluted process.

Naturally... you can level a second Char to do so and ship the items between the two characters. This of course is all terribly time consuming. For this reason I personally stay away from Enchanting and only engage into Alchemy to a limited degree since Enchantments and Potions can be bought readily from Vendors and are reasonably prized.

In other words...it is much more effective to level only the Crafts (and invest the skill-points) that your Character class benefits the most from. The rest of the crafts...meh... buy the stuff from vendors as you need it. At least that is my opinion on the matter.

Naturally...if you think you must level all crafts up...by all means do so, but be prepared for a lot of frustration in that case.