Most effective way to make a crafter without ESO+

Edelner · April 2020

Hi! What is the best way to make crafter if you don't have ESO+? I am thinking about Orc stamblade because his extra 15% passives to craft and mobility to farm materials and simillar stuff.

MerguezMan · April 2020

You don't need ESO+ to make a crafter, except if you expect universal cooking/potion-making.

Just store what you need and get rid of what you don't.

gatekeeper13 · April 2020

I have a crafter character without ESO+. If you plan on crafting items for other people, ask them to bring you the materials. If you just want to craft stuff for yourself, just keep the most used materials. Devote around 50-100 slots (depends on you) from your bank on mats like ingots, leather etc, resins and most used trait materials like impenetratable, divines, sturdy, etc etc.If you want to craft something special (like a Prismatic glyph with Hakeijo), buy it when you need it.

Make sure to unlock the extra chests to place in your house (you buy them with writ vouchers). Great help.

FierceSam · April 2020

Your biggest challenge isn’t going to be your character, it’s going to be the sheer number of different materials you will need to carry ... 100 spaces is just not nearly enough. 200 spaces and an endless crafting bag will seem like total nirvana.

Even when harvesting you’ll have to actively choose what to take and what to leave behind or destroy. When deconstructing, you’ll find yourself immediately disposing of much of the materials you generate.

For writs, you may have to decide between alchemy and provisioning.. both require a load of ‘spare’ ingredients that aren’t easy to get...

I’m not sure how anyone manages to do serious crafting without ESO+ to be honest. I would probably find it easier to just buy everything I needed rather than constantly be juggling crafting stuff as well as everything else.

RD065 · April 2020

Kind of a side note because I'm curious. What happens to your stuff if you go from ESO+ to not ESO+? Do you lose access to all your ingredients right away? Or do they give you time to get rid of or use the surplus? Thanks.

Lysette · April 2020

RD065 wrote: »

Kind of a side note because I'm curious. What happens to your stuff if you go from ESO+ to not ESO+? Do you lose access to all your ingredients right away? Or do they give you time to get rid of or use the surplus? Thanks.

You still have the crafting bag, but you can just remove something from the bag not add something to it anymore.

Jaimeh · April 2020

RD065 wrote: »

Kind of a side note because I'm curious. What happens to your stuff if you go from ESO+ to not ESO+? Do you lose access to all your ingredients right away? Or do they give you time to get rid of or use the surplus? Thanks.

The materials remain in your bag, but you will not able to add more to it. Any extra materials you get will go to your inventory. When you craft something, the game will prioritize materials from your craft bag, so say you want to craft an essence of spell power potion, and you have corn flowers in both your inventory and the craft bag, the game will take those from your craft bag first to use for the potion. As for the bank, you don't lose the items, but the capacity is halved, and you can only deposit things again when you have removed sufficient stuff to drop below the new capacity. Same goes for housing, if you have decorated with the double ESO+ slot capacity, when you remove the subscriprion, the furnishings stay, but you can't add any more.

Ratzkifal · April 2020

I'd make one crafter dedicated to gear (Blacksmithing, Clothier, Woodworking) so you learn crafting motifs only on that one. For sake of completion, you can pickup jewelry craft on that character too, but it will force you to use even more inventory space and skill points on that character.

Alchemy, Provisioning and Enchanting can be separated onto different characters so those crafting materials don't take up space and skill points of your gear crafter.

It's recommended to level Alchemy and Provisioning on all of your characters though for duration extending passives, but once you have those passives you can take the other skill points out and leave only those in the duration passives.

For trait research, I'd recommend you start with the chests, pants, belt, gloves and boots because you will usually wear monster sets on shoulders and hats. Do research divine and infused on those too though for transmuting purposes later.

Noggin_the_Nog · April 2020

FierceSam wrote: »

I’m not sure how anyone manages to do serious crafting without ESO+ .

What is serious crafting? My definition would be a Grand Master Crafter.

I have 2 Grand Master Crafters - one on NA and one on EU - both with ESO+. So my personal challenge in ESO this year was to evolve a GMC on an new account without ESO+. It is hard to do, but possible, and I did the following;

1. Personal Guild Bank. Essential for me as I can transfer and store items including gold transfer.

2. Orc Crafter - maxed inventory and bank from day one, plus riding bag space after 60 days. Multiple trips around my favorite farming area until my inventory was full, then back to base to deconstruct and store mats. Used full dropped training gear. Collected all overland sky shards, including ones from delves, that I could reach - porting to Guild mates helped alot.

3. Crafting Writs - certified from day one - do 6 writs every day

4. Research - started from day one and maxed research slots as soon as possible.

5. Crafting Skill Level - level 50 came quickly in Metal/Wood/Cloth, Provisioning and Alchemy were fast just by creating the best food/drink/potion I could and selling. Enchanting was the slowest, but found lots of glyphs to deconstruct.

6. Slight difficulty with Jewelry Crafting - may have to buy/gift Summerset to complete.

7. Bank - only store materials in the bank. Level 1 and 9 only. Metal/Wood/Cloth/Alchemy Waters max stored 1000, all the rest 200. Having a Guild Bank helps with the excess, but they can be sold easily.

8. Crafting Hirelings - yes please - level 1.

9. Alts - now have 6 - all doing daily writs. Keeping them at crafting level 1. All with Hirelings.

10. Love the current Anniversary Event. Lots of mats and it's helping with Motif knowledge.

Grand Master Crafter requirements -
Professions Master
Unsurpassed Crafter
Trait Master
Jewelry Trait Master
Learn the Nirnhoned Trait
True Style Master
Recipe Compendium
Potency
Botanist

Currently my baby crafter is level 50 in 6 crafts and doing writs at the highest tier. CP430 without grinding. Trait knowledge is complete in Wood, with 4 more to go in Metal/Cloth. Jewelry will come after this Event. Done 56/100 Master Writs and aiming to buy a house storage chest. Motif knowledge is 26/50 - going to be expensive.

After starting in late December I would guess my baby Non-ESO+ crafter will be a Grand Master Crafter in 3 or 4 months.

Hope this helps - it can be done.

Danikat · April 2020

I don't think your race and build really makes a big difference. Although I made my crafter an Imperial so I didn't have to buy the imperial motif, which I think is still around 100k.

I made him a dragonknight, partially because I didn't have one at the time and partially because I'd heard they made good tanks (this was years ago, it might have changed since then) and I imagined good defence would be useful since most of his skill points would be going into crafting so he wouldn't be able to fight very well. But he's so rarely in combat, and never with anything more dangerous than a few wolves, that it really doesn't matter.

FierceSam wrote: »

Your biggest challenge isn’t going to be your character, it’s going to be the sheer number of different materials you will need to carry ... 100 spaces is just not nearly enough. 200 spaces and an endless crafting bag will seem like total nirvana.

Even when harvesting you’ll have to actively choose what to take and what to leave behind or destroy. When deconstructing, you’ll find yourself immediately disposing of much of the materials you generate.

For writs, you may have to decide between alchemy and provisioning.. both require a load of ‘spare’ ingredients that aren’t easy to get...

I’m not sure how anyone manages to do serious crafting without ESO+ to be honest. I would probably find it easier to just buy everything I needed rather than constantly be juggling crafting stuff as well as everything else.

I almost always play without ESO+ and I've never had any of the problems you claimed.

Maybe it helps that I have a dedicated crafter, a character who doesn't do anything except crafting and gathering materials, so he doesn't need tons of inventory space free for loot or spare equipment sets. It also meant I prioritsed the inventory upgrades from mount training rather than speed, and he was the first character to get bag upgrades when I could afford them. He's now also holding all the stuff I'm going to list on my guild trader but don't yet have space for, because it made sense to do that on a character who is always in town, but even then I don't have trouble fitting it all in, with space for crafting writ items.

My system is pretty simple. Blacksmithing, Clothing, Woodworking and Jewelery materials go in his inventory, alchemy, provisioning, enchanting and furnishing go in the bank and trait and style items go in a home storage chest. (I'm using the Advanced Filters addon which allows you to sort the materials tab by those categories, so it's easy to sort it all out.)

I admit the occasional ESO+ free trials can be helpful, because that shifts everything to the crafting bag so things like rare style materials I don't get very often aren't taking up space, without that I might be using 2 storage chests already.

RD065 · April 2020

Jaimeh wrote: »

RD065 wrote: »

Kind of a side note because I'm curious. What happens to your stuff if you go from ESO+ to not ESO+? Do you lose access to all your ingredients right away? Or do they give you time to get rid of or use the surplus? Thanks.

The materials remain in your bag, but you will not able to add more to it. Any extra materials you get will go to your inventory. When you craft something, the game will prioritize materials from your craft bag, so say you want to craft an essence of spell power potion, and you have corn flowers in both your inventory and the craft bag, the game will take those from your craft bag first to use for the potion. As for the bank, you don't lose the items, but the capacity is halved, and you can only deposit things again when you have removed sufficient stuff to drop below the new capacity. Same goes for housing, if you have decorated with the double ESO+ slot capacity, when you remove the subscriprion, the furnishings stay, but you can't add any more.

Thank you.

Lysette wrote: »

RD065 wrote: »

Kind of a side note because I'm curious. What happens to your stuff if you go from ESO+ to not ESO+? Do you lose access to all your ingredients right away? Or do they give you time to get rid of or use the surplus? Thanks.

You still have the crafting bag, but you can just remove something from the bag not add something to it anymore.

Thank you.