Trade Skill for Druid

[drostan54]

I'm a level 35 Druid and I was thinking about starting a trade skill and was wondering whats best for a Druid?

[mr_jon3s]

What race? If a halfing go tailoring. I think halfings get to make leatherfoot haversacks during velious.

[Daldaen]

Unfortunately, tradeskills are useless until Luclin/PoP.

Leatherfoot Haversacks are not classic and will never exist on this server. Those were a Luclin addition. (Yet another reason Luclin is in the top 3 expansions for EQ).

As a druid:


Baking/Brewing - Don't really make any money, very minimal gameplay benefit (minor stat food in Velious), and some roleplay potential (see Greengrocer)
Smithing - This is useful if you are a race with cultural smithing and you have high 200s skill. However of the druid races, Human is the only one with Cultural smithing. So this is largely useless for money making or twinking alts.
Pottery - There is some use in getting Pottery to 120 in Velious to make instant clicky port to Thurgadin potions. Beyond that nothing you can make is useful
Fletching - The arrows and bows you can make aren't really worth anything because bow DPS is weak even when Trueshot is here... And Rangers will have their own bow and make their own arrows
Jewelcrafting - This is one of the few useful tradeskills. The problem is... You can't enchant the bars unless you're an enchanter. So doing this on a druid is generally unwise.
Tailoring - This one has *some* use in Velious. The high end Tailored pieces (Othmir, Holgresh, Arctic Wyvern, Trackraptor, Panther, Black Panther, Ice Burrower, and Cobalt Drake) are useful twink items. However they all have extremely high Trivials (250+). They are expensive to make with just the vendor bought components, not to mention the hides or the Velium bricks. And getting to high Tailoring you need to be a race that can do Cultural (Halfling/Wood Elf work). It's doable to skill up without cultural, but it is an immense pain.

The main use for Tradeskills is to get the Coldain Shawl.

[drostan54]

I'm a halfling.

[Daldaen]

So you could work up your Tailoring if you so choose in Kunark (you need a lot of brute hides from FM/DL/WW), and by Velious have Tailoring around 200-228 ready to try Velious Furs.

But I'm going to warn you... It is a VERY slow path. Tailoring is the worst Tradeskill to skill up. Everything else is relatively easy and just involves throwing money at it. Most of the time you have to farm everything you need for Tailoring.

I'd suggest trying to incorporate some of the Brute Hide farming into your leveling. So try Quadding in Dreadlands the Brutes for example.

http://wiki.project1999.com/Cultural_Tradeskills:_Halfling

Don't expect to get to 200 Tailoring in a month or even 6 months. It's a long road.

[Ele]

Is porting a tradeskill?

[Feanol]

Obviously the most appropriate choice for a Halfling tradeskill is baking.

Halflings love pie.

[maskedmelon]

Halflings love pie.

This is true. I work with one and have firsthand knowledge.

[loramin]

The main use for Tradeskills is to get the Coldain Shawl.

This. In classic EverQuest it's always faster and cheaper to buy whatever tradeskill item you want (10-slot backpacks, wedding rings, SoW potions, whatever) than to learn the tradeskill and make it yourself. When the server first came out that might not have been true, but at this point it's absolutely the case.

But the Shawl isn't something you can buy: to get it you have to have the requisite tradeskills. And the Shawl is one of the only ways a non-raider can get Flowing Thought (mana regen) in the Velious era. Plus those Thurgadin gate potions are part of the Shawl quest, so if you have enough Pottery to get the Shawl you can also make those (no drop) potions.

Either do a tradeskill because it sounds fun and you want to RP it, or do all the tradeskills enough to get the Shawl. If you're trying to do a tradeskill for the money or the phat lewtz it can produce you're going to be very disappointed (in classic EQ at least).

[DrKvothe]

Plenty of tradeskills brought up to the first item of value can rapidly yield a decent return on investment. Smithing to 115 to begin banded cost my troll shaman with self-buffed str (lvl 19 spell) a total of 79pp. The 135 trivial banded pieces (chest, helm, belt, boots, mask) at that point immediately break even, even accounting for failures.

I found the same to be true with SoW, IVU, and shrink pots on my blue sham. The cost from 21 to 70 to trivial shrink pots is easily recovered by selling sow, ivu, and shrink pots when lvling in dungeons (especially "outdoor" but cramped dungeons like KC where shrink pots are godly) or when visiting EC to buy or sell other items.

Jewelcrafting looks to be a great deal more expensive, and obviously severely inconvenient if you're not an enchanter. The lowest stuff that looks like it'll sell fairly well are the 7 char bracers (not for particularly impressive profit either) at 156 trivial. So probably not a good one unless you're very wealthy.

Tailoring doesn't look bad at all. 82 skill til the guide tells you to start making the 10 slot backpacks, and you can farm the silks to get there yourself. This can be a decent passive source of money if you're gonna be sitting around selling your wares or yourself (port whore!) anyways.

Tinkering seems obvious and profitable. You start with 50 skill and spyglasses trivial at 95. You'll likely be making a profit very early on. But if you're a druid this is obviously irrelevant.

[loramin]

Plenty of tradeskills brought up to the first item of value can rapidly yield a decent return on investment.
Only if you don't value your time. It takes both time and plat to level up tradeskills, then it takes (a lot) of time to sit in EC and sell them. When you compare that to how much much you could be making if you went out and killed stuff instead (which, of course, would also come with XP) it quickly becomes obvious that tradeskills make you less money than killing stuff.

Not that I'm trying to hate on tradeskills: I'm a huge fan of them myself. But I just think all new players should understand that tradeskills are there for fun and the Shawl, not for making plat. If you want to make plat go farm something, or better yet level up and farm something good. I guarantee you'll make more money and XP AND have more fun then sitting in the tunnel selling one SoW potion an hour for like 30 plat profit (well, unless you just like hanging out in the tunnel ...)

[DrKvothe]

I found the same to be true with SoW, IVU, and shrink pots on my blue sham. The cost from 21 to 70 to trivial shrink pots is easily recovered by selling sow, ivu, and shrink pots when lvling in dungeons (especially "outdoor" but cramped dungeons like KC where shrink pots are godly) or when visiting EC to buy or sell other items.
...
Tailoring doesn't look bad at all. 82 skill til the guide tells you to start making the 10 slot backpacks, and you can farm the silks to get there yourself. This can be a decent passive source of money if you're gonna be sitting around selling your wares or yourself (port whore!) anyways.


I'm not sure you read past the opening line of my last post so I'll highlight some important parts. I easily sold over 5kpp worth of shrink and IVU pots in KC for the couple of levels I was there. Only about 30% of that is profit, but that's more than enough to cover the costs of alchemy and make the time spent crafting worth the return on investment. If I'd started earlier, I could have made similar profits in CoM. I've sold quite a few of these pots in HS as well. All of this was done while leveling. It's quite easy to get mats quickly to you from anywhere if you have a druid alt, or to tunnel with a lvl 9 troll sham alt. SoW pots aren't usually worth the hassle, but sometimes people put in really big orders and make it worth your while. At the very least, they pay for themselves when going from 21 to 37 skill. I had a lot of customers who lvled in the sames zones as me /friend me and hit me up later for repeat orders. They're fed up of the EC tunnel bullshit too!

You don't have to sit in the EC tunnel to sell your stuff. Porting druids especially could build tailored bag advertisements into their port spam with little difficulty. Carry the mats around with you and make one whenever someone asks. Easy, passive profit that doesn't require any real amount of time away from what you're doing.

This works for other crafters too. Any time you're near a forge and some mail molds, you can make a set of banded armor in a couple of minutes. Take it with you, and sell it from where ever is most convenient while you do other things.

You will be spending time in EC anyways! This one seems intuitive enough. If you're there anyways to sell your crap, may as well have a larger selection of goods. Since working my alchemy, every single time I've visited EC to sell crap but didn't have any pots on me, I've regretted it.

You're eventually going to have stagnant cash anyways! Each class has a degree of gear investment after which the next 5k, 10k, or even 50k pp worth of gear only provide negligible benefits. If you've hit cash camps along the way, you'll reach this point in your 30s, if not then probably 40s. At this point, most of the cash you earn is just going to sit around until you reach the next cash breakpoint. For me those breakpoints were JBB (was 40k a year ago), fungi, and torpor. If it's going to take me 2 months of leveling to save 40k for a JBB, and alchemy can make back any money spent on it without even bothering with EC in just a week or two, then why not?

So when the community here warns new players away from tradeskills because it's a waste of time to sit in EC, it is misleading them. EC tunnel may be a waste of time (although there's few fat cats who don't camp it), but tradeskills themselves don't have to be. I didn't bother with alchemy until far too late thanks to advice like this from the forums, and I regret it.

[loramin]

I'm not sure you read past the opening line of my last post so I'll highlight some important parts.
I read your whole post, but did you read mind? It kind of addressed your entire post:

Only if you don't value your time. It takes both time and plat to level up tradeskills, then it takes (a lot) of time to sit in EC and sell them. When you compare that to how much much you could be making if you went out and killed stuff instead (which, of course, would also come with XP) it quickly becomes obvious that tradeskills make you less money than killing stuff.

Look I am NOT saying you can't make money on tradeskills. What I am saying is, you can make more money, and get some experience while you're at it, by killing stuff. And didn't we all come here to kill stuff, not sit in a tunnel and play EconomyQuest (well, all of us except GreenGrocer I mean)?

I easily sold over 5kpp worth of shrink and IVU pots in KC for the couple of levels I was there. Only about 30% of that is profit, but that's more than enough to cover the costs of alchemy and make the time spent crafting worth the return on investment.
Ok, those potions (the 10-doses) sell for 200 plat. If you sold 5k worth that means you sold 250 IVU potions. 250 is a LOT of potions to sell.

When I sold potions in EC I often went for hours without a single sale, so I think an average sale rate of one per hour (250 hours of selling total) is reasonable. But let's be generous and assume you only sell at peak hours, so you can unload two 10-dose IVU potions an hour. We're still only talking about 1.5k plat for 125 hours of effort, and that doesn't even include the time to run home, buy the components, combine them, run back ....

1.5k plat for 125 hours is not a good way to earn money. By comparison you could earn that same amount of plat in 2-3 hours on Seafury island, or in maybe 5 hours of porting people.

If I'd started earlier, I could have made similar profits in CoM. I've sold quite a few of these pots in HS as well. All of this was done while leveling. It's quite easy to get mats quickly to you from anywhere if you have a druid alt, or to tunnel with a lvl 9 troll sham alt.
Really, you would have brought 250 non-stackable items to CoM or HS to sell? Or you would have brought the (six-slot only) medicine bag and 250 stacks of components (well, more really since you're guaranteed at least a 5% failure rate)? Because it is not "easy to get mats" in either zone.

My point is that the places you want to XP are far from the places where you can buy components, and you can only carry so many components/potions around (especially if you want to be able to loot the monsters you kill). This means that any potion seller is going to have to periodically run to a Shaman city (and then back) from wherever they are XPing ... instead of just staying there and killing.

And even if we're talking about sitting in EC, it still takes time to run to Oggok, buy materials, and run back. Longer still if you have to log out/in several times to switch to an alt and to transfer the materials from the alt back to your main.

You don't have to sit in the EC tunnel to sell your stuff.
Absolutely true, but I've tried selling outside EC too: you just do not sell that many potions that often. Is it a good idea for an enterprising Shaman to carry a few 10-doses of popular potions around with them? Sure! But is doing that going to make a lot of plat? No.

And even if you're not in EC sales still take time: you still have to stop what you're doing, go find the buyer, do the exchange, then run back to wherever you were before you got distracted by the sale.

You will be spending time in EC anyways!
There's spending a couple hours in the tunnel to buy that JBB (or whatever) you've been saving for, and then there's spending ... well however long it takes you to sell 250 IVU potions. We're talking a handful of hours vs. a hundred plus hours. Most players will not be spending hundreds of hours in the tunnel.

If it's going to take me 2 months of leveling to save 40k for a JBB, and alchemy can make back any money spent on it without even bothering with EC in just a week or two, then why not?
How about because if you spent that time just leveling you'd earn more plat than you would have doing alchemy AND you get XP doing it?

I didn't bother with alchemy until far too late thanks to advice like this from the forums, and I regret it.

You may have noticed I hedged my claim at the end:
unless you just like hanging out in the tunnel ...

If you're going to be a tunnel quester anyway then yes you can make (some) money on tradeskills. It'd be silly of me to deny that. But unless you're already spending a ton of time in EC (and I'd argue most players don't) then tradeskills just aren't that profitable. They can make money, but so can adventuring.

Plus, if you are a true TunnelQuester you should be spending your time on arbitrage not on tradeskills. In a single "buy low sell high" transaction you can make easily make 100x or even 1,000x the plat you'd make on even the most profitable tradeskill transaction.

So look, I <3 tradeskills. I have my Alchemy skill up pretty high, and I have every other tradeskill except Tailoring at Shawl levels or higher. And I'll freely admit you can make some money on tradeskills.

All I'm saying is that "making some money" isn't enough to honestly call tradeskills profitable. To say that you'd have to show that you can make significantly more money crafting and selling stuff than you could killing monsters and selling their stuff.

[DrKvothe]

I'm baffled and frustrated at this point. You managed to make EVERY quote from me about focusing on selling pots instead of playing the game, even though my entire post was about how you NEVER have to stop doing what you're already doing to sell your pots.

Also, 1500 platinum over 125 hours from selling 2 10-dose IVU pots (400pp total) per hour?

Nevermind, I'm done here. I've left a cogent argument for others to comprehend, even if you insist on twisting my words into the exact opposite of what I'm saying just to prove your point. Good day, sir, I will see you later in other threads.

[loramin]

I'm baffled and frustrated at this point. You managed to make EVERY quote from me about focusing on selling pots instead of playing the game, even though my entire post was about how you NEVER have to stop doing what you're already doing to sell your pots.
Baffled? Your post was about "how you NEVER have to stop" and my post was about "yes, actually you do". Seems clear enough.

Also, 1500 platinum over 125 hours from selling 2 10-dose IVU pots (400pp total) per hour?
Shoot, I somehow lost a zero somewhere. 250 potions * 200 plat/potion = 50,000 plat. 50,000 plat * 30% profit margin = 15k, not 1.5k. My apologies: I get why you were baffled there.

But I think my argument still stands, it's just not as extreme. If you compare that to Seafuries you're talking 20-30 hours, or if you compare porting it's 50 hours; both are a lot less than 125. And again, that 125 was just the time to sell, assuming a (generous) rate of sale of two potions an hour; it did not even include the time to create or run back and forth. And that's 125 hours of 0 experience.

Other than that I don't think there's anything to be baffled by. You seemed to ignore a lot of the time involved, and I drew attention to it. Not much more to it than that.

Nevermind, I'm done here. I've left a cogent argument for others to comprehend, even if you insist on twisting my words into the exact opposite of what I'm saying just to prove your point. Good day, sir, I will see you later in other threads.
Fair enough; I think we've both made our points, and others can decide what they think.