ELI5 Tradeskills

[ShadowKing]

(Explain to me like I'm 5 tradeskills) I'm playing this game blind with nothing but a pure passion for Everquest. I didn't get very far with tradeskills in c. 2001 because I was just having too much fun trolling general chat and wood elves in Gfay but now I'm back again and wondering what's the best way to level up tradeskills? What's the route an armor wearer should take? Blacksmithing, jewel crafting? I guess everyone should take up baking and brewing? Thanks.

[ko37qtl]

If you're pragmatic, don't bother with the tradeskills until you are higher level and have money to burn. If you must and also need some armor, tailoring is easy and practical to make poor quality leather armor. Combine a ruined bear/cat/wolf pelt with a pattern for large/medium/small races respectively in a tailoring kit or at a loom (scattered around in most cities).

It's also very easy to buy sharpening stones in most cities and combine with rusty weapons to make them tarnished and a bit lower delay in forges. Blacksmithing gets more involved and expensive after those go trivial. Bigger weapons have slightly higher trivials than smaller ones.

[ShadowKing]

Tradeskills seem hard in this game. I don't see anywhere that explains them well.

[Sorn]

The best way to level up tradeskills is to do them as you go along! A lot of players prefer to get it all done at once, which is why most advise waiting until you're high level with lots of money to spare; however, this does not have to be the path you choose if you want to master a craft.

Like most of the game, tradeskills get progressively more difficult the farther along you get. Recipes get more complicated, materials become more difficult to gather, and you need more help from fellow players to make your pieces.

Take tailoring for example! The first things you make are silk threads, silk swatches, silk bandages, and silk cords. These are all basic building blocks for the rest of tailoring, and they can all be made from materials gathered from spiderlings (lvl 1-3 mobs) and spiders (anywhere from lvl 3 to 15). You can create patchwork armor from the ruined pelts of newbie mobs like black wolves or black bears or pumas. Then you can take the silk cords from earlier and create tailored bags (newbie's first weight reduction bag!) and the like from pelts that one might naturally accumulate during the leveling process. Eventually you'll find yourself making handmade backpacks, and then Wu's Fighting Armor (with the help of an enchanter and maybe a brewer - player cooperation!), and then suddenly you are collecting the hides/pelts of cobalt drakes or haze panthers and making truly high end armor as you adventure!

As you can see, they're progressive and you can take on the task of leveling up a tradeskill in tandem with leveling yourself up. If you don't choose to do that and instead level it up all at once, you can help poor newbies along in the process by buying the materials they collect, which will help them buy their spells or some good gear and continue on with their own adventures.

Currently on this server, you can only master 1 tradeskill past 200. The most popular right now are jewelcraft (for enchanters, generally), tailoring (which is extremely difficult near the end) and smithing (cultural). The rest can be done for roleplay purposes (rangers who fletch, dwarves who brew, and halflings who bake, for example), although some quests may require mastery of certain tradeskills (Trueshot Bow, for example, or the Coldain prayer shawl quests).

So yes, they can be really hard, but they aren't harder than dungeon-crawling. I'm pretty sure adventuring and tradeskilling go hand in hand, actually :)

[Pokesan]

If you want a picture of EQ tradeskills, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

[Daywolf]

For what? For the str buffs? All you need is brewing and baking for that. Baking is super easy to raise to the stat food you could use, just mostly buy wolf meat off of newbie visited vendors, like the one up the newbie lift in gfay. Then when you get there, as a starting player you shouldn't have any problems getting bear meat for the stats when you visit EC there abouts. Then mammoth meat if you fear kite them later out in everfrost.

Making booze is easy too, at least early on if you are still in gfay. Later though, if you raised it high, I'd recommend maybe rivervale. But you don't need to really raise it high if you are just using it for the str buff. In fact you could just buy short beers/ales or something off a vendor.

I don't recommend making jewelcrafting for some starter silver junk unless you have an enc to enchant.

As a ranger, you could use tailoring, though not important for a ranger compared to say a druid that can imbue on armor. Shammy can too, but not the right armor for them. But for making tailored bags and quivers it's not bad to have.

A good tradeskill for a ranger is fletching. More or less to make 150 range wood point arrows for pulling. You could work your way up to making trueshot longbows, but that'll cost ~600pp to that point, and you could buy the bow for ~350pp. But between the two you get 300 range which is nice when you are chasing stuff down with aggro hits to close the gap faster. I shoot stuff I cant even see in gfay with the fog hehe.

Pottery is mostly useless unless you make poison or a few low level items. You cant make poison.

As for smithing, gfay is a good spot too. But if you are just looking to make banded, it's a little cheaper to just buy it off another player that smiths. But it's not that much more expensive to smith it yourself, just takes a bit of time. But really if you just have extra funds you don't mind spending on mats, or have multiple characters to equip. Regular banded can last a long time actually, until you do your epic armor anyway. Cultural weapons are not worth it.


Anyway, I just follow this: http://wiki.project1999.com/Tradeskills it's got almost everything in it (apart from cultural weapons ;) ). Direct questions, just ask!


Like most of the game, tradeskills get progressively more difficult the farther along you get. Recipes get more complicated, materials become more difficult to gather, and you need more help from fellow players to make your pieces. Unless you're like me that would actually roll a rogue and lvl to 20 JUST to make fine plate dye lol
So... poisoning, fletching, smithing, tailoring, cooking, brewing, pottery and a little bit of jewelcrafting. Other than that, my shammy is still too low and I refuse to roll a GNOME :P
Nope, no need of fellow players to make my pcs :)
Though more bank space would be nice...

[Xaanka]

Pottery is mostly useless unless you make poison or a few low level items. You cant make poison.

wrong, pottery is very useful (thurgadin gate pots)

[Daywolf]

wrong, pottery is very useful (thurgadin gate pots)
Well yeah as an end product, but not supporting any other tradeskills. Can't even sell it. Trivial at 122. I wouldn't say it makes pottery very useful, but can be useful for players that spend a lot of time in Velious and don't have gate or port, such as for a rogue obviously that would likely raise some poison making anyway, so use pottery. Though my remarks are really concerning a starting/lowbie ranger here, just to clear that up. In his other thread he was looking for stat advice on str, I mentioned some ideas including crafting consumables, and then this thread popped up.

[ShadowKing]

The best way to level up tradeskills is to do them as you go along

How do I do this? I've been accustomed to games telling you how to tradeskill very easy. With EQ there isn't a guild or anything so I don't know how to begin tradeskilling in the early game.

[NarcolepticLTD]

wrong, pottery is very useful (thurgadin gate pots)

sooper dooper useful for melee... should always have one on ya
(nice little perk for those that can gate too, as you don't have to set your bind in thurg to get to thurg)

[Daywolf]

sooper dooper useful for melee... should always have one on ya
(nice little perk for those that can gate too, as you don't have to set your bind in thurg to get to thurg)
Yeah but common, for a lowbie ranger? rlly?
How do I do this? I've been accustomed to games telling you how to tradeskill very easy. With EQ there isn't a guild or anything so I don't know how to begin tradeskilling in the early game.
Depends on what you want to make. I dunno... it's all in the wiki if you want detailed info on everything which would be a little silly to try to write about everything here... as there is a LOT :)

Like for brewing, not everyone should take it up as you would think. But for certain things like other tradeskills it's useful. For consumables, it's mostly useful for warriors and warrior hybrids, but many don't bother here as much as I remember on live. To raise brewing early on, you mostly buy ingredients off vendors. The wiki links all the vendors in the recipe lists.

Food is a mix, some you can buy off vendors and other things like meat etc you get from mob drops. Or as I mentioned, tons of wolf meat on newbie vendors that sells for cheap and can raise baking fast. Sometimes other meat around too.

All just depends what you are after. Takes a lot of time to raise tradeskills, lots and lots of time. The more tradeskills you have, the longer it takes. It's not easy here at all like in other games, newer games. In some other games, I have done every tradeskill really fast (e.g. GW2 most recent). I've been working on them here for years and still don't have them all up as it really really does slow down past 120 or so. Most I listed that I have are between 150-200 apart from jewelcraft and poisoning which is 50 or so.

Anyway, there are so many ingredients, you would need to research what you would need, then hunt the stuff that'll give you the drops. That's how you raise it as you level up if you do it that way. It depends on the tradeskill and/or what you are trying to make.

So you were worried about low str on your ranger, and that was my recommendation for you. I spent a good deal of time outfitting my ranger here, and ranger was my main on early live. I only maxed fletching there though, then some others to 100 or so, like stat food and alcohol etc. Some tailored bag making. I mostly did all my tradeskill fun in UO at the time hehe.

[elwing]

Do tradeskills if you want to make them.
you won't get rich with them, and almost all item you can create are not as good as drop...
some people like to do tunnelquest, other forumquest, some prefer grouping and killing stuffs. In the same way, do tradeskill if you like that, all other reason are pretty bad reason in my opinion

[Daywolf]

and almost all item you can create are not as good as drop...
Cool! Where do these drop (http://wiki.project1999.com/Frost_Giant_Steak)? Or is there a vendor I can buy better? :D
Then there is imbued/enchanted cultural armor, you can get better but not everyone wants to wait on gear at max level and then grind the raid scene. Distance and/or damage arrows. I have one of these (http://wiki.project1999.com/Black_Sapphire_Platinum_Necklace) on my SK, not bad at all. There are a lot of things that are very useful, and needed to get even better equipment later on. Some stuff like consumables you just cant get anywhere else, definitely not better anyway.

[fugazi]

Tradeskills are a rudimentary addition to EverQuest. Do you like dragging lots of items to a container to then click 'combine' and repeat it for hours on end? That's fletching for you. Do you want to see your money burn away? Say hello to smithing and jewelcrafting. Do you want to farm specific monsters in specific zones for ingredients? That's poisonmaking for you.

As always, tradeskills ain't so bad if you use them to add variation to the game, but they are unforgiving, expensive and usually quite the hassle. The only fun one is baking, because the materials are widely available and often drop aplenty during your adventures.

[Thulack]

How do I do this? I've been accustomed to games telling you how to tradeskill very easy. With EQ there isn't a guild or anything so I don't know how to begin tradeskilling in the early game.

You need to learn to use the internet as a resource. If you look at the wiki it explains most things about everquest. I saw your post about xp pens and after reading this is just makes me realize you never use the internet as a guide for anything. A wealth of knowledge has already been written on classic everquest. Any question you should ever have has already probably been answered somewhere on the internet. As a suggestion i would start going to google search and just typing in your questions there and you should get automatic answers without waiting on others. Good luck on your rejourney through EQ though.

[Daywolf]

As always, tradeskills ain't so bad if you use them to add variation to the game, but they are unforgiving, expensive and usually quite the hassle. The only fun one is baking, because the materials are widely available and often drop aplenty during your adventures.They are really not that expensive, well apart from jewlcrafting of course. Such as smithing, it's not expensive to get to ~200, it's just it's crazy time consuming. See like to banded armor, a set can go for ~100pp to another player, but it's not that much more to raise smiting yourself to make banded. And if you have two chars to outfit with banded, it's cheaper to make it yourself.

Smithing seems cheaper than fletching imo. I spent about 1k to get fletching close to 200, but it was a lot of time to get there. I hardly spent half that for smithing to the same. It's just those failure gaps suck, and you really need to keep as close to trivial number as best you can. Good to have stats too of course, int, dex whatever.

But for newbies, most tradeskills are pretty good for making starting gear, especially with tailoring imo. And yeah cooking is very cheap. Just getting to ~170-200 gets hard since you'll need to farm things like brownie parts. You might even need to travel around for some vendor ingredients (e.g. spices or batwing).