Trade Skill for Druid
 

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

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

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.

I'm a halfling.

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...ills:_Halfling

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

Is porting a tradeskill?

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

Halflings love pie.

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

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).

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.