ELI5 Tradeskills

[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 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]