f13.net

I've been dorking around with this here's a basic primer on skilling up:

1) Your raw mats should be refined into some basic mats.  Do this untill it turns grey (same as WoW).
2) Now your basic mats can be changed into what I'll call basic pieces.   Usually two basic pieces per item.   These basic pieces are used across a range of levels.
3) Finally your basic mats + RARE mats can be used to make a stat piece.   This piece determines the level of the item and the stats on the item.
4) After making basic mats make a bunch of basic pieces.  Try to spread them out and leave some basic mats for the stat pieces.
5) Now make one of each stat piece.
6) Go into the discovery panel and pick a basic item type (staff/sword/whatever) combine each stat piece with the basic pieces.   This will give you huge skill ups (like 2~4 per discovery).
7) Repeat for each item type till you hit the next multiple of 25 skill.
8) Now you're making a new stat piece which will give you items 5 levels higher.

You can do this somewhat non optimally and make yourself gear you can actually use if you want.  It's not a huge loss to do it that way.

The important thing to take away is that rare mats = big skill ups through discovery.

This is really informative-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bFU_b4e2bxU

Tailoring is a pita. Way too hard to get the basic mat, jute. I've got more blue comps than I do regular. I break down stuff, but the light armor and ragged cloth that break down to jute are not plentiful drops. I'm reduced to farming mobs. It's slow and it sucks and it's a good thing they're not asking for a sub.

Jewelry is more reasonable. Plenty of ore nodes. Pearls are stupid rare though. I like how you get amber from trees, a little gathering crossover. Not as many combinations to discover as tailoring, but I have the mats to make stuff at least.

I would assume pearls drop more from the water mobs?

I got pearls by harvesting clams which makes no goddamn sense. About a dozen clam nodes in southern Bristlebane.

Perfectly sensible!

http://www.thepearlcollector.com/clampearl.html

Harvesting amber from living trees doesn't make any sense, but I like it as flavor and, yeah it helps diversify things a bit.  I dunno, maybe they're magic trees.

And knowing is half the battle!

First level 80 is a crafter http://www.gamezone.com/products/guild-wars-2/news/here-s-your-first-guild-wars-2-level-80-character-arenanet-responds-to-unusual-leveling although he does admit to playing normally a bit.

So much puissance.

So he basically got fed mats and chain fired out crafting levels.  Now arena.net will fuck it up for the rest of us just because one guy got an entire guild to power level him.

They're only going to mess with it if he managed to do it without hitting the crafting level caps on the way. It's intended to be able to level to 80 via only crafting.

What I'm missing from this story is how he got the higher level mats, since that would require 50+ characters feeding him.

Since Arenanet said there were some "unusual methods" and not through normal leveling, he might have been exploiting something (or found a loophole, depending on your definition of an exploit).

*edit* And from reading around the net, it seems like it wasn't completely by crafting (only the last levels).  There are some exploits around, like a boss that spawns every 2 minutes that everyone just afks at and gives 1k xp each time it's downed.

If you had a guild funneling you resources and money was not an issue, could you buy high level vendor gear and salvage it for mats?

With how the cash curve works, it would be difficult at best. If he had 20 people sitting at an event mailing him all the drops to vendor it might work?

In the Assura starter zone, there is a waypoint called "Rana Landing Complex", general area is called  Voloxian Passage. If zoomed in at max level, right under the word "Passage", there is a hollow tree that spawns 3 lvl 7 mobs every few seconds, if you set up shop there with a few salvage kits and a good ammount of AOE or lots of DPS you can farm stuff pretty easily.

I filled up all my 8 Slot bags in about 10-15 minutes and had enough stuff to level Leatherworking and Huntsman to lvl 25 in one go. Salvage drops split pretty evenly between Ore/Wood and cloth.

What level were you when you started?  I tried it for like 20 just now and only got 12 jute out of it.  I think I may have been getting higher level drops though due to my real level.

9ish, I think.

This reminds me, somebody mentioned to salvage bags for cloth, I don't seem to be able to do that, does one need a special salvage kit ?

I think they meant the drops from Mobs called "miners bag, stolen goods, etc" they seem to drop from the humanoid races and when you open them they give a couple crafting materials.

That makes sense. Duh.  :uhrr:/ :awesome_for_real:

It's pretty simple I suspect. Buy high level gathering sickles etc., go to WvW, harvest nodes in WvW since you're level 80.

I just assumed that you could not equip them because item availability is based on your real level not your "zone" level.

Well, I have a 'black lion harvesting sickle' that has no level requirement that I got randomly. Maybe they bought a bunch of those.

I tested it and you CAN'T equip harvesting equipment over your level in WvW, somebody send me 4 silver stat.  :awesome_for_real:

Guessing it has to be the RMT harvesting things? Pricey.

Yeah, probably.

Cooking is an inventory nightmare. I really wish you didn't have to pull mats of your bank to use them.

Yeah, if you could craft right out of the bank the whole system would be just about perfect.

The discovery system is really, really fun if you pick up cooking.  Expect to spend about 10-30s and 300-400 karma to buy start up materials if you want to play "guess the recipe." 

They want to do that.  There wasn't time to get it in for launch.

Cooking is fun until you get lots of foods that are also ingredients and do not go into collections and end up filling your bank space in no time at all  :oh_i_see:

Went to Hlem's spot to see if I could farm some jute to make a guildie a couple bags tonight (at level 20) and I was getting a fuckton of blue crafting items and got 4 green items (3 weapons, 1 pair of gloves) along with a couple blues that were upgrades  :uhrr:

All in about 25 minutes or so.

The market was working last night and I was finally in the position the designers had probably imagined. Had more than enough base mats for an ok price and deciding how to much spend on the blue components.

Having both shared bank space and shared collectible space between alts is a low blow. They could still move gems and sell bank space without restricting you worse than other f2p games.

Wait, why is shared collectible space an issue? I like the fact I can gather everything and have access to it on different crafter characters. Wholeheartedly agree with the shared bank space - 30 bank slots for 5 characters is laughable.

Collectible is an issue since it limits the number of items of that given material can have to 250 which isn't all that much when split between characters. Anything over that limit goes into the already limited (and expensive) bank space in addition to anything else you may want there.

It's great that there is shared collectible, but they need to increase that limited quantity to 999 or something, not 250

Happy that the collectables are shared.  Unless effort to pass mats between chars. I would pay to increase the limit too.

Just sell your excess on the trading post. There really isn't any good reason to be sitting on more than 250 iron bars or whatever anyway.

That assumes that you're among the 25% that can access the trading post.

I'm assuming that the trading post issues are temporary and we're discussing the long term here.

I know... I was being snarky.  I'm at work.  Snark is all I have.

Filling up a collectible is a good indicator that it's time to go make stuff. It's solid XP and reasonably fun for a crafting system. The cooking combinations are just blowing my mind and there is an odd pleasure in finding a new recipe, getting a massive chunk of XP and wondering how many more are hiding out there. Which apparently, given the system they've designed, is lots.

Feeding a craft skill is another reason to go zone wandering. I'm pretty aggressive at harvesting and salvaging and one session at working armorsmith pretty much chewed up a huge chunk of the metal, cloth and stat items all my characters had collected. They need a heap of raw material.

I have a couple of toons, each with two craft skills at ~100.  The raw materials from nodes (ore/wood/food) don't seem to be a bottleneck at all.  The issue is the blue drops needed.  Keeping yourself in current level gear seems to require finding and then grinding mobs that drop what you need.  Hoping this eases up later but I doubt it.

Cloth and Leather wind up being pretty bad bottlenecks imo. But usually the blue mats are the problem, especially if you have two crafts that use the same set.

My mesmer is still farming linen however, trying to catch my tailoring up to being able to make things I could remotely use.

Yeah, by stat items I meant those blue drops. I thought I had a lot but in a good crafting session I put quite a dent into it. And yeah, it was pretty much the cloth drops I ran out of first. And this is doing armourer, I can only imagine how many more I'll need to advance tailoring.

I stopped tailoring pretty early, not because of the Jute/wool/cotton (I get a ton of those through normal play without farming and am always mailing off stacks of 100 to guildmates) but the fine crafting materials are what got me.  I needed those for artificing so it was impossible to do multiple crafting careers that both need FCM, at least if they are kept at the same tier.

Yeah, the "tiny" materials were a huge huge cockblock when trying to raise weaponsmithing, i had to spend one entire days worth of playtime just farming them.

I see a vast swath of trees to chop down but hardly any food plants. Even mines do not seem as plentiful as all the fucking trees. I wish we could use some of this wood to build campfires for a buff.

My god they need to make it easier to at least do the basic leveling without rare mats. I did find that doing discoveries gives a ton of crafting XP, but that still requires rare mats.

Just chiming in with the love of the crafting system, but hatred for the rare blue ingredients.  I'm bottlenecked as well.  They need to increase the drop rates.

The need to make it possible to skill up through making crap items that don't require a rare mat. We should be able to make white quality weapons/armor then have the blue items require the rare mats.

For jewelcrafting at least, the Black Lion Salvage kit has been a lifesaver for rare materials.  Got one of those in a Black Lion Chest and it's allowed me to 100% reclaim the jewels in my jewelry so I can, for example, use the same jewel to make a ring, an earring, a necklace, etc, to maximize xp via maximum discovery.

The problem is the salvage kits are bugged.  If you look at the better ones they give a % chance of giving rare mats and a different % for recovering upgrades.   Right now they NEVER give rare mats.

Would be nice if everyone would /bug this.  At least they can fix it easier than the trading post.

I think it worked that way through all the betas as well.

Possibly... I think they've balanced crafting intentionally to encourage doing other zones and continuing to wander round lower level zones even after you've completed them.

Crafting progression is always going to block on some ingredient.

The problem with that is, when you are above level 20, you start getting less and less things that break into jute and rugged leather as the armor drops scale to your level.

This games crafting as it is now is shit. It's endgame crafting only, meaning you will always be out leveling what you can make so until you're max level you will hardly use your profession

I like the crafting. They made it so everyone is encouraged to gather all materials, and since there are no iventory or bank limitaions on those even more so. Eventually, selling them on the Tradepost or sharing them with your guildees creates a huge availability of materials for crafters, as opposed to other games where by limiting the gathering options in many ways it was harder to get the stuff.

Sure, this only shows when

a) the Tradepost works
b) you are in a guild

The lone crafter is gonna hate the system, while the social crafter will have a reasobaly easy time with all professions. Ie: trade deals with random players, you bring me all the mats of this kind you find, I'll craft you stuff for free until the end of days. Lots of win/win for crafters and non-crafters in this game through the actual gathering system in this game.

I've been able to make stuff that I can use with jewelcrafting pretty consistently.  I currently am level20 and wearing level20 gear I crafted and have some level25 stuff I've crafted stashed away for when I hit 25.  I haven't been able to keep cloth or leathercrafting up to speed as easily so far.

Are guys leveling through discovery ONLY? Because that's what it's designed to do. If you're doing anything other than discovery, you're doing it wrong and are going to take forever. Grinding a known recipe is not efficient.

The real bottleneck is the TP. It was up all last night, if not perfectly functional, so that's a good sign. The TP is not optional in this game, either for crafting or for mats.

I'd say 70+% of my jewelcrafting XP (over level 100 now) comes from discovery, which feels pretty good.

I feel like I'm stuck in a rut with clothcrafting.  I can make, say, Mighty Gloves, but trying to swap in different rare components doesn't yield different kinds of things the way swapping in different gems does in jewelcrafting. 

I've been avoiding tailoring like the plague. There's just too much of a production bottleneck at the raw material level. No cloth nodes means more mob farming or TP hunting. Until they alleviate that, I'm not touching it.

I'm a masochist and have been leveling artificer + tailoring at the same time. Artificer is around 270ish now and I can make stuff for my level / use raw materials I find in normal zones, so that's good. As for tailoring... I ended up doing three extra 1-15 zones to 100% (asura-sylvari-human-norn)* to barely get enough jute and those little blue drops to get me to wool range. Now I'm not hurting for cloth anymore, but I'd have to go back to level 20-30ish zones for the second tier of blue drops... ugh. The TP really needs to work. If they can't do it due to scalability concerns, just bring back the simple/dumb GW1 trading post, demmit!

* In my defense, I was planning to get as close to 100% world completion as possible on my first char, so may as well do it while it's (sorta) useful.

Guildmate who's smart about such things brought up the autofill options with their search drop down. So if you type in "si" looking for silver ore, it brings up *every single item* beginning with si. In HTML. Multiply by 100k, at least. That shit has to go.

The TP really is the missing link here. In closed beta, the answer to any question about not having enough money/crafting materials was "use the trading post". It's completely not optional. It's really well designed from a usability standpoint for that reason; they want you to have a bag of stuff and just sell it on the go. No muss, no fuss. Unfortunately, it doesn't work (it was actually working fairly well yesterday, just not showing UI completion of transactions, even though they were complete).

It looks like they'll have it up enough to make it usable this week, so that's good. I'll be interested in how crafting feels to people once it's up.

Yeah, lack of trade is brutal.  In any other game I'd sell materials from crafts I was not interested in to help purchase extra stuff I need in areas I am interested.

Tradepost was up for a few hours last night in Europe. Long enough for me to buy a dozen of new dyes  :awesome_for_real:

I must say, when the "Auction House" works, it's amazingly powerful. I love it.

Use the insignias or whatever. Make an insignia and the two components to a piece, like chest padding and chest dainty whateverthefuck. Then put those three into discovery, blam discovery exp.

I blew through a bunch of levels just making a heal armor set for my norn, because I had the mats for the healing insignia thingy.

Since you get 3 sets of insignia per bracket, at least one or two of the blue will be from mobs you;ve been plowing through. You should also be getting a small but steady boost from consumabes (sharpening stones or whatever for armorers). Don't forget the special bags, too.

For those of you crafting.. I'm not seeing the point of it currently other than XP.  

For the last two days I've spent a lot of time farming Jute and working on skilling up my armor crafting. I finally get to where I can make level appropriate stuff and I run out of the little blue matts (fangs and blood).  

I decided to check the TP to see if it was still down and to my surprise it was up.  I bought (for around 12 silver) an entire new set of gear since mine was 10-15 levels behind. That included all armor slots, weapon, and accessories.  Then I spent another few silver buying the upgrade things just to have fun. Some of them have some fun 2 or 3 set bonuses.

I'm starting to get the Diablo 3 feeling.  Items so cheap on the AH its easier to just buy them.  Most items were right around 1 silver and at level 36 every heart I do gets me 1 silver 40 copper in the mail.

I do enjoy crafting don't get me wrong. The discovery stuff is pretty fun as along as you don't look up all the recipes on the web.

So is there some end game reason to do crafting that I seem to be missing?

 

Legendary weapons.

Now that I grinded past my bottleneck, I'm making daggers at the same level as my hero.  Very happy about that.  Discovery is awesome but the blue mats aren't.  I do wish there was a larger variety of crafting items but I can live with it.  It does pay to plan out your crafting, I made like 60 shield bosses and 42 of them are still clogging my bank.

The AH being down sucks, I've been disenchanting blue and green items but whatever.  With everyone crafting, I'd say the prices will stay very low.  Expect raw mat prices to be high, especially the blue components.

Thanks!  For some reason I was thinking they were only standalone upgrades, not intermediate ingredients.  This got me moving again.  Still short on jute.  Time to kill more bandits.

If discovery gets you hot and bothered, cooking is the best craft for that. As far as I can tell, there's about a billion different recipes.  :why_so_serious:

Cooking blows my mind... The discovery portion doesn't seem to have the same regularity as the other crafts and the intermediate products clog my bank.

Nice buffs though once I started eating the output. +10 xp per kill isn't bad.

Is it actually working for you? I haven't yet found a food with the +10 xp bonus listed, that actually GIVES the bonus.

It's hard to tell because mobs can have a bonus implicitly. But I was seeing lower than 10 bonus numbers with a +10% food and larger than expected numbers with a +10xp food. Since I'm really just eating waste product of levelling if it I didn't test too carefully.

I really need some good potato recipes though, got quite a few now.

Well what I do to test it, is I go find mobs who I know won't have any bonus saved up - in the starter zone, spawned by an event, etc., and kill them while under the food effect. Universally so far, I get *no* displayed bonus.

I don't get a displayed bonus for the black lion xp boosters so I'm not sure exactly where you woudl see the bonus xp.

Yeah, I've wondered about the whole bonus xp thing... I've seen stuff like   10 xp 6 bonus  when I haven't eaten any food or used any special items... no idea what the bonus is for.

The bonus is from mobs which have not been killed in a long time.

Food doesn't give a +10 exp, it adds 10 percent. You can compare the exp with and without.

I think I mentioned this in another thread - I am getting the 10% bonus by eating rice balls.  6xp kills become 7xp kills.  The bonus does not appear as a separate number (e.g., 6xp + 1xp) because as Furiously mentioned that type of bonus is awarded for killing things that have not been killed in a while.  I got a crazy 36xp bonus per kill for a set of black sheep.

That's a pretty terrible typo to be on every single food item.

I tried one item I had on me (buttered cinnamon toast) that said +10 XP per kill and killed the same mobs until the bonus was gone. 13 XP went to 14-15 so yeah, looks like a typo.

To go with that the recent complete nerf of karma items makes using the AH way better as at least you can vendor or salvage stuff when you're done with it. What the fuck are they doing with this karma nerf shit?

At a guess I'd say it's in place until they're sure all the karma weapons that were obtained through the exploit are out of the system to prevent people from salvaging them. I seem to remember them asking people to delete those items (presumably after their ban was up?) which implies they don't have methods in place to do this themselves so I guess they don't have a means to track whether people deleted or salvaged them either. Which is pretty :uhrr:

On the cooking XP: I'm really not sure if it even works as 10%, but if you want a reason to keep grinding it up: I've seen people running around with +22% magic find food. :P

Does that carry over to resurce nodes too? I noticed the other day that I got 203xp from mining a copper node in addition to usual 9xp/dig but had no idea why.

Daily progress, probably. You gain a chunk every time the little 1-4 tiers trigger.

They need to just take the xp modifier off food entirely. You get such a little xp reward for normal killing that +10% or even +10 (if it was put that way to truly be +10) is pretty meaningless in relation to just exploring and DEs. It is just not that big of an incentive. Hell, even if it counts toward the lvl 30s DEs which give a nice 1k xp reward, 100 more is not going to make that big of a dent. Add another boon or extend the durations... just get rid of the xp mod entirely. Too distracting.

Trading post was up this morning; I was able to buy cotton and linen and get my skills back up to level without farming mobs.  I hope they tweak the cloth drop rates a bit.

Put down the pipe.

Depends on what you're killing.  At 50, I remember getting about 50-60 exp per kill with a 150 bonus in yellow mobs that people normally just walk by.  Grinding on non-aggro mobs can be lucrative IF you find them and then keep moving.  I like just leaving a path of non-aggro carcasses in my wake as I move through a zone to the next heart, hoping to nail the bonus exp.  I believe the bonus would be affected by the 10%, but have not tested it. 

As it should... I think the thing I am talking around is that the XP really doesn't mean a whole lot considering how much time spent downleveled in a zone. Nice looking higher tiered armor is always a good carrot, but the effects of armor and weapons and level are brought inline with the level you are playing on rather than being a god among men. And I am not saying that out of malice...I love the fact each zone is challenging - except that norn story quest with the horn - fuck that horn man.

The draw of leveling, for me, is the trait skills that I want for WvW.

Is there a list somewhere that tells you what cooking mats you need for discoveries?  The discovery process for crafting confuses me. :ye_gods:

Discovery is a little weird at first but basically:

- Get everything in your inventory.  Common materials / fine materials / cooking ingredients, etc.  If it's not here it won't show up in the next step.
- Go to Discovery pane of the crafting interface.  Everything that is shaded, you can ignore for now.  Everything that is redded out, you can ignore until your skill goes up.  Pick a normal-lookin thing and drag/doubleclick it out into the discovery part.  
- Some other stuff will probably go dim at this point - the remaining ingredients are possibles.  Keep dragging normal-lookin stuff out there until it says 'hey I think this is something' (you're set, push the discovery button doodad), or everything goes dim/red, in which case you are missing one of the pieces in your inventory.

That's about it!  Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fun, if you have big bags and can hold a bunch of stuff.  I find it entertaining enough that I have avoided looking up recipes, just sort of putter around with whatever new stuff I find to see what unlocks.   I found some rare claw, for example, and I know it will combine with iron bars (to presumably make some kind of box), but I need three of the dang things, so it may be a while before I can see what it really is!

The rare yellow ingredients needing 2-3 is kind of a pisser, I think, because they're SO rare.

I use http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/cook when I get frustrated and just want to make some GODDAMN SPACE in my GODDAMN BAGS.

Step 1 of your list doesn't work really well for cooking; with only 8 slot bags I can't actually hold all of the cooking materials/crafted subcomponents in my inventory all at once. Being able to craft out of the Collectibles tab would be a big help for cooking in particular, since they have SO MANY MATS. It'd also be nice if you could store the subcomponents in the collectibles tab.

I started up cooking and had to buy another bank slot.  Luckily by level 50 I had 3 gold and a new bank slot only costed 2 gold 2 silver for the 600 gems (or at least it did last night)

Yeah, I wish you could craft out of the bank.  There is a lot of item-shuffling back and forth in general.  Armorsmithing & jeweler also has a bunch of those intermediate components that don't stack in the Collectibles, which is pretty annoying.

The main hurdle to understanding discovering though is not trying to do anything with those grayed-out items.  I have no idea why it even lets you drag them into the window.

I'm level 19, and wanted to catch my crafting skills, armorsmith and weaponsmith, up to my current 'tier'. And it's a goddamn slog getting the fine mats together for a few skill points. I'm at about 40something on each skill.  :x

I sold off all my non cooking and Jewel crafting mats and was able to get enough to buy an additional bank slot which hopefully will give me a break from Inventory Tetris while I experiment with new cooking recipes.  Normally I'd just look them up on the web, but I'm having too much fun trying to figure it out to bother.

I'm struggling to understand the philosophy behind crafting in this game. They made everything more accessible and less of a grind...except crafting. Masterwork and rare gear (that I assume isn't crafted, just world drops) is very cheap on the trading post. Even some of the exotic stuff isn't that expensive.

Jewelry has been reasonable. I'm level 64 up to 308 or so and just made myself some level 65 yellows. Tailoring on the other hand, is very grindy. Two main differences. Jewelry you get all your mats from harvesting nodes which are plentiful. Tailoring you get from salvaging and the random loot bags. The other difference is that you only ever need one gem (the blue component) to make a blue or yellow jewelry item, but for tailoring you either need 3, 8 or 15 of the blue component, depending on the tier of the item.  I'm at 275 tailoring and have made myself level 60 armor, but that was with alot more buying from the post than jewelry. Fprget about runes. Runes are really ridiculous, components so rare I've only discovered like 5 runes so far.

It's certainly alot more work and alot more expensive than buying a new set of weapons for ~1s each off the post every ten levels like I do now. Hardly ever sell anything except my outleveled power/precision jewelry as everything else is so flooded/unwanted it's the same as npc price.

Actually a lot of stuff is "grindy" for longevity. Their trick is to keep the grind off the main levelling path. So craft skills, getting all the dungeon armors (which are ultimately cosmetic) and collecting all the dyes are time intensive. And i'm sure they have some more grinds hidden away for achievements and things like legendary weapons.

I see crafting as trade-off. It's a time and money sink, but you benefit somehow. It's not something I'd likely do just for fun because I haven't played an MMO yet that makes the act of crafting as fun as the combat. GW2 isn't really different in that regard. I've decided crafting isn't really for me since I'm still not sure about what the benefits will be in the long run. I know this game is very against the concept of everything being a means to an end. The game is full of pointless stuff to do that's just there for the fun of it. Crafting has to be just as fun, way easier, or have some really useful benefit for me to want to do it.

Honestly, with the trading post making everything unprofitable (hell in most cases you lose money by selling stuff on the TP than to a vendor due to the listing fee) the only point to crafting is if you want to make your own legendaries.

I like making stuff for alts and I don't have a lot of money. I find crafting enjoyable, so it works for me. I don't need the most optimal path to enjoy myself (remember I play mmo wrong).

Wondering about jewelry though. Seems to only be 6 rings and 6 accessories in the copper tier? I don't see any way to discover new recipes, am I missing something?

Also, my warrior doesn't actively craft (I took one just to access the crafting benches aka bank); I am a few levels behind where my guardian and thief were at this point (finishing the respective newbie-teen zones). I should probably pvp, but it's definitely rewarding besides goods manufacturing.

Crafting has never been fun in any MMO. But it can give you a sense of achievement when you harvest stuff in the wild and get a ding while making stuff. And this does it better than most in that the experience is generous and the discovery process makes it interactive (and discourages you flooding the AH).

Copper tier only has 6 gems rather than 7 like the other tiers but you should always have tons of things to discover with jewelcraft.

Each tier you have 4 items (ring, earring, necklace, cut gem). You then can combine the cut gem to make masterwork rings / earrings / necklaces, giving you a total of 42 discoveries alone in the copper tier which should easily get you to 75 points with the discovery bonus and the basic initial points for making copper ingots, settings, bands, hooks and filigrees.

You can't make chains or filigree til you hit 50 so you are stuck grinding recipes you know for a while with Jeweling in the copper tier. Also pearls are very rare for some reason.

I got quite a few from harvesting clams. There's a small lake in the Venlin Vale area of Brisban Wildlands that I harvested any time I was in the area but I don't remember if they're the right tier for you. There's also quite a few mobs there that drop vials of blood.

Yeah, pearls and coral are annoying because they come from sea mobs (extremely rare) and farming clams (rare). I used an expensive salvage kit to keep the one pearl I had a used it many times!

Yeah, that's the other nice thing about jewelry over tailoring. Using a black lion kit (works out to 15 cents a salvage) you always get the gem back, since the gem goes in the upgrade slot. So you only ever need one gem to do all the discoveries. The insignia used in tailoring is part of the base stats and you don't get it back.

A black lion salvage kit (allowing me to re-use gems) and the general abundance of copper made working through the gap between discovery done and the next chunk of craftables in jewelcrafting pretty painless.

I'm about ready to give up on leveling armorsmith and weaponsmith as it's slowing me down from playing level-appropriate zones and seeing new content.

While leveling is faster in higher level zones you shouldn't run out of 'new content' I wouldn't think, since you can just go to other race's zones.

That's what I did tonight. After running the same zone over and over for about a week to gather mats.

You'll want to complete other zones for the 100% map completion achievement anyway  :why_so_serious:

Look into mounting the gems with filagrees.

I don't know you get the option with jewelcrafting sub-50. I think you just have to grind through it.

I hit 80 tonight, from 74, just with crafting, and I have a long way to go to cap either of mine. The xp is kind of silly.

One thing to keep in mind: filagreed gems CANNOT be placed into armor or weapons like uncut stones can; only jewelry/accessories.  So you're stuck either replacing a stone in a ring, selling it on the TP or crafting a masterwork piece out of it.

Except you can also experiment with filigreed gems for huge exp gain per discovery. Those masterwork pieces are worth making just for the exp.

Good info, but still means a grind to 50. Wonder how that got overlooked :|

No idea, I had to google around because it just felt like I was doing something wrong. On the positive side no other craft is competing for the gems. And you can use a high end salvage kit to get the gems back for re-use or make some decent copper selling them.

You waited until you greyed out copper before starting making stuff no? If not there's your missing points.

Tried giving crafting a chance for like 2-3 hours.
Wasn't fun. Wasn't interesting. EXP reward is decent, but it didn't feel rewarding to have all that clutter in bank and making alt mules just to hold junk.

After a week of pondering, I decided to just sell it all off to the trading post. Every. Single. Piece that gives more than vendor price.
It's a load off my mind.

EXP reward is insanely high. I read somewhere that if you max an profession, you get pretty much 10 out of the 80 total levels for your character. This more or less matches my personal experience.

That doesn't justify being a crafter if you don't see the fun or the utility in it (there's plenty of utility if you plan to stay in the game for a while). Just wanted to point out that the exp rewards are crazy good, like never before in any other game.

Going from 0 to 400 in a craft will give you 10 levels, no matter what level you are. It is possible if you have enough resources to get someone from 0 to 80 purely through crafting.

I like to make my own stuff. Even though it's more expensive than just buying from the market. Probably always will be unless they really up the drop rate on the blue components. As it is they cost 2x or more as much as the finished item. I can buy masterwork level 80 weapons from the market for ~2-3s, you'll be lucky to buy 1 blue comp of that tier for that price.

Some things I'd like are changes to the ui:

1) Remember which sections I have closed or expanded. Both when you switch to the bank or discovery tab and when you open/close the crafting window.

2)Subdivsions for each tier of material. So coats would have separate sublists for jute, cotton, etc. that could each be opened and closed.

3)An in game way to keep track of what recipes you've unlocked. I'm making a grid on a piece of paper. Fang, blood, etc as column headings and helmet, coat, etc as row headings. Much easier than trying to scan through an ever increasing, small-fonted list.

Discovery from the bank is in, finally. \o/

Time to level that chef!

I heard that, but there's no rush to level in this game. I'm at 20 now and I still spend time in another race's lvl 1-20 zone just to spice things up, and it's a pretty nice change.
So what's the attraction of crafting for me? Kinda nothing to be honest.

I picked up an odd weapon upgrade every 3-5 levels or so from AH for a silver or two. Dumped everything into AH to sell, making net gain in currency, then head back to exploring, unlocking vistas, skill points, gather free resources, completing hearts. It's a really free-flowing MMO sandbox experience on par with Skyrim. If I invested time into crafting, everything seems disrupted and I spend a lot of time not doing the fun stuff.

I don't like that at all.

So don't do it.

The game's designed so there are lots of things you can do but nothing you *need* to do. The XP from crafting included, you certainly don't need it because you can't do anything in the game without getting given XP.

Thank god.  No more scanning everything to see if it's usable by the current profession and then moving it over to the pack just to find out I already know that particular combo.

Legendary Greatsword Sunrise was crafted.  It is truly legendary whether you are talking looks or crafting mats =p
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/68910-the-long-awaited-legendary-greatsword-sunrise/

Weak, now he needs to make Twilight and combine them.  :-P

I did this last night and couldn't be happier. I am no crafter.

My ele alt hit 40 so I was gonna craft some armor and jewelry for her. My main is a 400 tailor/jeweler. I has some materials but needed more. I'd have to buy 15 venom sacs, 22 cotton scraps from the tp and a spool of thread from the npc. At 'buy it now' prices the total would've been 13s 39c. I looked at buying finished pieces. At 'buy it now' prices that would've run 5s 2c for a full set of level 40 armor. sigh. I did some of both. Had enough on hand to make the chest and bought the three venoms I needed to make the legs. Total 3s 27c. So damn upside down that the finished pieces are worth less than the components.

That's every MMO ever.

Skill up + finished product is always going to be more valuable than just the product alone.

Cooking has changed a great deal, apparently. Every guide I've seen is out of date.

I wish there was a permanent way to see the gathering nodes without pushing Ctrl - a toggle or something.

I just did 1-400 cooking on an alt for 2g or less following a guide someone posted on their forums, here (https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/crafting/Skye-Marin-s-Cooking-Guide-Oct-22/first#post1065644), read the whole thread though the OP isn't completely right.

That one seems to be the most recent.

The prices are way out of whack though, compared to what I saw last night on the AH.

They were slightly off when i did it a few weeks ago, I guess demand has gone up since then because of the guide.

Cooking is a pain unless you've had several characters gathering materials from 1-80.  Even then there are so many recipes and sub-components that it's by far the toughest to level.

I'm not so worried yet about leveling, although I can see why it might be tough just to keep up with my level unless I also level alts. (Which of course would have to craft as well since that's how I roll.)

I realized it is WAY easier if I look at my little minimap to see the actual nodes. Doh.

After playing with discoveries, it seems that leveling crafting might be most efficient by discovering recipes rather than grinding particular ones. Leveling cooking while leveling up, anyway.

Yeah, that's how I did it.  Also: more fun.  I liked the discovery process in cooking; seemed like the one craft the discovery mechanic really worked.

I think the best way is to have a recipe list and every 25 points check for the cheapest one of the bunch, that requires a lot of time though.

Same.  I love the discovery process.  Cooking takes it to a whole new level since you can end up with several levels of sub-components required.  I actually did 1-400 cooking at a single time, with the purpose being to learn every single discoverable recipe possible.  There are... a lot.

What pissed me off about cooking was the intentional cockblock of rare ingredients. Like chili peppers. Stupid low level herb, but rare as fuck. I hit 400 but still had over half the chili recipes undiscovered.

Appearantly there was some exploit they patched by making chili peppers drop instead of a karma item like it was on release. Unfortunately another knee jerk nerf that never gets reconsidered.

Vanilla beans were the cockblock for me (also used to be a karma vendor item). I think they were made a bit more numerous in a later patch, but blah.

Also, if you're levelling cooking via discovery (I did too, for almost the entire 1-400 journey), you NEED at least one bank tab to keep all the subcomponents that don't go into the collections tab (finished food can also act as a subcomponent sometimes).

One good thing about the system was that you could see how many undiscovered recipes used an ingredient, so you could make that many sub-components then and there.  It wasn't perfect, due to a few chains using further sub-components, but it helped me not overproduce.

Considering the high prices of gathering materials, I'm wondering - is crafting ever worth it? I'd be rich right now if I had sold everything I gathered, I think, instead of paying for jute thread and so on to craft.

There may be some niches that are worth it - if you don't mind playing the TP. Other than that, it's much more profitable to sell all the crafting materials you gather and buy crafted items/food when you need them.

e: however, if you're planning to craft a legendary weapon, you'll need to get 400 in two appropriate craft skills (can be across all your characters)

It is very hard to make money with it, but it gives exp and you need it for legendaries.  You can save a bit of cash making your exotic armor rather than buying it, but not enough to make a profit after the 15% trader cut and you are much better off running dungeons and getting it for free anyways.  Some people claim it is possible to make money with crafting, but they are mostly playing the market which doesn't actually require crafting.  I thought the two and a half gold i spent maxing cooking was worth the ten levels i got from it.

It might be possible to make money with crafting, but you could probably make as much or more by dedicating yourself to other pursuits.

I do crafting for myself, though.  Instead of buying exotic armor at 80, I make it myself, which does save a lot of gold.  Also it's a great way to get later levels.  Going from 1-400 skill will get you 10 levels.  In each profession.  If you had the materials, it would be possible to level to 80 by crafting.

It's certainly not essential though, and if you're more interested in the money until you're more established, just sell your materials.  You can always farm them once you're higher level.

I finally found a ring I can buy the mats for, make and sell for a (very) little profit. At least this can fund my repairs for wvwvw, which I'm finding very fun! even though I'm mostly fodder so far. I can still man siege and res people.

The world is huge. I didn't realize just how large it is. Some of the mechanics in this game are really nice - like being able to do any lower zone by being downleveled, being able to participate in wvwvw by being upleveled, the gathering nodes being available on an individual basis rather than global....

I like the lack of holy trinity nice too, although I have no idea what dungeons are like.

Chaotic.

Dungeons are brutal.  Oddly, I like them here when I can barely stand them in WoW.  I think it's the difference in skill use and ability to dodge.

Dungeons are weird in that the mechanics are utterly non-forgiving but DEATH itself IS.


Where like losing your healer in a standard WoW dungeon is probably a wipe/reset if you don't have some kind of Brez, in GW2 losing anyone is more of a inconvenience as someone has to spend a few seconds waking you up.

I enjoy how challenging the dungeons are in GW2 if I can run with friends. Sadly the people I game with tend to have short attention spans and most of them have scattered to other games. These days if I want to run a dungeon I'm stuck watching map chat for a group, which is my least favorite thing to do in any MMO, ever, so I pretty much just don't run dungeons anymore. I hope they implement some kind of LFG system. I don't want the same thing as WoW's random dungeon finder though - people aren't invested in those kinds of groups and it tends to bring out the asshole in everyone. I just don't want to have to sit around watching a chat channel instead of actually playing the game.

Yep, an LFG tool would be awesome.

I like many things about the dungeons (especially the fractals), but dislike the boring hp-sponge aspect of many bosses. I still think WOW has better dungeons overall, if only because the trinity makes a lot more things possible. The only GW2 dungeon boss I found to work better was the Iron Forgeman at the end of Sorrow's Embrace. It doesn't help that the boss right before him is one of the most obnoxious things in the history of mmo bosses since... oh I dunno, Oculus*?


* I actually kinda sorta liked the Oculus

You guys know there is already an LFG tool, right?

Its in the contacts window.

Nobody uses it.

The website for finding groups is actually really good:

gw2lfg.com

I've been using it over the past couple of weeks and generally found groups very fast. They do need to implement a group finder tool, but until then I would suggest using that website as it seems to work well. Am at fractal level 11 now from pick up groups from that site.

(Groups from there seem to be slightly higher skilled than groups formed from chat)

I wanted to post this link to dynamic crafting guides.  This guy runs a script against GW2Spidy every hour and creates a crafting guide for each profession based on what is cheapest method at that time.  This solves the problem of prices shooting up everytime a new best crafting guide comes out.   

http://gw2crafts.saladon.net/

I definately agree about gw2lfg.com.   I've used it a lot and was actually able to finish my Arah story quest on one of my characters.  I thought I'd never get that done.

I also agree that people who use it tend to be a bit better though that's not always the case.

That is incredible.

Right now it says they all cost about 6g except cooking. Which for all the omgsoexpensive talk is less than 2g.

Yeah cooking was by far the cheapest/easier to max, if you knew what the cheapest recipe was at every single point.  I did it for around 2.5 gold, but it could easily be three or four times that if you just wing it.

They really screwed cooking up. It was suppossed to be the hardest craft to level, that only expert dedicated players would use. Instead it has ended up being a joke of a craft thats ridiculously easy to level.

Judging by those guides it would take approx 45 gold or so to level a character from 1 to 80 just by crafting. Not too bad I guess.

Where they screwed up is in trying to make cooking the hardest craft to level, because that is just incredibly retarded.

The best mmog craft is always the one with the best consumables. If they want to make one harder, it has to be cooking.

I dont see why. The idea behind cooking was that it was supposed to be a 'master' craft for those people who really like crafting. Unlike the others it gave you no permanent gear or exotics, but did give some nice temporary buffs. It was supposed to be a reward craft for the type of player who loves to spend ages farming and tradeskilling - much like the sort of player who typically loves cooking in other MMOs.

It's not like there's a raid game to make the craft required.

Ran the cooking guide last night to power through levels 20-30 on a guardian.

Cost about 80s after using random crap I had collected. Took about 90 minutes, half of which was shopping.

I think where they screwed up (if they planned to make it expensive) was in having so many high level recipes built from low level ingredients. Even after completing the shopping for a 0-400 run there was almost nothing in the bottom half of my cooking ingredient collections.

I think I'd recommend chefing to anyone as a way to power level up to dungeon access.

I don't think they meant to make it expensive in materials costs, but if you try to level without a guide purely by experimentation you quickly run out of storage due to all the things you make which can be used as components of other recipes.  It basically requires that you buy at least one and maybe two extra bank slots to level that way. Plus you have to discover the recipes which can be complicated, especially if you don't cook in real life enough to know some basic recipes and concepts.

I used these guides last night http://www.errantquest.com/guild-wars-2/chef-guide/

Got cooking and JC to 400 and got myself 20 free levels.  Took forever to collect and click everything.