A Guide To Crafting

STARTING YOUR PROFESSION
1) Find an opposite, ie. someone who gathers the same type as you (woodworker, prospector, farmer) and work with them so you both get plenty of what you need. For example gather copper if you’re a jeweler, but also gather tin to allow copper to respawn at the resource nodes. Give the tin to your weaponsmith friend, who can feed you the random jewels picked up from prospecting which they can't use. For scholars, speak to everyone as you are the only one who can use runes, scrolls and symbols. Trade the 35 Minor Lore scrolls you need to make in order to go up a level (100 total to master the tier) with other players for their scholar ingredients, as the Minor Lore scrolls are used as quest completion requirements for most professions.

2) Don't simply sell all the stuff you gather. Keep some items for a few days and see if you bump into someone who needs them as they might be able to exchange your components for items you need or sell at the Auction House (see below). Components tend to trade and sell better than crafted items (ie, blade or hilt not a sword) at Apprentice tier because the crafted items are poor, however, many professions use the components you can create.

3) Keep an eye out for craft missions and their rewards. Often it's a cook mission and you're a weaponsmith, but the reward is some ore or ingots. Speak to a cook and trade (some of the huge number of bronze blades you need to produce for a pie crust, for example).

4) Talk to people. The one thing the forums have highlighted is that we're all in the same boat, but instead of expecting Codemaster to fix the "problem" of limited resources or difficulties in improving your crafting tier we can simply get around it by having a decent network of players who talk to each other in game.

ADVANCING
1) For the crafting professions (ie. Non-gathering) once you complete the tier you are on, you need to fulfill a quest to advance to the next tier and will not gain any experience for any crafting done until the quest is complete. The quests vary from merely talking to someone to much tougher missions which you might need to fellowship up for.

2) Help out other players who need you to craft components for their hard to make items. If you haven’t mastered the level, and they provide all the gear, it costs you nothing and you gain experience. If you’ve mastered the tier, then you can mastercraft the same item and potentially get two free items for crafting their one (or whatever the multiple is). Mastercrafting often produces multiple of an item, or a far superior item. Either way the player will likely be pleased and at worst you lose nothing.

3) Recipes are key. As many people have pointed out, the automatic recipes you get each tier tend to be very bog standard items and will garner little to no response from paying players. Rare and/or mastercrafted items will command the highest prices but are the hardest to work towards in terms of effort put in. Find the ones people want and work on those and just work on other items to min/max your crafting experience. Unique items are especially rare and, if mastercrafted, tend to come with additional bonuses beyond the normal (weapons = additional damage effects, other items = stat bonuses) that you can’t pick up as rare drops, etc.

THE AUCTION HOUSE
1) Use the auction house and mailboxes as often as possible. If your friend is several realms over you can still swap ingredients using the mailbox, albeit one ingredient (or batch) at a time. There is a nominal fee, which increases when sending stacks and covers 10% - 40% of the stack price depending on it's rarity. The auction house is a great place to pick up items and components, assuming you don't pander to the few people who put items on at seriously inflated prices. Market demands do drive down prices on components also the fee for posting is non-refundable and quite high for stacks.

2) Find the unique items your craft can make, ie. Food, craft tools, burglary items, potions, etc. and work on them. They might be harder to craft but will always provide a good return on investment on the Auction House. New items of note are bear treats and Minstrel strings.

3) Price things in the Auction House at a reasonable price. If it's worth 48 copper, asking for 20 silver each is just going to result in your item not selling and you being out of pocket. Stacks have a higher cost to post at the Auction House, so cost accordingly, but not so high your item doesn’t sell. That truly IS a money sink. Basic real life auctioning etiquette is that you start things out at no more than the real value of the item (item price plus posting cost) or set an initial price at no more than twice it's value and a reasonable buy price based on it’s demand. Letting an auction run three days with no buy price is likely to garner little interest as players can often find other avenues for the same resources within three days unless it truly is a rare item.

4) When in the Auction House max out the number of bids you can place and merely accept the ones you win. Concede the ones where you get outbid to an excessive degree as auction fever is another good way to lose money and new items for bidding are always popping up. That way you can get the resources you need over a long term (weeks), without paying the excessive prices currently being posted. Patience is key here and almost all resources have been posted at reasonable prices at some point. If you can wait then the resources will come, you just often need to bid on three reasonable priced items and hope you win at least one. Sometimes I’ve won all of the bids I’ve placed but it’s always better to have too many resources than too few, besides you have access to the Vault to store any excess.

5) Prices do fall for most resources as more and more players get used to the AH interface. It's a decent way to make money and there are fewer postings for 1 bronze ingot at 5 silver, etc. Learn the game, learn the crafting quests and learn what others need. Supply and demand is key here. You have to make a LOT of duff items to level up, which no-one except the vendors will want but from Journeyman onwards, or mastercraft apprentice items you can usually get a decent profit. (10-20% overall on cost put in). As in most things in real life, you need money to put into it first before you can get some out. Adventure first to gather some capital then invest in crafting, bearing in mind you will need sufficient funds to pay your way through master apprentice and master journeyman before you will see any real return.

6) The Auction House does not have a great interface that's true, but it has undergone improvements and I've not had much trouble with it once I've become accustomed to the interface. If you have problems just ask around.
post by hipster666@http://community.codemasters.com