Thank you all for the replies! It’s very interesting to hear different opinions from people that have been playing through different times and that have experienced leveling up in different ways.
I need to take some time and munch all this information and come up with a strategy that would work with the current state of the game. It could be a mix of different activities like playing the Trade Post, gathering some resources, trading them for others I need, planning how much of the different resources I will need to level up the tradeskill. Maybe focus on just one tradeskill at a time instead of leveling them all together.
It also looks like being part of a big company and doing some regular trips out there to collect caches from elite regions might help with hard to find reagents.
If you guys have suggestions please keep them coming.
I leveled engineering to 200 before the changes, and then leveled it to 200 after the changes on a different character. It was literally a walk in the park before compared to after.
I’ve got the gathering skills to 200 and most of crafting skills to at least 100 before 1.1. That was not a total easy thing. I’m playing something about 3-4 hours a day. The way to make the grind less annoying was just to change activities from time to time. If I would only focus on crafting, especially on smithing, I would run out of sand flux and or money quite soon. If I swith after a while to faction quests, I’ll get those refining materials from the chests and can buy the material converters too. Then I can com bck and craft further.
Just yesterday I’ve started an unexpected grind in jewelcrafting. Going throug my stored gems, I’ve found out, that Ive about 300 cut flawed ones - too weak for my char but I couldn’t through them away. So I looked at stone cutting again and found out, that I need not cutted ones fpr making fusion gems. So followed several runs on silver to insert the cutted flawed gems there and to salvage the items. Raised my jewelcrafting and got the uncutted flawed gems. Now I need some motes/wisps/essences to do the fusions - no pain, was going to harvest some solk together for later armouring.
Exchange activities and enjoy the game.
EDIT: Got engineering to 150 yesterday, weaponsmithing and armouring are even lower. Plan to get the last both to 200. Haven’t even started Furniture stuff.
It takes ~400 Starmetal ingots to raise weaponsmithing 4-5 points around 120. To get it to 150 would take more than 30k even if you were only buying the ingots on my server.
The more work you do yourself, of course, the less you have to buy. But if you’re just using gold to buy everything, 30k won’t get you even close to 200 in any trade skill.
Crafting is way more slower and expensvie. Before patch 1.1 (worst patch so far) for crafters it was hard, but now it is a pain. You could lvl fast crafting low items, which are cheap (taxes) and crafting stations could be T3. So you could craft anywhere, just get enough material with you. Now you need T4 and T5 stations at 150+ and storage logistic is more difficult.
I also think, many players, but also companies used several exploits to lvl fast by spending loads of gold buying ressources. Well known issue. Especialy when they maxed most skills. Noone would tell you. They only say its timeconsuming. Nope, its not the truth. AGS knows that but they do nothing. Check the numbers behind and you will see how they managed to become rich, while maximizing crafting skills at the same time . Player numbers decreasing continously, crafting stations often lack of quality… Makes it even harder.
Again, it is hardly possible to lvl all crafting skills up to 200 with legal methods as a solo player.
Please do a video. It will be the most watched ever…if you can get Furnishing 0-200 for 30K… I spent more than 40k getting from 175-200 this past week. Better yet…start a character on Camelot and I’ll give you 30k to do it.
You do realize the only reason they nerfed crafting is cause of asmongold video ? With him complaining it was too easy to max trades after being fed materials?
Cause he the dumbass that skipped tons of playable content to be able to talk shit about the game? While actively using exploits to max his gs?
Yes. The patch was the worse.
But know that it was cause of troll ass players with no sense of hindsight that ruined it for us.
Always remember they gave the feedback to change the direction of crafting WHILE we were still grinding ourselves. So any asshole with a platform and easily carried for a couple weeks couldve chilled out and NOT ruined the length of grind to prevent players from having actual end game gear that they workin their ass off for to craft but this exactly why i stop feeding into their dumb opinions and unsubscribed.
Once someone convinces devs to ruin the game for me or start bitchin bout grinding while being carried i just dont care. And you saw his streams where donators wouod randomly send 1k gold.
Trade him mats for lower TP listing. Etc
Then he pushes the narrative to stop EVERYONE ELSE from getting best gear cause he wanna hoardd the privledge of being the " best" player. Which is now irrelevant.
I never heard of this asmogold video before. I will have a look at that. If that’s the real reason AGS changed the way levelling up tradeskills work, well… they can still change it and admit it was just a faulty decision and that would be great. It is much worse if the devs keep the current system just because they implemented it and they think it would make them look dumb if they take a step back. I believe this is still a learning process for AGS unless they are backed by some ex-Blizzard designers (which I haven’t heard about tbh).
Nonetheless we are currently stuck with this really punishing system and it would be nice to find a decent way to level those tradeskills up without having to spend years playing the game. I am a casual player and I find it boring having to invest a huge amount of time just to get past one level on a single tradeskill.
I leveled all my skills solo with exception of weaponsmithing and engineering pre patch and it was still a major grind. Never used guides or abused low level crafting. I would say that it’s easier now since gold is so easy to get even chopping wood or mining rocks. You can buy mats you need with that.
Each trade skill has different path to level. I’ll give you two examples.
Furnishing - you need to grind Round rugs or something similar in the beginning to be able to make stains and than just go do WF rounds to mine oil. Sell all other mats (like death motes) and buy solvent. Make stain.
Jewel crafting - mine as much metals as you can, save gems (with exceptions of diamonds and onyx that sell well) and silver sell the rest. Make silver chains and bands as well as gemstone dust. With money you get from selling mats buy as many gems as possible to grind it to dust.
Use buy orders for mats you need. Always leave a couple of cheapest mats in the trade house to avoid inflating the price. Learn how you server prices fluctuate and use it to your advantage. For example on my server I noticed that every Friday there is a major spike in price of certain mats. I learned later that the biggest company (split into 3 companies) distribute gold to their crafters that day and crafters are free to buy whatever they need to craft and offer items to their company members. I would stop buying on Thursday and accumulate certain mats to sell on Friday.
I’ve been toying around with stonecutting to get to 150 and I see that lodestone is way overpriced on my server at the moment. Stones can be bought at a very affordable price instead.
So now I have my buy order for lodestone open but it’s not really working as I wished it would.
Next up would be to farm something to sell to cash in to buy the lodestone, but I need to find out what
