Hello,
I finally managed to hit every Trade Skill level 200. I did it mostly by myself, with some company support with weaponsmithing and furnishing. Since I don’t believe there is any person in AGS, who tried to do that and there was no tester hired to perform it (same as for the pvp missions and territory standing), here I am - I tested it and I have my opinion, I want to share.
GATHERING SKILLS
I will talk about them in general with an exception of fishing. I’ll talk about fishing later.
So, for gathering skills, I think they are ok to level up. I’d say even more - Harvesting was so fun to level up, I wanted to offer my services to other company members to give me their login/pass so I can do this again 
I mean, this is something personal, I like running around Aeternum and pick everything I see as a true Loot Goblin. There is something unclear tho, I wanted to discuss - it’s experience distribution on top tier materials. So this is approximated experience list per largest node of top tier material:
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Big Ori Node - 2000 exp
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Big Wirefiber Node - 1200 exp
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Level 66 animal - 800 exp
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Big Ironwood Tree - 6000 exp
It’s kinda weird in my opinion and I think this is, again, effect of not testing stuff before the release. But as I said, gathering skills are ok to level up, they take some time, logging is boring, but they just feel right. With exception of…
FISHING
Now hear me out - In my opinion fishing in NW exists only because “every game” has some fishing mechanics, so NW must have it as well. It’s useless, you can play the game without using a fishing rod even once. Resources, you are getting from fishing are worthless and could’ve been easly replaced with something else, completly removing fishing mechanics from NW. That said, let’s talk for a moment about what is wrong with fishing.
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At launch Treasure Chests were actually cool and exciting to get. Rewards from them was actually good, which made fishing somehow relevant. Because of the bot problem AGS decided to nerf it to the ground, to the point when they are actually “Garbage Chests”. I’m absolutely against punishing players, that play the game normally, for some cheater activity, and this is what happened to NW - The only good thing about treasure chests right now is the experience they give, which is another problem.
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Experience points u get, while fishing are just sad. While leveling, you kinda hope to fish the Garbage Chest, just to get this exp boost, because grey/green fishes gives you almost nothing. And yea, catching legendary fishes gives you some exp boost, but they are just absurdly rare.
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Now let’s say you catch a legendary fish. Some of them are used in T5 cooking recipes, that give you 40 points of some stat. Their market value is around couple hundreds of gold, which is somehow nice. But you know what? You can adjust your build and run 26/14 cooking recipe and completly forget about the fish issue. And this is kinda what happed - Because of how bad is fishing mechanics, legendary fish supply is somehow low and there is a huge demand for T5 food, so ppl skip legendary fish meals and go for something easier to get.
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What about the other fishing resources? Well they are worthless. I gathered all the fishing stuff I managed to obtain, while I was leveling from 157, to 200. I gathered all of them, respeced to focus and salvaged everything worth salvaging. Now, hitting last 40 levels took me around 16h. You can wonder how much money I made on them, so here is the answer: Around 3000 coins. And only because there are town board quests that requires you to bring specific fishes, which increases their prices. The actual crafting materials, that should be naturally required to some usefull stuff are absolutely worthless. And btw, I’ve had around 60 Garbage Chests, which gave me ~5 pristine gems.
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Finally, since aptitude boxes are a thing, and they are pretty cool for all professions, I decided to get T1 for fishing, to check it out. Here is the result: https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/rz4nlf/this_is_t1_fishing_chest_in_case_u_expected_to/
I can’t really express how bad is fishing right now. It’s really unrewarding, It’s the hardest to level up, because of low exp/fish and also because of the mechanics, that actually makes u play some kind of minigame for hours and hours. In my opinion, fishing should be probably removed right now, completely reworked and reintroduced at some point. Current fishing system has almost 0 impact on actuall gameplay. Having this abyssmal placeholder for the skill that could’ve been fun and rewarding will just produce posts with complains.
REFINING SKILLS
So most of them are ok. You can level up them in the natural way, while leveling crafting skills. And if you want to level up one of them, just to have it at 200, it’s still resonably easy and cheap. As a small note, I’d say that Stonecutting is weird. After unlocking pristine gems cut, you can just cut 800 of them to speedrun to level 200, but this is pricey, so you can go for the stone way and cut 100k of stone and 50k of lodestone and turn them into higher tier materials. I mean, this feels kinda weird for Stonecutting, but I wouldn’t say that it is an issue.
CRAFTING SKILLS
The only crafting skill that is chill to level up is cooking. Rest of them are somehow grindy, but before I jump into that, I want to also mention Arcana, which is resonably easy to craft and feels somehow fair. Altho you will produce tousands of potions of market value that equals 0.01g. That said, let’s speak about other crafting skills. They share one problem - every of them is a money sink and first 199 levels gives you nothing. They start to be useful at level 200. There are some exceptions to that, I’d like to list here:
- Ammunition
- Tools
- Bags
- Chests
- Consumables (i.e. honing stones, prof boosters)
- Trophies
but most of the usefull stuff comes with level 200. You probably can’t make a good armor/weapon/jewellery for yourself, or for sell, before u hit that level. And by “good” I mean one that is better that those on the trading post. And I’m talking here about early/mid game players - They should have some kind of bonus for having a decent profession level, but they simply don’t. You can spend 20h grinding weaponsmithing to 150, just to craft some medicore named item or gamble some starmetal sword for yourself OR go to the TP and buy a decent one for 4g.
Profession level grind looks like this right now - You hit level 60, get some money, decide that you want to level up some Trade Skill, put all your money to get it to level 200. And it feels bad.
Now, I want to jump into specific professions to talk about them in more detailed way.
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Armoring and Engineering
I think they are somehow fine to level up. Armoring gives you couple of ways to reach level 200. You can go the silk way, the leather way, or the metal way, choice is yours, it’s somehow fast, probably 2 days of hard grind and you are done. Engineering offers you some approaches as well, but the most efficient one, crafting fishing poles, is somehow cheap - Wood is reasonably easy to aquire, so I’d say those two are the least problematic and the most pain free. -
Jewelcrafting
This one is a little stupid. After reaching level 150, you unlock the pristine jewellery. Now you can create 950 silver pristine jewellery pieces OR 1400 silver brilliant jewellery pieces. Now do the math.
I kinda disliked leveling jewelcrafting, it is pricey, you can sometimes hit random jewellery piece, that is actually sellable, so you can make some money back, but the biggest issue here is, as always, motes. Since the Elemental Animals got slaughtered by AGS (RIP and thx ags for the nerf, noone wanted), cutting gems is actually expensive. So jewelcrafting is way more expensive, than you probably expected. On the upside, materials weight is kinda low, so you don’t need to worry that much, about the storage space. -
Weaponsmithing
This profession is the king of bad design. You will salvage every single piece of equipment you craft just to get some extra ingots. It’s terribly expensive, no other profession is even close to that. It used to be way cheaper, but we got some profession balance from AGS
After this balance, you are getting more exp from higher level crafts and less exp from lower level crafts. What does it mean? Well, before this beautiful update, you could’ve farmed insane amounts of steel and make steel weapons to hit level 200 weaponsmithing. Now it’s kinda impossible - you are stuck with starmetal and orichalcum. If you don’t have solid amount of money, don’t even bother leveling this up.
And also, which is very important in my opinion, applies to all professions, but have the biggest impact here - it’s the way to remove resources from the server. You need 15 orichalcum ingots per craft, after hitting level 150. You will do insane amount of crafts and salvage everything. Every salvage removes 14 orichalcum ingots from the server. They just vanish. Think about it a little longer - 14 orichalcum ingots is approximately
250 Iron ore
108 Starmetal ore
50 Obsidian Flux
100 Orichalcum ore
111 Charcoal
And each of the above will dissapear from the game, because of this poor design.
You are going to compete with every end game player. Indirectly, but “everyone” wants the asmodeum, so orichalcum ingots will grow in price, since there is like 100 nodes of orichalcum on the map. And 100 nodes, yielding around 40 orichalcum ore, every 15 mins, will supply the server with 16k orichalcum ore per hour, given that every node will be farmed. At the same time orichalcum ore demand is around, dagnabbit, 1000000 per hour. So I wish you good luck and alot of fun chasing your weaponsmithing dreams.
AH, let’s say you got level 200 weaponsmithing. Now you only need weaponsmith set. Well good luck with that, Weaponsmith’s Pants drops only from Malevolence (boss, not location). My company killed the boss approximately 2000 times (when you sum every kill/person). And we dropped them twice. TWICE.
I’d love to see someone from AGS doing it live and sharing their experience with viewers -
Furnishing
This one is funny, here is the formula to level it up:
- 1-100 craft everything that looks cheap and is salvagable. Then salvage it and sell the resources.
- 101-150 get following:
31500 Potent Solvent
12600 Oil
Craft Oak Stain 3150 times, which gives you 31500 oak stains. Drop them on the ground, noone wants them. - 151-200 get following:
49000 Pure Solvent
19600 Oil
Craft Mahogany Stain 4900 times, which gives you 49000 mahogany stains. Drop them on the ground, noone wants them. Now you can enjoy crafting trophies.
You can, ofc, go and craft some cool looking furniture to level up, but at some point you will end up crafting stains anyway. I mean, I don’t want to comment the design of this profession, it is as stupid as it sounds.
CONCLUSION
I asked myself a question - “If I had to level up all trade skills again, would I do it?”. And the answer is “hell no”. So the only question left is “which of them I would level up again” and I’d, probably, level up gathering/refining skills (not you fishing, gtfo). Cooking and Arcana are okish to level up as well, especially cooking, it should be the easiest one. But if you don’t need to level up Crafting Trade Skills just don’t touch them.