Tradeskill suggestions to raise all tradeskills

[Uroc]

Thank you all for the suggestions!

I see a lot of people suggesting that I stick on the path of 1 tradeskill at a time and avoid worrying so much about crossover tradeskilling as much. If that ends up being the best route, kinda sucks, but I'll deal with it. The reason I chose to do this now is for 2 reasons. First off, my guild is going through a rebuilding procress. We were ripping through PoP tier 1 and 2 and snagged on Lord Mith Marr. We failed at him 4 times due to stupid stuff and a bunch of people left at once. So the guild is left to pick-up's and experiencing atm. The second reason, is...well, due to the fact we *were* doing PoP flagging, Emp/VT keying, VT, etc., I'm burnt out on mob bashing. Tradeskills sounded like a good alternative, EXCEPT the restocking of containers with multiple ingredient combines.

From my understanding, I have approximately 2 weeks before the tradeskill changes go live. In 2 weeks of guild down time, I figure I can start to farm tradeskill items. For reference, I have 4 empty character spots (3 now due to the fact one is already loading up on tradeskill items) in which to use to stock and supply. My bank vault has approximately 50kpp, but I also have the luxury of 2 accounts with a Monk(65, 101AA's)/Cleric (62, 3AA's) combo to farm, etc. This doesn't allow me to farm any tier 2+ PoP zones, because without a slower, the mana sink to my cleric is too much, but I can pretty much farm any other zone in the game, with some exceptions.

The flip side to all this, even bashing greens and filling up the stockpile gets old quick. With the downtime from that, I figure I'll read as much as I can here. Try to write down an appropriate path for each tradeskill with items I know I can get and try to ensure the least amount of loss by cross-skilling as much as possible. I don't plan to start doing combines until the change goes live. I just can't take the pain. I was cursed with my mothers side of the family wrists', and they crumble with too much stress.

Anyway, I'm doing research, and everyone's input here has been great. Anything I learn now will help.

[Healblade]

Uroc, shoot me a PM with your current skill levels and whatnot.

I'm working on writing up some skillup paths for a friend of mine who is getting into tradeskilling, and I can share them with you. While they wouldn't necessarily be the best ideas they'll be a great way to keep trackof progress and get ideas for your trades.

Best of luck!
~Healblade

[Auricula]

The first thing I would recommend stockpiling is Spider Silk (well, preferably the swatches made from it to save space). Not only will you need it for Wu's level tailoring, you will go through it like water if you take the Ceremonial Solstice Robe route for advanced skill ups. Likewise, skilling up Brewing by making the cursed Heady Kiola's isn't a terribly expensive route to go, and you will need more of them than you can dream of for Wu's tailoring.

If you don't want to pay the Bazaar prices for Leather Padding, Low/Med/High Quality Lion/Cat/Bear pelts are also good to stockpile along with Spiderling Silk (again, preferebly the threads made from it). Or the Luclin version of padding, which is Rockhopper hides and Shadeling Silk. The padding is another of the things you really can't avoid needed in large quantities. And if you farm Shadeweavers, save Swirling Shadows for Smithing and Condensed Shadows (not sure of name) for high level Fletching.

With Baking and Brewing there are just SO many options, pick the ones you will have fun with. If you just want quick skills ups, you can pretty easily find recipies that are mostly or all vendor bought ingredients.

Nothing worth stockpiling for Jewelcraft. I can't really think of anything for Pottery either, except maybe pelts/zombie skins for poison vials.

While it is probably most efficient to pick one tradeskill and work on it until you are done, I have never followed that path. Let's see, today I am in a pottery mood; tomorrow it might be tailoring. EQ is a game, and therefore you should be having fun. To me, it defeats the purpose of playing if I let something become a chore.

[RangerTimy]

In response to the original question...

Now that I'm crafting Master Wu's Fighting armor, I wish that I had used Heady Kiola to do skillups in brewing. Everything I made in brewing up to that skill level was just sold back to vendors, but the heady kiola would have been something I could keep.

You need 4 heady kiolas per piece of wu's armor, so I'd heavily recommend making these to get your skill to 46 in brewing.

Another thing I might suggest is to make Metal Bits to get your blacksmithing up. They are trivial at 18, so it won't take you very far, but eventually you will need all you can get.

For now, some items you may want to hang on to when you see them:

- snake, aviak, dragon, griffon, eggs (or any other usable egg)
- any and all wolf/lion/bear skins that you see (for tailoring and pottery)
- basically any animal meat for baking

Keep in mind that you bank slots will fill up very quickly, so you may need to store stuff on an alternate character.

[Tinile]

I'd agree that concentrating your hoarding to tailoring supplies would be best. You will need a large quantity of spider silks. You can usually find them in bazaar as well. If you decide to buy the spider silks, you can farm for hopper / velious pelts for high level tailoring. You will need a lot of hopper hides and velious pelts to get you to 220 or 250.

[mizoto]

My advice, if I had to do it again, would be to raise brewing to 250 first. It is one of, if not the easiest, skill to raise and provides help in both smithing and tailoring -- maybe others too. Save JC until you absolutely need it. It is another easy skill to raise and a refreshing diversion from the pain of the "hunt and gather" tradeskills.

If you become addicted to tradeskills like most of us here, you will be actively making and changing your mini-maps for the short term road ahead, rather than the long road of tradeskill mastery.

Miz

[mizoto]

double post

[RangerTimy]

My advice, if I had to do it again, would be to raise brewing to 250 first. It is one of, if not the easiest, skill to raise and provides help in both smithing and tailoring -- maybe others too.

What would you recommend brewing that would be most helpful for other areas? This is my only skill that is still relatively low. I was thinking Paeala Bark Tannin to 102 and then Snapper Oil to 150, but not too sure after that.

Any ideas?

[mizoto]

Need a steady income to support the tradeskill addiction. Brewing items such as Qeynos Afternoon Tea sell steady and with a pretty good profit margin.


Items you can hold onto:

Heady Kiolas (tailoring)
Ribbon Dyes (tailoring)
Cod Oil (tailoring) various other oils as well for different items
Coldain Heaters (smithing/tailoring)
Coldain Velium Tempers (smithing/tailoring)
Ethereal Tempers (smithing for the 210-212 freebies)
Cured Ethereal Energy (tailoring for the 210-212 freebies)
LDoN tempers (smithing)

The List goes on

Miz

[Utope Eljugador]

My map -

Starting points:

Brewing - 121
Baking - 91
Fletching - 145
Jewelcraft - 89
Tailoring - 42
Smithing - 54
Pottery - 181

I didnt use mods for anything except the last two points of pottery when I had my trophy.

Those are the bases I had when I decided to go to 250 in all trade skills.

The first thing I did was farm up about 60 stacks of spider silks (yields approx 30 stacks of swatches) stored them on a mule. Also, I killed cats in EK while farming spiders for the HQ pelts, MQ pelts. Saved both on mule.

Moved to brewing on shakers. Then powered through on hero brews to 248, and 100 combines of constitutionals for the last two points. 250 brewing.

Back to tailoring, made my own kiolas and used up all the HQ pelts to take me to 115? tailoring. Did wu's to 158 on the rest. Had 8 stacks left over I think.

Smithing, used the MQ pelts for leather padding (didnt yeild many, maybe 5 stacks) saved those after I capped off banded. Went straight to plate, did bracers, then helms, then bp's. 188 smithing.

Baking , did cheese melts to 188 i think (those are 191 right?) then tried to do misty picknicks.. took me to 190 on 400 combines, moved to obidiah truffles to 201. Did a bunch of random things, mostly I farmed brownie parts and did holy cake, but also managed to find a good quantity of jord meat, boar meat, griffon meat in the bazaar (never more than 100 of each per run) and farmed about 100 griffon meat in Jagged Pine while also camping half elf mask (which I never got but I didnt really care , I was mostly doing it cause I was hunting griffons and I like to mulitask). Did the last 5 points on 400 picknicks. Finished off baking 250.

Fletching I did arrows to 202, then bows. The vendor kind that take you to 250. Made a stonewood bow and sold that, financed (replenished funds) fletching and pottery and baking and smithing (thus far) and tailoring (later on). 250 fletching.

Jewelcraft is pretty simple, followed the trivial list on this site. 250 jewelcraft.

Pottery I had the advantage of doing medium bowls way back when (for poison vials) so the first 181 went fast. Tried a multitude of things to go to 200, mostly planar steins (vendor mined and farmed in codecay for tainted planar essence) then opal steins then I had the fortune of having a chanter bot already, with just under 3k mana so I could do my own mana vials for idol combines and enchant my own clay I commissioned a shaman to imbue a bunch of amber for me. Finished off the last two points with star ruby steins. 250 pottery.

Back to tailoring. 158 skill, bazaar'd up a bunch of loy foraged dye components. 167. PL'd a forage bot. Foraged cauldron prawns. Decided that sucked. Cut my losses, bought up more foraged components and dye. 182 tailoring. Had a bunch of hopper hides from shard camping /shudder. 185 tailoring FU tailoring. More dye. 186 tailoring. To be continued...

Smithing - 188, had been saving ldon tempers, took me to 205. Farm velium. I farmed in Skyshrine cause I'm a rogue and I can use the bank, vendors, forge no matter my faction but its not that bad anyhow. One AoW faction tag when I was down indiff (from ally) and I never dropped to kos. 205 (cause I didnt want to pay 100pp per temper for ldon) to 220 enchanted velium bits. The money I earned vendoring all the other drops in skyshrine financed the spell purchases and then some. 220 to 227 (took me 79 combines) I did grimel. Bard up top for selos. Wizard at the forge for levi / xloc. Took me an hour. Or close enough too anyhow. 228 I got from 1 of 6 combines of tae ew chain leggings (farmed my own vials while PL'ing aforementioned chanterbot). Thus far have farmed up 131 shrieking / 104 wailing substances (or vice versa) and 112 swirling shadows. To be continued.

I also did all 18 aa's , farmed about 100 wyvern hides, and fished about 180 cobalt cod. Level'd my SK one level, my enchanter 3. Basically this broke up the monotony that can overwhelm a tradeskiller from time to time. If you can farm your own blood vials from CT I'd suggest that along with Shadowscream for smithing. I recomend against sickles. They're a) too costly unless you're sick rich, which can only help b) too many subcombines for my taste. Also, I vendored everything I made (or destroyed / dropped) save for misty thicket picknicks, kaladim constitutionals (both of which I use for my toons) the bow i sold for funds. And the tae ew chain leggings (2) I made. I've also managed to save up 400 velium studs from left over velium/previously saved velium.

I also recomend setting a budget for how much you're willing to spend on bazaar items. I refused to pay more than 5pp for ce's . I didnt pay more than 25pp for leather padding. I refused to pay more than 1pp for silk swatches so I farmed my own. I never bought velium, and only bought acrylia for 40 bonings because I felt like using up some components to save some space. I hate a messy bank. So far I'd guess tradeskills have consumed 200k pp. Prices vary by server so do bit of research into your server's market. The biggest chunk was spent on fletching. The rest evenly over the rest of my skills.

Tailoring I fully expect to be a bear. I'm hoping GoD opens up some easier routes between 188 and 250. Smithing has been fairly straight forward thus far and I an planning on hitting 250 sometime this week depending on my work schedule. Setting your own hours can be a blessing or a bane.

In all fairness, I've had the advantage of having access to a 65 cleric and a 54 wizard as well as a 65 bard. Making velium farming, hollowshade (go go supernova) farming easier.

[Koru]

Pick and choose what you want to save. Decide how much you are willing to spend on a tradeskill, find the skillup path that looks like it would best suit you (plenty of those on the board). Then go over the planned skillup path for each skill and figure out what the rareish components are. Save those. The easy or cheap ones you can get as you need.

Then compare those to your skill up plan. Are the components made with any other skill? If so are they worth skilling up on? Would the loss of skilling up on valuable supplies slow down your progress? That is, out of 400 of those supplies, how many are you willing to lose due to failures?

The ones you can save on: Brewing, baking, fletching, JC. Beyond a stack of brownie parts there's not much that isn't easily and cheaply gotten save perhaps for acrylia for fletching if you go that way. Not if you're just skilling them up. Maybe make sure you have the implements you need because running to make/buy them as you skill up will bite. For the most part you will gain more by skilling these up purely for the sake of skilling them up and then making the items you need as you need them later on.

Ones you should look carefully at what to save: Smithing and tailoring. These two go very well together if you're farming, so I treat them as almost the same skill when it comes to sorting out supplies. Also the supplies for them are used down the road more often.

Do yourself a favor though and skill up smithing to the point where you can make boning and studs without failing a lot. Just that will save you a bundle, not only in platinum but also in inventory space needed for ore. Same for brewing for tempers. If I were doing it again I'd go smithing to 130ish, brewing to 150ish and tailoring 88 asap just to cut down on failures for the rest of the supplies. After that I'd personally go with raising the easy trades first since that also buys time to gather more supplies for the other trades. No matter how much you farmed or chipmunked away the RNG is keyed to always require more than you got or so it would seem.

The items I can most think of that would be worthwhile to skill up on and save: Kiola (brewing) for tailoring, boning (smithing) for tailoring, ceramic lining by and for pottery, leather padding (tailoring) for smithing. All items you'll use a fair deal of later on, are cheap to make and may save you time to hold on to.

[Nolrog]

go ahead and do woven madrake to 66 then make at least a full 10 slot of leather padding for smithing.

I'm well on my way to this one. LOL.

My suggestion is not to hoard the items, but work on the tradeskills as you have enough combines for a nice run. While I was farming swirling shadows for SS armor combines, I was also picking up payala friut for brewing combines. When I had about 100 friuts, I'd head to the brew barrel, and make the essence until I used them up, and then I went back.

If you don't turn your inventory over, then you'll quickly run out of space to hold everything. There's just to many different things you'll need in order to raise your skills up.

[Tweedledea]

Originally posted by RangerTimy
What would you recommend brewing that would be most helpful for other areas? This is my only skill that is still relatively low. I was thinking Paeala Bark Tannin to 102 and then Snapper Oil to 150, but not too sure after that.

Any ideas?

Faydwer shaker is a nice store-bought combine to 188, and not too click-intensive. I used to brew in SH then run to FG for the awkward components.

[Cavel]

IF I were doing the AG quest and working a Toon Just for that I would do Trade Skills in the following Order:

Brewing First (easiest skill to get close to GM with fairly Low cost) Save all the Heady Kiola you make
Baking to around 195-200
Tailoring Skill up doing Mandrake and baskets
Back to Baking to the MTP
Tailoring again to Wu's trivial
Then cause you will be sick of looking at the Loom or Tailoring Kit Move to Fletching
Sprinkle in a Bit of SMithing
Then some JC

Heck if you can forrage do some of the Ro LDON adventures and save the Quartz Crystals and the Geodes for JC....

That is about all I can think of now.

[ddubois]

One cross-skill thing I stumbled across: While working on smithing, I did Holloshade war to farm shadowscream components. Doing so, I got tons of Owlbear Pelts. So I did the luclin vah shir needle quest and used those pelts, along with feathers from the owlbears, and if I recall correctly, shade silk from the swirling shadow guys in TS, to make owlbear leggings and tunics. I think I did that from 66-131, and I didn't have to waste any time making stupid heady koialas. (But then, I did have to waste time doing a stupid vah shir quest, so who's to say for sure whether I came out ahead.)

I still have to go back an do some Wu's now, but I think I may have effectively leveraged some farming time.