Need a bit of advice (Baking AND Brewing)

[KyrosKrane]

I always buy CVT that I see in the bazaar for 15-20p or less. Thats a huge profit for the makers.

Heh. Here's the crazy thing. I buy my CVT from vendors for just under 27pp each -- I'm too lazy to make my own. I resell them in the Bazaar for 40pp. Invariably, I sell out.

Go figure.

[Calabar]

I can really relate to this question. I’ve always loved the baking skill. Its just plane fun. So my first character, after much soul searching, was going to be a GM baker. After almost two years he’s at 226. I tend to level slowly, I’m always broke and I was in a small guild. So trade skills went rather slowly. When I switched to my shaman as my main character I decided I wanted to GM a skill instead of constantly trying to GM one. So my shaman became a GM brewer.

If you want to get a skill to 250 as quickly as possible then brewing is the way to go. You can hit 248 with store bought items and for extremely little cash. Those last two points can be a pain, depending on your luck, but its still an easy skill to GM. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the combine for Hero Brew, but after making Halas Pies until they became trivial I don’t think its such a big deal. As for the negative side of brewing, you will need to buy a corking device. And if you want your trophy, which I would recommend, you’ll need to buy at least two. Corking devices have dropped a lot recently, at least on Seventh Hammer, but they are still an investment.

As fun as baking is, it can be a pain to raise beyond 191. If you can’t forage, your options are greatly reduced unless you can afford to buy the items in the bazaar. But it can be done. The only non store-bought items Halas Pies require are wolf and mammoth meat. Wolf meat is fairly easily bought off NPC vendors or acquired by killing wolves, especially in East Karana. Mammoth meat drops fairly often in Eastern Wastes. And once those trivial you can make Misty Picnics all the way to 250. You may have to buy a few items in the bazaar, but they tend to go a long ways. One brownie meat, for example, is good for 100 combines. And if you’re willing to hunt in Jaggedpine you can supplement Misty Picnic with griffon and anaconda melts. Baking isn’t one of the harder skills to grand master, but it does tend to be rather slow.

As far as sells, lets look at baking and brewing separately. Baking, in my opinion, is the better of the two trade skills. From day one you can use everything you make. And there are a huge variety of items you can make. Most of these won’t sell very well in the bazaar, but some of them will. Fish rolls are very cheap to make and with their long duration tend to sell well. Halas Pies and Misty Picnics tend to sell steady even with the market as flooded as it is. None of these items will make you rich overnight, but they sell steady and can bring in a fair amount of money in the long run. Of course, with both Halas Pies and Misty Picnics you have a lot of sub combines you have to do to make them and for me that becomes a pain after a while. Baking can become even more profitable once you start fighting in the PoP zones and have access to some of the drops there.

Brewing doesn’t have a lot of marketable items. Most brewing items are alcoholic beverages, which, while fun, don’t have a lot of uses. Once you trivial Hero Brew at 248 you can make some stat drinks. But there are only a small handful of drinks to choose from. Of these, Qeynos Afternoon Tea requires a griffon feather and foraged tea leaves for each combine and Kaladim Constitutional has such a high trivial you can expect to fail half your combines even with 250 skill. You can also make tempers but I’ve not messed with those yet so I don’t know how well they’ll sell. On the plus side, I have been able to do smithing and quest combines for friends, which is always nice to be able to do.

So if you want a wide variety of items to sell and don’t mind taking the time to grand master your skill, then baking is most likely your best choice. If you’re in a hurry to hit 250 in a trade skill and get your trophy, then brewing is the way to go. And if you just want items that sell well, sell spiderling silks, spider silks and leather padding. As long as you price them competitively you should sell out fairly quickly.

Best of luck.