Seeking advice on trying to become GM in all tradeskill

[PalisRahl]

Ok couple of questions. From my current skills levels what is the amount of PP i should be expecting to pay? What should i work on from this level to the next to 250 in each tradeskill (cheapest route and the store bought route)? Thanks in advance

Baking 190
Tailoring 170
Blacksmithing 173
Fletching 174
Brewing 173
Jewellery 192
Pottery 173

[Lilosh]

Tailoring and Smithing, from 170-250, will be the hardest, most expensive and time consuming thing you can think to do in the game.

Don't think in terms of how much plat you will need.

Think about How many MONTHS you have to kill.

Unless you have over a million plat. Then you might be able to buy it all to bring both to 250.

-Lilosh

[Idara]

With brewing, I suspect both the cheapest and the store bought route are the same - Mino Hero Brew. Just be prepared for your hand and wrist to HURT by the time you hit 250.

With baking I did Halas Meat Pies then switched off between Misty Thicket Picnics, griffin/anaconda melts and any PoP drops I could get. Jord meat is THE cheapest route to go if you can farm the jord meat yourself (recipe is just meat+clump of dough+pie tin in Tanaan Oven). The melts would be next to cheapest, although the cheese is only sold in Jaggedpine, which is also the best place to hunt the griffins and only place to hunt the anacondas. The only things not store bought with the Misty Thicket Picnics are the eggs for dough and the brownie parts for the chocolate. For some reason, though, I found that I skilled up a lot faster on the PoP drops than I did on the MTPs. However, I still get a good return for my investment on the MTPs.

Lilosh is VERY right about the smithing and tailoring though. Those two have absolutely NO easy route to get to 250. I have my smithing at 179, and I suspect it's going to top out at 188 when I finish fine steel. My tailoring is only at 158 and I tried doing some rockhopper farming the other day for flawless and superb hides. I think I spent 4 hours farming and got 2 flawless and 1 superb hide. Blech.

You can get your pottery up to 216 on planar steins. Tainted planar essences drop quite often and you can usually even vendor farm a bunch of these. The tanaan clay is pretty expensive though. I think I dropped about 1k pp on this getting my skill from 193 to 198. Poison vials are much cheaper to do and zombie skins aren't hard to get at all. Just go slaughter in Unrest and check vendors in zombie laden areas. After the poison vials you can do casserol dishes, but this one is more of a pain, especially if you're not a druid, because the only place the sketch is sold is in Jaggedpine - and there's not a pottery wheel there.

[Sethlic]

Do baking and brewing first. The reason I say this is that onmy server MTP,s Halas pies, and qeynos afternoon tea sell very well. Yu need a little patience but they sell. This will fund your some of your other Trade skills.
after that if you have the patience do smithing and fishing. These are also capable of making you a great deal of money to help fund your Trade skills. Now if you have a lot of plat get JC, fletching, and Pottery out of the way at any time.

Just my 2 cents.

[Farnyr]

Re: Seeking advice on trying to become GM in all tradeskill

(cheapest route and the store bought route)?

You my friend have just produced and Oxymoron. You cannot expect to do the "Cheapest" way by using store bought goods. As Lilosh said, you can either spend months farming your components. No no, dont start thinking "Nah, it cant take that long, Ill farm a few days and thats all Ill need". Youll need MONTHS. Ask anyone here, youll gather what you figure is more than enough items to get to your goal, and you wont get anywhere near there.

Or you could spend well over 500k, and might make tailoring and smithing to 250. You neglected to mention your race, so we dont even know if you have racial stuff available. If you do, it makes things a little bit less painful, but still not easy.

This may all sound like a scare tactic, and to be frank, it is. If a person cant handle the farming, or the lose of alot of money, they shouldnt be in tradeskills. We are here because we love it folks, not because we love the money.

[Tunee]

definitely NOT the cheap route, specially if you cannot enchant the metals, but JC is by far the easiest to get to 250. My pottery has stalled out at 190-something as well as baking, and fletching, blah, who cares about fletching lol! Smitthing I haven't attempted yet, and lets not even talk about tailoring!! Sigh, been stuck on 135 forever now and farming of parts is just too daunting atm (why I got JC up to 250 hehe, avoidance tactics). Brewing I just haven't felt the need to get up yet. Two of my toons now have maxed brewing for those #$@#$@# heady kiolas (and a friend is maxed on those too when I had him make em for me as well LOL!).

Good luck on getting those skills up, I HATE tradeskills but keep coming back to them anyways hehe...

Tunee Tutall

[Lilosh]

I HATE tradeskills but keep coming back to them anyways hehe...

Tunee Tutall

He loves and hates the ring, as he loves and hates himself.


-Lilosh

[Treefriend]

My tailoring is only at 158 and I tried doing some rockhopper farming the other day for flawless and superb hides. I think I spent 4 hours farming and got 2 flawless and 1 superb hide. Blech.

Idara, what killed me on tailoring was not the RH hides--it has been finding Acrylia. I am so tired of killing orefinders I could puke.

Idara has given you a very good overview and I would like to reinforce what has been said by several--not to discourage you, but to prepare you. It takes a lot more time as you go up in skills, both for finding stuff (8 and 9 component combines are the norm in brewing--but at least you can buy it all, but oh, my wrist) and the number of attempts you do to skill up.

Your skills indicate you have already put some serious time into tradeskills so I think you will be successful. My suggestion though is: Don't dedicate yourself to tradeskilling. Play the game and enjoy it and do the trade stuff on the side as the spirit moves you. There is much less chance of burnout that way. Good luck.

[Idara]

I didn't do too bad with the acrylia because I leveled my warrior up on the Sambatas in Dawnshroud which dropped some, and I hunted quite a bit for experience in Scarlet Desert on the cavemen there, who also drop it. So getting acrylia is kind of just a side benefit to getting experience for me. But getting the freaking rockhopper hides just makes me want to cry.

[Greymantle]

Velll

Hmm one thing no one has asked is how many free AA points do you have? Unless you have allready put them in, only one tradeskill can go over 200. Each other skill will require 3 AA points to let them rise any higher. Others have touched the joy's of smithing and tailoring, so i will not add further to them. Fletching post 202 is both expensive and time consuming. Cheapest way is to farm acryla and make arrows, fastest most expensive, make bows. But have a TON of plat to burn.

[Treefriend]

Without expanding on it Idara makes another very important point about planning your venture into all the trade skills--coordination of component finding and getting experiance. Last week I was farming lion meat in EK (right no exp there but...). I ended up working on three skills at the same time. I had auto forage on to pick up those wonderful little tea leaves, had my tailoring kit and skinning knife with me to make LQ hides for smithing and trying to get the lions to drop lion meat instead of 'chunk of meat'. My lamintation was that if I had been organized enough when I was farming silk (yes, in this same zone) for Wu tailoring I could have been working on 4 things at once... sigh, to late now.

So getting acrylia is kind of just a side benefit to getting experience for me.

I didn't get interested in any trade skills except JC until about level 50 so I passed a lot of good oportunities for experience + components. I just entered 54 when I got through with Wu so Mons Letalis was very good experience wise (except for dying too often but stonegrabbers contributed a lot to the exp pool--and kept things from getting boring).

Sorry if this kinda rambles but to work on all the trade skills at once you need to ramble

Tree

[Reflan]

I agree with some of what Sethlic was saying about doing some skills first.

If you really want to get heavy into tradeskills, don't think of what you need as a starting point only regarding money; it will take a long, long time to do the harder ones alone, much less all of them. Your bank account will have all the time in the world to fluctuate radically in the meantime. So when it comes to money, think of how you will generate it and how that can help you get still further in your tradeskills(and maybe some other needs here and there, like a new piece of armor, equipment, a geerlok, etc). Perhaps you are already rich, or perhaps you make gobs of money by selling uber phat lewts every day practically as an accidental byproduct of just playing the game, and have little need to generate money on purpose. But if that is not the case, try to leverage proficiency in one skill into funding for another.

Brewing and baking will generate thousands of plat for you a week on most servers, once you make the top end products like Grobbs Liquidized Meats, Kaladim Constitutionals, Qeynos tea, Misty Thicket Picnics. A solid evening or two a week may be required, maybe more, maybe less, depending on your server prices, how lucky you are in in selling out quickly, etc. But...with that amount of time, you can keep on bringing in thousands per week even if you never sell another piece of dropped loot in your EQ lifetime.

Brewing is much cheaper than baking; it took me probably about 5k to get baking to 250, as I had to buy the occasional mammoth meat at 10pp each, since mammoth meat is so heavily camped on my server. However, I made my money back and more with baking fairly quickly.

That's because I had MANY mules to store my products on -- two accounts and a friend let me borrow a few of his mules too. If you have less space, you will either have to start throwing away your product and losing a ton of money or will have to just wait till you sell out your product. I would suggest begging friends, anything at all you can do, to see if they can create mules just to help you out, especially if you don't have a second account. A second account is a gigantic help. I keep two mules up overnight in the bazaar usually to help sell my product. Sometimes they even price-war each other just a tad, to create some fake excitement over my prices.

Anyway, start with the skills that are either cheapest, like brewing and JC, or that are cheap and will let you get sellable product quickly -- throw out JC(not much that's very sellable until you get to PoP jewelry, which you'd better be 250 for) and substitute baking instead. Fishing can be great too, some say, so consider that one too. Brewing is a very good one because both tailors and smiths need tempers for their work. I made 2200pp today in about 10 or 15 minutes on brewing because I was running through a zone where someone was /ooc'ing that he needed a GM brewer. I failed on one out of 60 of his combines, and we were both happy. That money was then almost immediately destroyed by my still futile attempts to level up smithing.

So, use the money you get from cheaper, easier skills to fund others. You'll need it!

[Chaid]

From someone in the 1750 club, here's my input:

You'll need 500-600k to master all tradeskills to 250.

Estimate 200 hours of gathering/farming and combining.

Have a second account with many mules or don't bother at all.

[Chenier]

You'll need 500-600k to master all tradeskills to 250.

Estimate 200 hours of gathering/farming and combining.

That and a rabbit's foot the size of Rhode Island.

Random luck, friend's who give you stuff, time to farm, space to do precombines...

And money - personally, I think anyone who can put an estimate on how much doing a tradeskill costs is lying. Perhaps you can put firmer estimates on brewing, baking, JC...but tailoring and blacksmithing - no way.

Perhaps smithing is easier to firmly place a plat figure on, making an assumption that one will follow one route (FS, shadow scream, sickles - or whatever).

But tailoring has way too many variables and recipes to the top.

But my biggest point is that in all tradeskills, you recycle the money. Farm some stuff, buy some stuff, make some stuff, sell that stuff to merchants to buy more stuff. Or sell that stuff on your bazaar vendor. But you're recycling money. Now if you start with exactly 600k and don't buy a single other thing for the entire time your tradeskilling, then you figure out exactly how you spend on the skill ups, even after recycling the money. But most of us don't do that. We raid and xp and buy gear upgrades and give loans to friends and take loans from friends and sell merchant fodder and buy spells and go merchant diving, etc. etc. And tradeskilling takes a very long time, so all of these things happen eventually.

When I was working on tailoring, some days I would spend 60-80k on gems alone. Then I would only spend a few thousand that next week. You have to be a pack rat - do you remember if you made that backpack of CE's or did you buy them? Did you fish all those cod egg oils or did you buy them? And where did that stack of acrylia bits go?

Anyway, there is no price that one can accurately put on tradeskills. It's a lot - more than you probably have. But it's the journey that's interesting. =)

[Reflan]

You will almost certainly spend more time than 200 hours camping and combining. I have spent 150 hours camping time just on smithing alone, and that's just to get to 215 skill. A very very long way from 240/250.

That's just ONE tradeskill to a not super high level. Not even counting combines time.

You will spend many hundreds of hours doing all this. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes over 1000 hours to get 1750, easily.

So far I've done baking and pottery to 250, brewing to 241, smithing to 215, fletching not at all, tailoring to 131, JC to 200, fishing to 161. I'm well on my way to the nut house, and my hours spent are well into the hundreds.

If you get one of those wonderful drops that boosts your skills 10 or 15% (a geerlok only gives you 5%) then you can expect to cut literally weeks of effort off your skilling up.