Profiting with Tradeskills

[racquet13]

I'm a fairly new player looking to make some plat with Tradeskills. I'm a level 52 Wood Elf Ranger. My Brewing is in the 180s, Pottery in 120s, Fletching in 80s, Baking in the 60s, and all of the others are less than 30. Anyway, I've been looking through the recipes and it seems like all of the high end player-made items require components that come from high level places. So I was thinking I wanted to go to 250 with a skill but didn't know which one. I've been making a lot of money off armor dye lately, but it's still a bit too slow for me. I considered Smithing, but I don't think I could make Tae Ew Chain armor. My guild is not that strong, and we don't raid places like Cazic Thule or wherever you need to go to get the molds for it. I thought of doing Fletching, but you need to kill planar mobs for some of the components to the high end bows. Are all of the high end tradeskill-made items like this? I'm willing to invest the money/time to get a skill to 250, but I just don't know which one I should do...looking for one that is profitable without having to kill high level mobs. And lastly sorry for this topic, because I know they're done to death, but I figured my question was a bit different.

[Silound]

Not much different. The *only* proven ways to make cash off tradeskills are

a) Corner a new market. This usually requires a fairly high skill to do
b) Spend thousands of plat and days of time to GM a skill to produce higher end items that will *eventually* pay off your costs and make some profit
c) Make sub-combines for other tradeskillers. Examples being Heady Kiolas, Celestial Essences, Clumps of Dough
d) Don't do tradeskills, rather farm the more mundane and common paarts and sell them to other tradeskillers. Examples being Silks, pelts, meats, eggs, and other wanted items for tradeskills.

Silound

[Oakraven]

Not much different. The *only* proven ways to make cash off tradeskills are
Silound

a couple of observations.

a) this involves starting yourself on a new server at launch and working your way up the traidskill ladder
b) This relies on your being on a server with few Traidskillers with more than 250 skill
c) But depending on your server economy you may actualy be better of doing d) or farming zones that drop items that sell to NPCs for better than Fine steel/combine wepon prices
d) your a ranger, Go farming in zones where you forage up Eggs when you can, and look up the prices on your server for other forage items.

you may also want to take a look Arrows, you can usualy get back part of what you spend doing skill ups by fletching sellable arrows

[racquet13]

I'm on Kane Bayle, a very under-populated server without a lot of high-end tradeskillers as far as I know.

[Renjah]

SURE FIRE FASTEST WAY TO MAKE MONEY!!!

The 100% fastest way to make money with trade skills.... u ready for it?

DONT START!!! hehe any halfway decent profittable skill will require 250 skill. This is the only way you can make big bucks fast. Howevr any skill worth doing to make money will rewuire either a lot of time or a lot of money... most likely both. If you dont want to waste the time and money make celestial essence or farm spider silks... You can make a few thousand plat a night farming silk by day and selling celestial essence by night.

[racquet13]

You said:

any halfway decent profittable skill will require 250 skill. This is the only way you can make big bucks fast. Howevr any skill worth doing to make money will rewuire either a lot of time or a lot of money... most likely both. If you dont want to waste the time and money

I said:

I'm willing to invest the money/time to get a skill to 250, but I just don't know which one I should do...looking for one that is profitable without having to kill high level mobs.

I understand that you need to have a very high skill to make money. Just wondering which of the skills has the best options at 250 to make money that doesn't involve killing planar level mobs.

make celestial essence or farm spider silks... You can make a few thousand plat a night farming silk by day and selling celestial essence by night

I'd rather work a skill up to 250 and make stuff then rather than farm for hours (after writing that I realize the irony). It just seems more rewarding...maybe it's just me but whatever. I don't want to make heady kiolas or celestial essences all day long...or in my case, armor dye lol.

---

After doing a bit more research, I decided Fletching looking good. The mistake I had made earlier was that I was only looking at the PoP bows, rather than the Cultural bows. Would making Blessed Faydark Thunderbolts at 250 be a good source of income? Not really sure how well they sell but I see them go for ~9-11k on Kane Bayle. The components look tedious to acquire, but not at all difficult. Any insight on this or maybe a different skill? 183 Fletching atm.

[Cigarskunk]

PAH! And people accuse me of being a pessemist. :shock:

There's still plat to be found in most tradeskills - even without GM level skill (although it certainly helps).

Baking - misty thicket picnics and fish rolls are always good, solid sellers in the bazaar - all my alts make nice plat doing the rolls and my troll can always depend on MTPs to pay his bills.

Brewing - got a buddy who makes nice plat with the various stat drinks as well as the various tempers (and of course armor dyes) - the corking device is an SOB though.

Fletching - making various arrows for folks to use for pulling and bow kiting is a pretty steady source of income - not uber income, but steady atleast.

JC - ok, this one is pretty well shot, but fire opal, black saphire and the various resist gear still sells.

pottery - while admittedly the planar pottery now dominates, some of the old stuff can still make you a few plat.

smithing - OK, while the real plat is in the BD cultural, CT and planar stuff, a smith can still make some nice plat just keeping a stock of skinning knives, filleting knives, pots, no-stick pans, etc around - at 10-20p each, they aren't half bad. Playing the velium ore market is also a good move for a smith who can turn the various drops into the raw materials which others need.

tailoring - simple bearskin backpacks still sell nicely for the low level tailor and there's a ton of great stuff for the up and comming tailor to make plat off of. Traveling the newby and xping zones hawking your combine results is a far better way then the bazaar to make plat rather than dumping skill ups on the merchants too.

So, while not all tradeskills are spectacular plat makers anymore, they are hardly doomed and worthless to pursue now adays.

Additionally, don't forget that there's always new stuff comming around the corner - if your skills are at a reasonably high level come next patch when uber item X is put in for tradeskill Y, then you'll be one of the first to exploit selling it for 1000% profit instead of one of the me-too crowd who are stuck hawking it at cost + 5sp.

[kiztent]

I'm willing to invest the money/time to get a skill to 250, but I just don't know which one I should do...looking for one that is profitable without having to kill high level mobs.

I understand that you need to have a very high skill to make money. Just wondering which of the skills has the best options at 250 to make money that doesn't involve killing planar level mobs.

Well, just because you've said you want to do something doesn't make it possible. If there is a way to make cash without killing lots of planar mobs, chances are it's been done until the market for the item is trashed and you can't make money any more.

Faydark bows don't sell at all because of the planar bows.

Subcombines is really the best way to go.

[Tinile]

Do not start tradeskills to make money. Do them because you enjoy them or are addicted to them. Any money made back at the end or profits above that is a bonus.

[Draggar]

Take full advantage of supply and demand.

Farm stuff. HQ and MQ cat pelts in EK (lower them to LQ and make paddings) - kill crags iN EK for silks, make swatches.

Forage Morning Dews etc..

Fish in OOT for Saltwater Seaweed.

The best and most profitable way is to farm the basic components yourself. Whenever I see a bear, I go to kill it, right now I have half a stack of HQ bear skins in my vault, so if I need to sell backpacks, my cost is 5GP (the cost of the pattern). I don't need to shell out 30-40PP for a HQ skin. Same with HQ cat skins for quivers. Sell them to noobie Rangers for 5-10PP each.

[Xxyl]

I sent you a personal message so look at the top of page and check your messages.

[Reflan]

The best way to make money has always been and will always be by leveling. You can simply get in better camps that drop better loot -- or even camp greenies for loot better -- when you're higher level.

Tradeskills are one of the slowest ways to make money imaginable.

If you must insist on doing tradeskills to make money, I would suggest brewing. You can forage, and you can solo, so you should be able to get the components for many tempers you can sell to smiths, for instance. This will take a bit of research on your part. Check out cultural smithing and look at the tempers they need. Typically, they need LOTS of them. Quite often, they can simply be foraged, if you have the patience, or soloed. Get the good and make the tempers and you provide smiths (or tailors) two things. You save them the enormous amount of time it might have taken them to forage or camp the items(if they even ARE a class that can camp or forage them), and you save them the time they would have needed to get a high brewing skill and combine all those items into tempers, too.

Keep in mind that you are not selling ingredients alone; you are selling the value of your time. Your high level skill is a product of that time, too, and you're entitled to charge accordingly. And you certainly should.

You might want to buff up your skill in tailoring or smithing or even pottery, too, to make even more attractive subcomponents for tradeskillers.

Cultural smithing sells well on your server? Everone hot for fierce heraldic armor or ogre/troll cultural? People refer to that as blue diamond armor because it uses blue diamonds. It requires tempers made using the brewing and pottery skills. It requires velium sheets of metal made using smithing. Would I buy it from someone else at a reasonable price to do my ogre/troll cultural smithing? You bet. It's a pain to get enough velium and blue diamonds all together at once, and very time consuming to combine them, and failures are an issue too. Would I pay someone for finished folded sheets of velium, for the blue diamond celestial temper(not essence), for the blood temper? Heck yes! At screw-you-to-the-wall-I-hate-all-my-customers-forever prices? Well, no. But there's absolutely a market there.

Anyone doing high end tailoring/smithing tends to need a higher end brewer. Sometimes the components are expensive, sometimes they're foraged, sometimes they are cheaped. But we need them, and lots of them. I've bought hundreds of blue diamonds for my cultural smithing attempts -- I probably would have bought them in temper form from a master brewer even though I'm a max brewer myself just to have a nice volume of them in my personal inventory.

[Cendorly]

To quote someone else who said it on these boards quite some time ago:

Tradeskills (Tray-d-skil-z)
The process of making a small fortune, by first spending a large fortune to get there.

Now if you're willing to invest the pp to get a tradeskill to 250, then you're already on the right track. As for the best skill to make pp off of, without needing to kill high-level mobs...well all of them and none of them

You can make cultural armor with smithing that, depending on your race may fectch a nice coin or two.

You can make high end PoP pottery items by finding the components that drop in the Planes off Vendors (if you're lucky) or buying them in the bazaar, or setting up a network with your local server's uberguilds giving them a wishlist of what you're buying.

You can do the same with Tailoring, JC and Baking.

I continue to make a decent profit off my tradeskills, but let me tell you, I work long and hard for that money. My bazaar mule is up 24/7, some days I spend 8-9 hr sessions doing combines on stuff to resell for profit. I auction frequently for WTB and WTS stuff, and I just continue to work at it.

It's all about patience, and willing to work. There is no "fast" way to make PP, and you WILL lose a lot before you start to see a return. Even then, there is no guarantee that you'll make back your PP, or make any at all. It all depends, in the end, on your server's economy, how many other 250 tradeskillers are out there, and the time you have to devote to tradeskilling and selling.

Cend

[Obina]

There is no doubt that some people make money on tradeskills on some servers. It is just not a sure thing. And the market may get bad for a month, but recover. But anyway, I think it is sensible to consider the payback as well as what you enjoy. Lets face it, in EQ land, making clay pots feels a lot like baking pies!

Sticks neck out-->I'd suggest using our old friend the Earring of the Solstice as a trade skill index on your server. The demand for these items in quantity is very well matched with one or 2 exceptions (e.g. MTP). And these are a measure of all tradeskills but fletching.

Compare the price of the nine gifts versus the standard cost price. This assumes that you buy the raws at fair price. For example, Iron Oxide is not free (as a drop) or what ever the merchant price is, since you can sell for 50pp however you get it. So it costs you 50 pp to use one up.

Sticks neck out more-->My guess of some standard price is
GIoT = 600, SRES = 150, LC = 30, CSR = 300, BFR = 700, Sickle = 800
Lotus Pie, MTP, Champagne = not sure

If the price of these items is mostly over these on your server, gives you insight into potential today.

Problems include - what will pricing be when you are 250 skill. And hard to untangle some skills like JC and tailor for robes. Perhaps look at Velium jewelry for JC, and hmmm perhaps tailored robes or acrylia armor for Tailor.

Anyway this might be a starting point for a server tradeskill price index!

Obina R

[Tinile]

Sticks neck out more-->My guess of some standard price is
GIoT = 600, SRES = 150, LC = 30, CSR = 300, BFR = 700, Sickle = 800
Lotus Pie, MTP, Champagne = not sure

Yikes! all of those sell a lot higher on Lanys. On lanys it's more like idol = 900, stein = 275, robe = 700, rod = 900, sickle = 2000, pie = 20, mtp = 8-10, champagne = 50, cabbage unsure. i could be wrong on the sickle since i haven't checked it lately, but the rest i am sure on.