ELI5 Tradeskills

[Sorn]

The best way to level up tradeskills is to do them as you go along! A lot of players prefer to get it all done at once, which is why most advise waiting until you're high level with lots of money to spare; however, this does not have to be the path you choose if you want to master a craft.

Like most of the game, tradeskills get progressively more difficult the farther along you get. Recipes get more complicated, materials become more difficult to gather, and you need more help from fellow players to make your pieces.

Take tailoring for example! The first things you make are silk threads, silk swatches, silk bandages, and silk cords. These are all basic building blocks for the rest of tailoring, and they can all be made from materials gathered from spiderlings (lvl 1-3 mobs) and spiders (anywhere from lvl 3 to 15). You can create patchwork armor from the ruined pelts of newbie mobs like black wolves or black bears or pumas. Then you can take the silk cords from earlier and create tailored bags (newbie's first weight reduction bag!) and the like from pelts that one might naturally accumulate during the leveling process. Eventually you'll find yourself making handmade backpacks, and then Wu's Fighting Armor (with the help of an enchanter and maybe a brewer - player cooperation!), and then suddenly you are collecting the hides/pelts of cobalt drakes or haze panthers and making truly high end armor as you adventure!

As you can see, they're progressive and you can take on the task of leveling up a tradeskill in tandem with leveling yourself up. If you don't choose to do that and instead level it up all at once, you can help poor newbies along in the process by buying the materials they collect, which will help them buy their spells or some good gear and continue on with their own adventures.

Currently on this server, you can only master 1 tradeskill past 200. The most popular right now are jewelcraft (for enchanters, generally), tailoring (which is extremely difficult near the end) and smithing (cultural). The rest can be done for roleplay purposes (rangers who fletch, dwarves who brew, and halflings who bake, for example), although some quests may require mastery of certain tradeskills (Trueshot Bow, for example, or the Coldain prayer shawl quests).

So yes, they can be really hard, but they aren't harder than dungeon-crawling. I'm pretty sure adventuring and tradeskilling go hand in hand, actually [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[ShadowKing]

Originally Posted by Sorn [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The best way to level up tradeskills is to do them as you go along

How do I do this? I've been accustomed to games telling you how to tradeskill very easy. With EQ there isn't a guild or anything so I don't know how to begin tradeskilling in the early game.

[Daywolf]

Originally Posted by NarcolepticLTD [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

sooper dooper useful for melee... should always have one on ya
(nice little perk for those that can gate too, as you don't have to set your bind in thurg to get to thurg)

Yeah but common, for a lowbie ranger? rlly?

Originally Posted by ShadowKing [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How do I do this? I've been accustomed to games telling you how to tradeskill very easy. With EQ there isn't a guild or anything so I don't know how to begin tradeskilling in the early game.

Depends on what you want to make. I dunno... it's all in the wiki if you want detailed info on everything which would be a little silly to try to write about everything here... as there is a LOT [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Like for brewing, not everyone should take it up as you would think. But for certain things like other tradeskills it's useful. For consumables, it's mostly useful for warriors and warrior hybrids, but many don't bother here as much as I remember on live. To raise brewing early on, you mostly buy ingredients off vendors. The wiki links all the vendors in the recipe lists.

Food is a mix, some you can buy off vendors and other things like meat etc you get from mob drops. Or as I mentioned, tons of wolf meat on newbie vendors that sells for cheap and can raise baking fast. Sometimes other meat around too.

All just depends what you are after. Takes a lot of time to raise tradeskills, lots and lots of time. The more tradeskills you have, the longer it takes. It's not easy here at all like in other games, newer games. In some other games, I have done every tradeskill really fast (e.g. GW2 most recent). I've been working on them here for years and still don't have them all up as it really really does slow down past 120 or so. Most I listed that I have are between 150-200 apart from jewelcraft and poisoning which is 50 or so.

Anyway, there are so many ingredients, you would need to research what you would need, then hunt the stuff that'll give you the drops. That's how you raise it as you level up if you do it that way. It depends on the tradeskill and/or what you are trying to make.

So you were worried about low str on your ranger, and that was my recommendation for you. I spent a good deal of time outfitting my ranger here, and ranger was my main on early live. I only maxed fletching there though, then some others to 100 or so, like stat food and alcohol etc. Some tailored bag making. I mostly did all my tradeskill fun in UO at the time hehe.

[Thulack]

Originally Posted by ShadowKing [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How do I do this? I've been accustomed to games telling you how to tradeskill very easy. With EQ there isn't a guild or anything so I don't know how to begin tradeskilling in the early game.

You need to learn to use the internet as a resource. If you look at the wiki it explains most things about everquest. I saw your post about xp pens and after reading this is just makes me realize you never use the internet as a guide for anything. A wealth of knowledge has already been written on classic everquest. Any question you should ever have has already probably been answered somewhere on the internet. As a suggestion i would start going to google search and just typing in your questions there and you should get automatic answers without waiting on others. Good luck on your rejourney through EQ though.