I've had quite a few people in game ask me about crafting, and trying to understand how to craft here on Phoenix, so I figured I'd write up a real quick overview on crafting and how to get started. I am not a professional writer, and I don't typically make guides, but hopefully this poorly formatted collection of thoughts will help somebody out and at the very least get them on the right track.
How to get started
First things first, visit any crafting trainer to learn a trade, it doesn't matter which one, the only difference is your title, but you can change this at any time by speaking to a different trainer.
Once you've unlocked trades, at the bottom of your specializations menu you'll find icons for all the various tradeskills, these can be dragged to a hotbar to open the crafting menus. There are 2 general types of trades, primary and secondaries. Primary skills typically make items to be used by players, secondaries (mostly) make trinkets that you sell to vendors to make cash from salvaged raw materials.
Primary skills:
Armorcraft
Fletching
Tailoring
Weaponcraft
Alchemy
Spellcrafting
Secondary skills:
Clothworking
Leatherworking
Metalworking
Woodworking
Secondary skills cannot exceed your combined primary skills.
You'll see icons for Siegecraft, Gemcutting, and Herbcraft, but these can be safely ignored as they do not require skilling up.
Macros:
Before you actually start crafting, here are some helpful macros I've used to make leveling a trade even easier.
Buy 5 macro: /macro buy5 /craftqueue buy upto 5
This will buy enough materials from the merchant you have targeted, provided they are in range and sell the materials required, to make up to 5 of the last craft you attempted.
Craft 5 macro: /macro 5 /craftqueue 5
This will craft up to 5 of the next craft you attempt
Sell all of bag 1 macro: /macro sell1 /moveitem sell #bag1
This will sell EVERYTHING in your top bag slot to the merchant you have targeted.
Actually crafting
There are quite a few crafting guides out there, and generally speaking, they should all be pretty accurate for Phoenix. The general gist of skilling up is to pick an orange craft and make it until the next item you want to make turns orange.
Typically, I like to start my next craft when I'm within 15 skill points, to avoid losing an excessive amount of materials. Red crafts are incredibly hard and have a very significant chance to lose materials upon a fail. Orange is slightly hard with a low chance to lose mats. Yellow is a very high chance to succeed, blue is virtually guaranteed and green and grey are trivial to your skill level. Once a recipe is grey, you craft at significantly increased speeds. The lower the recipe is to your skill level, the less chance you have to gain a skill point from it.
So, using Tailoring as an example, your first craft would be leather gloves at skill 15, click the gloves drop down in the tailoring menu and drag the icon to your hot bar.
Once you click the gloves icon, you should get a message saying:
You are missing:
(x) rawhide leather square
(x) woolen heavy thread
Now click the buy macro with the tailor material merchant targeted and if you have enough coin, you will buy enough materials to complete 5 crafts. If you had any materials already in your inventory, the macro is smart enough to skip buying those materials and only buy what you are lacking.
Once the mats have been purchased hit the craft macro and then the gloves icon and you should craft back to back crafts until all 5 gloves are made, you run out of materials, or the queue is interrupted by moving, combat, etc.
Upon a successful craft you have a random chance to make an item of any quality ranging from 95% to 100% (to my knowledge roughly 1 in 6 will be 99% and 1 in 60 will be 100%) and a chance to gain a skill point in your primary trade, and if you do, you should always gain skill in the related secondary trades. Since we're crafting leather armor, this will gain skill in both leatherworking and clothworking.
Once your bags are full, just select a merchant and hit the sell macro to empty your bags. Personally I have sell macros for bags 1-4 and just keep everything I need to keep in bag 5.
At this point it just becomes wash - rinse - repeat.
For tailoring you'll hop between various gloves and boots all the way throughout the material level until you reach 99 skill, at this point you'll need to visit the tradeskill trainer in order to get a free skill point and learn the next material level and do it all again.
Salvaging and Trinketing
As your secondaries progress you'll be able to start salvaging drops you get to destroy the item and break it down into raw materials. This is done by simply right clicking the item and selecting salvage. If your skill is too low, be aware that you may not get full value for the item. Once the raw materials have been salvaged, open the secondary trade, say, metalworking, and you can turn those bars into hinges or brackets (the end result is the same, just hinges use 2 bars at a time)
Here on Phoenix, random items have a low salvage value which is offset by how often they drop. Regardless of the material type, it is always beneficial to salvage and trinket verses outright vendoring drops.
A wonderful resource for looking up estimated costs and trinket values can be found at http://motogs.redemptionofdivineharmony.net/craftingcalculator.php
Also keep in mind, you get a crafting speed bonus for crafting in a capital city, and there is a quest given in your main city to obtain a suit of crafting armor that will significantly boost your crafting speed, as well as grant bonus strength and carry capacity (and also looks pretty awesome, specially on a dwarf). The quests are given at level 5, 15, 25, 35, 40, and 45. The final 2 steps require you to kill mobs in the Hibernian frontier, so bring friends.
I think that covers everything I can think to put in.
Good luck and have fun out there folks, and if I left out anything important, just let me know and I'll see about editing it in.
Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes.
Mura
How to get started
First things first, visit any crafting trainer to learn a trade, it doesn't matter which one, the only difference is your title, but you can change this at any time by speaking to a different trainer.
Once you've unlocked trades, at the bottom of your specializations menu you'll find icons for all the various tradeskills, these can be dragged to a hotbar to open the crafting menus. There are 2 general types of trades, primary and secondaries. Primary skills typically make items to be used by players, secondaries (mostly) make trinkets that you sell to vendors to make cash from salvaged raw materials.
Primary skills:
Armorcraft
Fletching
Tailoring
Weaponcraft
Alchemy
Spellcrafting
Secondary skills:
Clothworking
Leatherworking
Metalworking
Woodworking
Secondary skills cannot exceed your combined primary skills.
You'll see icons for Siegecraft, Gemcutting, and Herbcraft, but these can be safely ignored as they do not require skilling up.
Macros:
Before you actually start crafting, here are some helpful macros I've used to make leveling a trade even easier.
Buy 5 macro: /macro buy5 /craftqueue buy upto 5
This will buy enough materials from the merchant you have targeted, provided they are in range and sell the materials required, to make up to 5 of the last craft you attempted.
Craft 5 macro: /macro 5 /craftqueue 5
This will craft up to 5 of the next craft you attempt
Sell all of bag 1 macro: /macro sell1 /moveitem sell #bag1
This will sell EVERYTHING in your top bag slot to the merchant you have targeted.
Actually crafting
There are quite a few crafting guides out there, and generally speaking, they should all be pretty accurate for Phoenix. The general gist of skilling up is to pick an orange craft and make it until the next item you want to make turns orange.
Typically, I like to start my next craft when I'm within 15 skill points, to avoid losing an excessive amount of materials. Red crafts are incredibly hard and have a very significant chance to lose materials upon a fail. Orange is slightly hard with a low chance to lose mats. Yellow is a very high chance to succeed, blue is virtually guaranteed and green and grey are trivial to your skill level. Once a recipe is grey, you craft at significantly increased speeds. The lower the recipe is to your skill level, the less chance you have to gain a skill point from it.
So, using Tailoring as an example, your first craft would be leather gloves at skill 15, click the gloves drop down in the tailoring menu and drag the icon to your hot bar.
Once you click the gloves icon, you should get a message saying:
You are missing:
(x) rawhide leather square
(x) woolen heavy thread
Now click the buy macro with the tailor material merchant targeted and if you have enough coin, you will buy enough materials to complete 5 crafts. If you had any materials already in your inventory, the macro is smart enough to skip buying those materials and only buy what you are lacking.
Once the mats have been purchased hit the craft macro and then the gloves icon and you should craft back to back crafts until all 5 gloves are made, you run out of materials, or the queue is interrupted by moving, combat, etc.
Upon a successful craft you have a random chance to make an item of any quality ranging from 95% to 100% (to my knowledge roughly 1 in 6 will be 99% and 1 in 60 will be 100%) and a chance to gain a skill point in your primary trade, and if you do, you should always gain skill in the related secondary trades. Since we're crafting leather armor, this will gain skill in both leatherworking and clothworking.
Once your bags are full, just select a merchant and hit the sell macro to empty your bags. Personally I have sell macros for bags 1-4 and just keep everything I need to keep in bag 5.
At this point it just becomes wash - rinse - repeat.
For tailoring you'll hop between various gloves and boots all the way throughout the material level until you reach 99 skill, at this point you'll need to visit the tradeskill trainer in order to get a free skill point and learn the next material level and do it all again.
Salvaging and Trinketing
As your secondaries progress you'll be able to start salvaging drops you get to destroy the item and break it down into raw materials. This is done by simply right clicking the item and selecting salvage. If your skill is too low, be aware that you may not get full value for the item. Once the raw materials have been salvaged, open the secondary trade, say, metalworking, and you can turn those bars into hinges or brackets (the end result is the same, just hinges use 2 bars at a time)
Here on Phoenix, random items have a low salvage value which is offset by how often they drop. Regardless of the material type, it is always beneficial to salvage and trinket verses outright vendoring drops.
A wonderful resource for looking up estimated costs and trinket values can be found at http://motogs.redemptionofdivineharmony.net/craftingcalculator.php
Also keep in mind, you get a crafting speed bonus for crafting in a capital city, and there is a quest given in your main city to obtain a suit of crafting armor that will significantly boost your crafting speed, as well as grant bonus strength and carry capacity (and also looks pretty awesome, specially on a dwarf). The quests are given at level 5, 15, 25, 35, 40, and 45. The final 2 steps require you to kill mobs in the Hibernian frontier, so bring friends.
I think that covers everything I can think to put in.
Good luck and have fun out there folks, and if I left out anything important, just let me know and I'll see about editing it in.
Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes.
Mura
