Today, I’ll be talking about one of the most rewarding roles you can play in ESO: the crafter.
Intro
Crafting is interwoven into basically every aspect of the game, from PVE to PVP to housing and everything in between, so I would argue that it indeed is for you.
From my experience, crafting is a pursuit that players often just sort of fall into rather than actively focusing on it. I think that’s a mistake, so in this article, I’m going to give you five reasons why you should prioritize improving your crafting prowess.
Three Qualifiers You Have To Meet
First, I want to explain what I mean by “being a crafter,” as it could be interpreted in several different ways. So, what do I mean by “being a crafter”?
To me, there are three qualifiers you have to meet before you can call yourself a true crafter:
1. Be A 9-Trait Crafter
You should be a 9-trait crafter, that is, have all traits researched on every item, or you should at least be working toward that goal.
2. Learn Styles, Motifs, ETC.
You should actively be learning styles, motifs, recipes, and furnishing plans to expand your crafting portfolio.
I’d recommend doing this on one character only so you can make some ESO Gold off of any duplicate plans or motifs you come across.
3. Do Your Crafting Daily Writs
You should be doing your crafting writs every time you log in, or at least nearly every time you log in, and ideally on all of your characters. These are the basic necessities required to be called a crafter in my opinion.
5 Perks In Being A Crafter
Now, what’s so great about being a crafter? There are a ton of reasons I could mention, so I’ll just go over my top 5 perks in no particular order.
1. Self-Reliance
The first benefit I want to discuss is self-reliance. As a crafter, you’ll be able to make your own gear instead of having to ask a guildie or pay some random player in zone chat.
That means making your own training gear for new characters or CP (Champion Points) grinding and putting together PVP setups with no hassle. Along that same vain, you’ll be able to create your own consumables and furnishings instead of finding them in guild traders or asking a friend to help you out.
Additionally, and this is a big one, you’ll be able to transmute your gear to have your desired traits. No one else can do this for you, so without transmutation capabilities, you would have to farm a piece of gear until you get it in the trait you need. I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid potentially never-ending grinds if at all possible.
2. Gold Generation
There are several ways to earn gold through crafting, the easiest of which is daily crafting writs. At the max level of each crafting skill, and with the two 10% boosts from ESO+ and the Gilded Fingers CP node, you’ll earn 5,075 ESO Gold per character by completing all seven writs. That may not seem like much, but completing all your writs on eight characters adds up to a nice 40,600 ESO Gold.
If you do them in an area where all the stations are clustered close together, you can get your time spent doing writs down to about three minutes per character. A little quick math shows that writs are a pretty efficient gold generation method at just over 100,000 gold per hour, and we haven’t even considered the value of the materials you’ll get from the writ quest rewards. You have a pretty good chance of receiving legendary-quality improvement materials, which are typically worth a few thousand gold each.
Another lucrative gold making method for crafters is selling consumable items. Consumables such as potions, food, and glyphs are essential for players looking to optimize their character's performance, and as a crafter, you can make a considerable amount of gold by selling them. These items are crafted using the Alchemy, Provisioning, and Enchanting skills. Each consumable requires various materials to craft, and foods have the added requirement of learning the associated recipe.
To make ESO Gold by crafting consumable items, you'll first need to determine which items are in high demand and how much they’re selling for in the player market. You can do so by checking guild traders or searching for the items in a Discord price checker.
Consumables, which are always in demand are the most widely-used items like weapon and spell power potions, bewitched sugar skulls, and legendary max stat glyphs.
Once you've determined which consumables to craft, you'll need to gather the required materials and recipes. You can find materials all over the open world, but recipes for the more popular foods and drinks can often only be obtained through very specific methods. For example, the recipe for Bewitched Sugar Skulls can only be obtained from Plunder Skulls during the annual Witches Festival Event. When crafting consumables, it's important to craft in bulk to save both time and resources.
You can also invest in passives for the Alchemy and Provisioning skill lines that increase the yield of foods, drinks, potions, and poisons and therefore reduce the cost of crafting. Once you’ve crafted your consumables, you can sell them through in-game guild traders or directly to other players. When selling through guild traders, be sure to set a competitive price that will attract buyers while still providing you with a reasonable profit margin.
You can also make ESO Gold by crafting desirable furnishing items. I must admit, I don’t have a whole lot of experience selling furnishings, but I do know many players find it to be a very lucrative practice. The furnishing market is a bit trickier than the consumables market simply due to the enormous variety of these items, so it’s important to do your research ahead of time to determine which furnishings are in the highest demand or sell for the most gold.
Additionally, some furnishing plans can be exceedingly rare or difficult to obtain, so I recommend just reviewing the items you can already craft and looking up their prices to find out which ones are desirable enough to sell.
3. Being A Helpful Guildmate
For our third spot, your crafting skills can often make you an extremely helpful asset for your guildies in a variety of ways.
One of the most obvious ways to aid your guildmates is by crafting gear for them. You can provide training gear for those new to ESO to help them level their characters at a faster rate or create specific sets for players looking to improve an aspect of their game.
If you’re unfamiliar, there are several crafting stations throughout Tamriel, which allow you to create gear with specific bonuses, similar in structure to the sets you pick up from questing or doing dungeons and trials.
You can also find most or all of these stations in the guild houses of many well-established guilds. Quite a few of these sets have fantastic five-piece bonuses which are extremely desirable to a wide variety of players.
For example, one really useful crafted set for newer players is Heartland Conqueror. This set provides weapon and spell damage, max magica, and max stamina for its two through four piece bonuses, but where it really shines is in its five piece bonus, which increases the effectiveness of your weapon traits by 100%. That means that the training trait will provide twice as much bonus experience as it normally would for kills made with Heartland Conqueror equipped.
You can also even help experienced guildies by crafting them sets like Clever Alchemist, Order’s Wrath, and Mechanical Acuity, all of which are used by some of the most battle-hardened pvpers.
Keep in mind though that, to craft these sets, you’ll need to have the requisite number of traits researched on the respective pieces of gear you’re trying to create. The more traits required to craft a set, the harder it is to find someone who can craft it, so being a 9-trait crafter is a huge boon for your guildies.
Additionally, happy guildies will often send you gold as a tip after you craft their desired set pieces. By providing your guildmates with the gear they need to excel in their endeavors, you'll be helping them achieve their goals while creating a more welcoming atmosphere for the guild as a whole.
Another way to help your guildies through crafting is by providing them with the consumable items I mentioned earlier. Consumables can make a significant difference in challenging content, and newer players typically won’t have the resources to obtain the more helpful items on their own.
Also Read: Elder Scrolls Online: Emergence Of Fair Winds Housing In Necrom
If you’re feeling generous and don’t need the gold you could gain from selling them, you could even give these items away for free, although I would recommend doing so in smaller quantities unless you’re a real high roller. Supplying your guildies with the consumables they need will help them improve their chances of success in any undertaking they choose.
In addition to crafting gear and consumables, you can also be a helpful guildmate by sharing your crafting knowledge with others. You can offer tips and advice on how to level up crafting skills, where to find rare materials, and which recipes and furnishing plans are the most valuable.
You can also provide guildies with research items or intricate gear to help them improve their own crafting skills. Sharing your knowledge can help your guildmates become better crafters themselves and contribute to the overall strength of the guild.
4. Master Writs
Number four on the list, and the benefit that I consider to be one of the more compelling reasons to be a crafter in ESO, is master writs.
If you haven’t come into contact with these writs before, or if you need a refresher, master writs are more complex crafting quests that will sometimes come in the reward boxes obtained by completing normal, max-tier daily crafting writs. These quests can be completed in exchange for writ vouchers, which are the most valuable currency in ESO with a gold exchange rate of roughly 1,000 to 1.
With writ vouchers, you can obtain items you can’t get anywhere else in the game including storage containers, furnishing plans, motifs, and crafting stations. What I mean is that you can’t get them anywhere else, but players with extra writ vouchers will often purchase unbound items from the masterwork vendor and put them up for sale in traders. These items typically cost several writ vouchers each, so their prices in ESO Gold can be quite hefty considering the 1,000 to 1 exchange rate.
For example, people are always looking for attunable crafting stations to add to the collection of craftable sets in their player or guild homes. The stations cost 250 writ vouchers each, so those items are a great choice if you’re considering converting your writ vouchers to gold through trading.
Before setting your prices, however, you’ll want to look at what other players are selling them for, as competitive supply can often affect the amount of gold you can demand for these items.
But why are writ vouchers so valuable? For one thing, Master Writs only come from the highest-level daily writ quests, and the drop rate is relatively low. Their value also takes into account the cost of the materials used to create the requisite item.
The bigger reason, though, is that, outside of alchemy and enchanting writs, the player who obtains a master writ must know the motif or recipe required to complete it. With over 100 motifs in the game and 14 pages per motif, that doesn’t always happen, and while the provisioning master writs only require a few specific recipes, those recipes are fairly difficult to obtain and often go for quite a bit of gold in guild traders.
Additionally, master writs require the gear to be made in a specific craftable set, so the player will need to have researched the appropriate number of traits to create the item as well.
If all of those requirements align between your character’s experience and a writ that you obtain, then completing the writ is actually pretty simple. You’ll need to travel to the location of the crafting stations for the specific craftable set listed on the master writ, or, if you have access to a guild house which contains the set you need, you can travel there.
Once you’re at the station, make sure you’re on the correct tab and gear piece, then select the required trait and style material, and craft the item. If you don’t have the style material you need, you can purchase it at a guild trader or just us a crown mimic stone if you have one of those. After you’ve created the item, you’ll then need to improve it to the quality listed in the writ.
A nice thing about these quests is that, if you’ve actually opened the master writ and started the quest, the required selections will be denoted by a quest marker, making it easy for you to find what you’re looking for. Once you’ve created the item and improved it according to the writ’s instructions, you’ll just head over to Rolis Hlaalu in any of the alliance capital cities to turn in the quest.
If you’re just getting into Master Writs, they can be a little confusing, so here are a few general tips to remember about these quests:
*First, the easiest master writs to complete are for alchemy and enchanting, as they do not require any specific traits, recipes, or motifs.
*Next, blue jewelry writs are often not worth completing, as the cost of the associated materials usually outweighs the value of the writ vouchers rewarded for them. Be sure to review your cost of materials before doing a jewelry master writ and compare it with the relative value of the writ’s voucher rewards.
*And last but not least, if you obtain a master writ for a motif you don’t know and you’re not planning to learn, you can sell it to at least get some value from it. Pricing master writs is a little complicated, but a good rule of thumb is to remember the 1,000 to 1 gold ratio and work backward from there based on the cost of the materials required by the writ and the rarity of the motif or recipe needed.
For example, this gold Clothier Writ requires legendary quality nirnhoned leather bracers of Fortified Brass in the Ebonheart Pact style. It rewards 132 writ vouchers, so its approximate value before any reductions is around 132,000 gold. The cost of Dreugh Wax right now is about 4,300 gold per, and eight of these improvement materials are required to make the item legendary quality. A good estimate for the cost of the mats needed to get the item to epic is 500 to 1,000 gold depending on the item type.
Quick disclaimer, this is not the case for jewelry, so be sure to look at each jewelry improvement material individually.
By adding those numbers up, I estimate the total cost of the improvement materials to be about 36,000 gold. Fortified Nirncrux, the trait material required for this writ, currently goes for about 1,500 gold each in guild traders, so we’ll add that to the improvement mats for a running total of 37,500. The style material for Ebonheart Pact is pretty cheap at about 350 gold per, but we’ll still include it in the running total.
The really difficult estimation to make is the amount to take off of your price based on the rarity of the motif and number of traits needed for the writ. Typically, I’ll run a price check on the motif to see how much it’s going for, but I won’t include that entire cost in the running reduction total, as people who would purchase the writ will usually already know the motif.
Since the price of Ebonheart Pact Gloves is around 10k, I would consider this motif’s rarity pretty low and would therefore only minimally reduce my list price accordingly. The Fortified Brass set requires only 4 traits to craft, which I consider low to moderate difficulty and warranting only a small reduction as well. I’m going to go with a reduction of 10,000 gold based on the motif rarity and the traits needed.
So, after taking all of these things into consideration and rounding up, I would reduce the initial 132,000 list price by 48,000 for an actual price of 84,000 gold. As you can see, I wasn’t joking when I said it was fairly complicated, but if you follow the methods I’ve outlined here, you should be pricing your writs pretty reasonably.
5. Make Your Characters Look Fashion
For our final spot, and what I would consider sort of a fringe benefit of being a crafter, you’ll be able to make your characters just generally look badass using all the styles you’ll be learning along the way.
Additionally, some dyes you might want to use when creating your outfits, such as divines gold for example, are only attainable through crafting-related achievements. The satisfaction you experience when you perfectly combine various motifs and dyes to create a masterpiece of a character is pretty fantastic.
As many jokingly say, and some not so jokingly, fashion is the true endgame of ESO. If you look good, then you feel good, and if you feel good, then you play good or if you want to be grammatically correct and as a crafter, you’ll be able to put together some of the best looking characters around.
