MMORPG.com EverQuest II Correspondent Daniel Stull has written this introductory article to a continuing series on the tradeskills system in Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II.

Tradeskills, in most MMOs, are the backbone for generating money in the game. Players who are successful at creating in-demand items are usually the richest, that is, until there are enough crafters to satisfy demand. But that's Economics 101, or another article. You're reading this for some insight into crafting in Everquest 2.

The tradeskills in Everquest 2 consist of three classes – craftsman, outfitter, and scholar. But first, you must reach tradeskill level 10 to make your choice of class. How does one increase tradeskill level? Pretty simple; according to a guide over at EQ2traders, you must go to a starting trainer to increase your tradeskill level to 2, thus making your character an artisan, and from there you start increasing tradeskill experience points by simply making items. You make items via recipes found in your Book of Knowledge (accessed by pressing the “K” key). Recipes can also be found in the world, can be granted as quest rewards, and even sold on the broker. This sets the ground for your choice of class, as experimentation with what you create will usually set you on your track. I'll break down the classes for you so you'll see that what you make usually makes you:

Read the article here.

I suggest you either start crafting yourself, or leave writing about tradeskills/crafting to someone who knows what they're talking about.

You don't specialize at lvl 10 and 20, you do it at 9 and 19. You CAN'T reach 10 and 20 without specializing, but will gain that lvl when you make your choice.

Pressing K to find recipes in the Book of Knowledge? No, that's wrong. You'll  find spells and abilities there, not recipes. For recipes, most players needs to press N, while for reasons unknown to me, others have to press B. Or simply press on the crafting station. Either will open your recipe book.

Sorry, but when you start an article with wrong info, it's not tempting to read further.

He also did not mention how the tradeskills have been significantly dumbed down.  It used to be far more complex.  Guess they had to compete with Wow.  I don't find either EQ II or Wow's tradeskills that useful in game.  Unless you have significant replentishment in a tradeskill system, like item decay or item loss, tradeskills in the game suffer from lack of need.

Originally posted by Netspook

I suggest you either start crafting yourself, or leave writing about tradeskills/crafting to someone who knows what they're talking about.

You don't specialize at lvl 10 and 20, you do it at 9 and 19. You CAN'T reach 10 and 20 without specializing, but will gain that lvl when you make your choice.

Pressing K to find recipes in the Book of Knowledge? No, that's wrong. You'll  find spells and abilities there, not recipes. For recipes, most players needs to press N, while for reasons unknown to me, others have to press B. Or simply press on the crafting station. Either will open your recipe book.

Sorry, but when you start an article with wrong info, it's not tempting to read further.

I reached level 10, and could not go further until I chose a specialization.

The recipe hotkey may have been a typo on my part. I can't remember, to be honest.

As for the whole "dumbed down" aspect, I started this game rather recently, so I have no opinion nor experience in anything before August. Sorry.

Thanks for the input though.

Originally posted by Miustus

The recipe hotkey may have been a typo on my part. I can't remember, to be honest. 

My point should have been a bit clearer on that one. Which hotkey you said to press, isn't the most important error, But saying that recipes are in the BoK, that's a major one.

Can the Forge still kill you if you fail?

I have not run into that instance, and I've failed plenty of times at forging.

I remember on my first toon back in 04.. missed up and i was dead on the floor next to the forge.

Originally posted by Nocuma

Can the Forge still kill you if you fail?

Sadly, no.  If you fail to counter one of the events you still have a chance of being hurt or having power drained, but not to the level that it could kill you.  There are those of us who still request death-by-forge to be re-instated.

As far as the article is concerned, it's rubbish as usual.  Sorry, but the author just doesn't seem to be able to grasp the simple fact that repeating things other people have said doesn't work if what they said is incorrect.

For example:

Book of Knowledge instead of Recipe Book

Mentions imbuing but doesn't mention blessing (which suggests the details were cut and pasted from an older article!)

Bucklers do not, in my experience, "proc to increase blocking when struck".  What they have is a chance to proc heat damage.

"in the case of the Outfitter, you may not be able to pump out an entire set of armor at one tier. Parts of it may be stretched throughout multiple tiers" = wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!

"The Scholar usually sits at a scribing desk to make their spell scrolls, a chemistry table for potions and poisons, and a work bench for jewelry. Scholars also create essences for tank characters, and runes for scout characters.".  Well, this is sort of nearly right but surely it should be mentioned that spell scrolls, essences and runes are upgrades to mage spells, fighter and scout combat arts. 

And then there's the omissions, for example where are the boxes and sales crates?  Sure, these are not really for levels 1-20 but then again neither are altars and they got a big mention.  Any mention of the materials required for crafting?  No, of course not.  Which means that for a beginner it doesn't even provide the basic information required to get past level 2.  Also, for a beginner, it would be beneficial to have the tiers explained in more detail.  Another also, why not mention that the reaction arts are not only in the knowledge book but also appear at the bottom of the crafting window?  Why not mention that there are two types of reaction arts (one for duration and one for progress)?  Why not mention that you really need to be pressing these buttons every craft cycle and not just as reactions?  And why oh why doesn't this article mention that there is a set of crafting quests that teach you the basics?

The article isn't even structured that well, for example it tells you things about scholars and outfitters in the craftmen section (I think it is just a simple case of the craftmen heading being placed incorrectly, but still if simple details like that are messed up then how much trust can you have in what is written?).  Also, the bit at the bottom about reaction arts would have benefited by having a heading to make it clear it was not part of the scholars section (sorry, am I being too picky?).

0/10 is my score for this article.  It would have been 100% better if it just directed folks to places where this is explained properly ...

http://www.eq2.eqtraders.com/

http://eq2.allakhazam.com/

I never copy and pasted anything. That's called plagiarism, and I am completely against it. Yes, I did reference a guide, which I cited in the article itself. All my information came from this guide. And, before you say anything, it was from EQ2traders.

I will be releasing a second part to this article, to which I will add in all your suggestions and correct any legitimate errata.

I apologise for any implied plagarism accusation.

I did note that you mentioned an EQ2Traders guide, which to be honest is what hacked me off most about the article as EQ2Traders already provides the details that you are trying (failing?) to convey.  It seems to me that you would have been better off writing about your experiences of crafting rather than describing what has already been described pretty darn well.

I think the maybe the problem is that you just haven't crafted that much.  I have only checked on the Miustus character but from EQ2Players you appear to be level 13 craftsman, which is about 30-45 minutes crafting at the level you are attempting to describe (levelling up is ludicrously easy at the lower levels).  That possibly means that you have only have limited experience of one of the 3 generic crafting levels, and this has led to you misunderstanding what is accurate at EQ2Traders (but inaccurate in your article).

For example, I can certainly see where on EQ2Traders you got:

"in the case of the Outfitter, you may not be able to pump out an entire set of armor at one tier. Parts of it may be stretched throughout multiple tiers"

Except that EQ2Traders doesn't say that.  It says that some items are not in every tier, not that a given set is split between a tier.  When you are in adventuring level tier 1 you'll want to be wearing crafted level tier 1 gear (or drops), when you progress to adventuring level tier 2 you will want tier 2 gear (you may have missed that as you still appear to be wearing some tin), and it goes on up the tiers.  Occasionally (Gorowyn excluded!) you may get some items that you will keep through to the next tier, but generally (if you can afford it) you will upgrade each tier.  What EQ2Traders was saying is that the tier 2 version of a set may only be 2 pieces (e.g. legs and chest) and so you'll need other tier 2 gear to fill the other slots, but maybe the tier 3 equivalent set will have 4 pieces.  Basically, it's saying that you should expect consistency between the item setss available at each tier (although this has been improved a lot recently).  Actually, if you'd clicked on the suggested link in the EQ2Traders article you may have understood.

Alternatively, maybe I've misunderstood what you were trying to say!

BTW, the EQ2Traders guide appears not to have been updated since last December, so you may wish to perform a bit more research on what you take from there in order to lessen the forum responses!   This would certain account for the missing "blessing" details, as they were added to weapons this year.

I do intend on looking up some further information, but it's pretty sparse out there.

Sparse?  Maybe.  It wasn't always that way though.  If you do a search for "EQII tradeskill guides", you'll get a lot of hits and most will have fairly comprehensive guides.  The problem is that they get out of date very quickly because the SoE developers keep fiddling about.  I'm not saying the fiddling about is bad (although it's not always been done with the gamers best interests in mind) but that the constant changes are hard to keep documented.  Add in that, over time, certain sites have drawn in a large quantity of the player-base and you will hopefully realise that some sites just don't see the point in constantly updating their details if players are not going to use them.

Over time I would guess that EQ2Traders, Allakhazam and EQ2i have become the main places for tradeskill guides (all of which give you all the information you need to be able to craft in any of the tradeskill classes and sub-classes).

So, it maybe sparse as in there are not vast numbers of up-to-date, accurate guides, but it isn't sparse as in the information is not available easily.

The trick to using any guide is to read the guide and then try and do what it says.  That gives you experience, so now when you re-read the guide you have certain reference points so the guide will make more sense.  Rinse and repeat until you know enough to make items to "pristine" level.  The point of my last post was than I don't believe you have done the rinse and repeat, and so have provided us with information that you have not yet understood and so have repeated incorrectly.

On a side note, I believe EQ2 still have a great community, even if less web sites are maintained, so if there's something you need to know try searching/asking for it on the EQ2 Forums (and/or EQ2 Flames).

Another reason, in my opinion, for the various websites being out of date is because SoE don't exactly help the information flow.  For example, they have all the recipe information held somehow so why not let EQ2Traders have access to it so that they can update their details automatically rather than having to manually type in details provide via players?  Perhaps this will change with the Zam.com partnership (although it'll probably cost players yet more money).

Having said all of that, I still think you need to consider what you are trying to achieve via your articles.  This latest one seems to be trying to do too much and is repeating what already exists, which seems a bit redundant to me.  You obviously have a limited amount of time to play the game so I would suggest limiting your articles to your actual experiences. 

For example, you are a level 13 craftsman so you could have made some notes on how you got from 1 to 9, to 10, and then to 10 to 13 (actually, one article on 1-10 (explains tradeskill basics), second article 10-? (explains the class choices and details the one you chose (and why)), third article ?-20+ (explains the sub-classes and details the one you chose (and why)) i.e. split it into 3 chunks to give yourself more time).  The notes should include whatever searches you did, players you asked and websites visited.  Then when you came to write the article you expand your notes plus do a bit more searching etc. to see if you missed something (like maybe you leveled to 9 just by crafting whatever you liked and now, through research, you realise you could have done a tradeskill questline to get there), which you then add as "things I wish I'd know".  That way you give fellow new and potential players a taste of what it's like for you, which they can then mirror to their experiences, preferences etc.

Potentially you could have a fourth article to give details of changing you crafting choice, and a fifth and sixth article on experiences of the sub-tradeskills.  You'll be pretty sick of crafting by then though! 

Do you see what I mean?  Rather than trying to provide a description about a big chunk of the game that you haven't yet experienced, provide an description of the bit you have experienced but also provide links to places that helped you (and therefore others) so that readers can learn about the other areas themselves (thus benefitting from your experience rather than guidance).

Just a thought!

Couldn't get into the SoE forums earlier, now can so here's a link to the sticky for tradeskill guides and the like ...

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?&topic_id=347090

I like the idea. I'll see if I can make that work with the format given to us.