TLP Do tradeskills now or wait for trophies?

I might be totally wrong about this; I only provide my feedback and experience.

UF = Underfoot, that is an expac where you can get the upgraded Shawl (the one started in vellious gets better).

The Trophey quest and the individual combines within those quests, is not that difficult. It depends on your skill level in terms of which trophey and items you have to make, but collecting a few of those items, buying a bunch from pok / bazzar; doing the combines. that would probably take just an afternoon. No skilling up and fully evolving that trophey and getting to max skills - that is going to me a massive time / plat / time / time commitment.

As someone had mentioned, you still have 5+ expacs where people can make decent plat in tradeskills. But i guess i view it as a massive time / plat invesment to go for it. As a solo warrior, i am sure you can solo for much of the necessary materials now, probly even in velious and beyond. But i feel like that material becomes more challening to gather alone the deeper you go into expacs where some of the material to gather comes from the highest level zones in an expac (farming material out of the Planes for instance to make those TS items). And then there is just additional time and plat as items in the future continue to have more and more subcombines it seems.

Tradeskills are terrible. eh, they just feel terrible. I just enjoy the effort in them to complete the few associated questes (shawl, signet of might) - just do enough skill ups to get those items and then move on with other parts of the game. Circle back to skilling up for future expacs when you have time / the materials.

Really? I was under the impression that the most difficult trophy quests could take a week or two due to drop rates? This was the nightmare story I was given and a major contributor of this thread. I actually have been very stressed about it.

I wouldn't even know where to start to formulate a plan to making plat with trade skills in any of those eras (PoP/Omens/DoDH) going hard on any trade skills with a toon sitting in the bazaar?

I am not bored but I would like to be prepared for the future quests to come in velious and in other future expansions. I want to do them all so I can obtain the Radix that I was told about.

So, i dont know. but its not really a yes/no. But here is what i think:

The higher your skill the more difficult the items are to gather (they come from higher level zones). But i did the Baking trophey quest at skill 250. The items to combine were still pretty simple with mostly vendor bought items and a few drops - with the highest lvl mobs you had to kill maybe lvl 50(ish) [you are lvl 75 in PoR] - so its is simple.
The benefit of doing the trophey at a higher skill (i think) is that you are working on two things - skill ups in the category; and 'evolving' the trophey. Based on very little - i feel like your skill ups go up faster than the trophey evolving - so if you start with a higher level trophey you will (possibly) have an easier time leveling it up.

I just saw your post about the camping a single drop for a week - i guess i would find out what tradeskill that was for and plan to save it when you get it or dont level that tradeskill. Im going to assume tailoring

Though as a warrior I won't actually need this or to do it for any purpose correct? My thoughts were mainly focused on the ring quest (precious...)

1. This last bit about fully evolving the trophies does this require quests as well?
2. What if I am already "max skilled"? just wondering

1. I guess this is part of the experience/knowledge is power as I have none to make that "decent plat" I expect it will just be a sink for me for a while until I obtain more information to work with and plan ahead

This does sound daunting. Though it is a social game. I cannot be the only one doing the tradeskills. I'm sure I could group up with people if it is needed to skill up.

I haven't done trade skills so I might do this if it is insanely difficult but hopefully I find it fun since it is my first time. I was considering the goal of doing every trade skill to 200 and figuring out one to take to 250

Correct.

No, while classic can be decent for making money in smithing, the real opportunities begin in Luclin as there is not much (enchanted/imbued maybe) for Kunark & Velious. In Luclin, you will be selling mistletoe cutting sickles (mentioned before) for Solstice earring quest as well as the first opportunity to sell blue diamond cultural. Since you chose wood elf for a very strange reason (+ cha for DI), I imagine your opportunities to make plats on smithing will be negligible. Ogre & human (rallos zek) is where the real opportunities lie as the human cultural makes +90 hp gear for RZ wars & Ogres (frontal stun immunity = popular race/class combo) also get to cater to Trolls, and their market is not only RZ but Cazic Thule & Innoruk for shadow knight gear.There may also be a market for the Iksar armor considering they are popular war/sk choices for the +ac modifier and regen racial bonuses.

Maybe if you were not at max level and had no group or assistance in farming mats since you are flying solo but really, its all relative. Stop stressing, this should not be a concern. Granted some of the smithing combines for 300 smithing trophy require drops from MPG where trash mobs hit around 1100ish, meaning you wont be soloing the mats....they will still be easily attainable through the bazaar or through grouping.

This is incorrect, I covered it earlier. To answer your questions...
1. Well, initially I started leveling tailoring on my cleric as I play 6 toons on boxing friendly Rizlona and in Velious you can only take one ts past 200. During this time I manged to also level up a assling druid as an alt AND leveled the clerics tailoring to 252. Demand was so great (monks, monks, monks, rangers, shaman & rogues) that I was able to continue farming on the druid and level the druid's tailoring so I could eventually make WR bags. I was able to 252 the druid and began working on saving combines for enc who is erudite. In luclin, erudite blue diamond cultural plate armor is tailored. Since the enc is a main ts'r for me, he is the account I eventually leveled to 300 first.
2. Answered, velious tailoring is money because there are tons of monks and the other Velious tailored sets are also desirable to some degree or another. These sets are also 13 pieces instead of just the eight visible slot sets. On Riz, big boxers would buy multiple sets at a time because they all ran a mob of monks for their great dps. Black panther skin armor alone will net you tons of krono/plat if you put time and effort into this.
3. There are no bs sets in Velious.
4. There is no reason to fear or stress, you have created an issue where there is none. Granted a max combine trophy will be more difficult for you as a solo warrior but if you have made it that far, you most likely have found a way to farm the needed mats. If you have rl$$, you wont ever have to farm a thing as long as you can afford $18(?) for krono and can convert it to plat, which you use to buy the materials on the baz. If you are chasing the right skills with the right race combos while doing this, you may not have to buy many or any krono at all, your RoI should cover the need plat requirements to buy mats from the baz.

In Luclin you get AA's that allow you to raise all trade skills above 250 so this is only a temporary concern.

/boggle

Yes, the max trophies can take a week or two but you have 16 months, sometime before 2024 farm all the materials for several attempts at each of the items. Evolving is a non-factor, doing the higher trophies you get an item to turn in to instantly evolve it.

UF Shawl is for all classes, the tank version procs a 750pt Rune.

Wood Elf is a common race for Bards and they also wear plate. Rangers and rogue wear chain which also requires blacksmithing to make. It more a question of if the server have heavy population of mains playing those races, since it uncommon max out TS on an alt(alchemy and tinkering excluded from that statement). On Mangler, it seemed like a fair amount of the human and iksar blacksmiths crafting the culture armor were monks.

In Underfoot, We get the Shawl 2.0 line questline, it has a version for all the different arch-types. The final results is a best in slot item, and later in Rain of Fear it can be upgraded to an aug.

I subscribe to one approach: Skill up as you go.

The absolute worst experience is being caught between pursuing content, farming for skill ups and grinding out combines just to have to head back out to the bazaar or worse zones to farm mats when the RNG laughs at your skill up rate and leaves you short.

I spent an ungodly amount of time in PoP skilling up everything to max - which I eventually did. The caveat being that on Lockjaw we were in a 6 month prison in PoP so I had ample time on my hands between Time instance refreshes with occasional off night greed runs of elemental planes.

Given we don’t see 6 month unlocks anymore… waiting seems like a terrible idea as something will surely have to take a back seat given the rapid rate of unlocks observed today.

For this alone - I would advise staying current on TS skills as content unlocks versus trying to grind it all out in a very short period because it’s “easier”.

Staying current is doable if you have a large playtime, or if you don't mind sinking a lot of real cash into keeping your trades up together.

Personally I felt that I saved a ton of plat by waiting until PoR unlocked, and gave myself a lot of time to farm mats as a higher level character which can definitely make farming TS mats a lot less tedious when you can blow stuff up more easily.