Abusing Draught of the Craftsman to Level a Heroic Char's Tradeskills

I didn't read all of this so it might have been mentioned before.

If you're planning on doing a TS combine with a high trivial level for the repeat failure to save the materials, be sure you pick something which you already know. If you do not know the combine, I believe you will be stuck manually loading the items every time until you get a success. It doesn't sound like much, but this will eat your time and frustrate you.

Let me rephrase that:

This will eat your time and contribute to REPETITIVE STRESS INJURY.

Tucoh,

I would start while non heroic and get all of the TS trophies first then push to 300.

I personally HATE doing intensive repetitive mouse clicks, so I tend to go out of my way to avoid mass combines using the 'explore' mode.

I think using a Draught of the Craftsman is kind of a waste until you get to the really rare/expensive items.

With that said:


Q: Does the zone you're in change crafting speed, such that maybe it'd be better to do it in PGH, some old world zone or anywhere but laggy PoK?

A: Yes the zone matters. PoK is nice because all the vendors are close by but you can get lag spikes which cause "auto combine all" to fail.


Q: Does it make sense to level from 150 (base level for level 100 heroic) to ~250ish (where it usually gets hard) before popping craftsman??

A: Yes - Do all the prep work you can do before you hit the potion.


Q: Is this all a dumb idea because of information I don't have or because of how many combines it takes to skillup on failure and I should just do things the *right* way instead of trying to game the system???

A: I don't think it will be all that much 'easier' or 'faster' than doing it the normal way. BUT I would love to hear how it works out for you!

If you're using a TS potion, it will leave most of the items in the bag, so it's not as awful.

On the topic of skilling up, if you're going to drop the ~$25 on a Draught of the Craftsman, you might as well drop the $4 on the perk that gives a bonus TS skill up chance. (if that wasn't already mentioned)

The potion really isn't useful to go from 1-300 since you need to do recipes within 100 points of your skill level in order to evolve the torphy for the first 6 levels. You can get pretty far along in everything with storebought or easily obtained materials without a potion. You just need to research which recipes to do that A) require the fewest materials and B) require the cheapest materials. Between Overseer and the devs putting rare materials on vendors now because of stat food, it's not that hard. It just takes time.

The potion is really for ensuring you get that really rare (expensive) combine you need for something, the last few points to 300, or getting the last evolve on the trophy. Other than that, it's just a waste of money.

If you're gonna use it, do it in a guildhall. As others have pointed out, the lag in PoK will make you waste a lot of time. Keep a toon in PoK to buy anything you might need and parcel it to your toon in the gh running the potion.

We are getting off topic - But I just tested.

It took me 38 combines to go from 25 - 54 in Jewelcraft in CR and it took me 460 combines to even receive the recipe with a trivial of 54 in AS. So yes, agree it's a choice - but if speed is your goal - CR is the way to go. AS has not been changed.

Edit: Regardless - the point is get to 50, get the trophy tasks. Whether you do it with freebies or not isn't the point. You'll eventually need/want the trophies and the ingredients are easier to procure at the beginner level.

Thank goodness we are all different!

• The trophy must be equipped to gain experience.
• Trophies only gain experience on a successful combine.
• Trophies (below level 5/7) do not gain experience on combines more than 100 points above your raw skill.
• The experience gained on a success is equal to the trivial of the combine up to 350. All 350+ combines give only 350 experience. Therefore, your trophy would evolve faster making 350 trivial combines than 301 but even at 301, it would eventually get there.

Experience Needed:
Baking - 350,000 (1000 350+ successes)
Brewing - 350,000 (1000 350+ successes)
Jewelcraft - 350,000 (1000 350+ successes)
Pottery - 350,000 (1000 350+ successes)
Smithing - 262,500 (750 350+ successes)
Tinkering - 262,500 (750 350+ successes)
Alchemy - 262,500 (750 350+ successes)
Poison Making - 262,500 (750 350+ successes)
Tailoring - 157,500 (450 350+ successes)
Fletching - 157,500 (450 350+ successes)
Research - 157,500 (450 350+ successes)

I wonder if there is a way to learn NoS recipes at low skill levels without having to fail the recipe 20x times...

Like other posters, I was thinking you'd need to manually put in the ingredients for every combine until you learn the recipe with a successful combine. However, I think when you salvage an item from the combine in experiment mode, that item is left in the tradeskill container. If I'm remembering correctly, then you'd just have to place the ingredients once and hit the combine button every 3 seconds until you get a success.

But if the recipe has alternate items on combine failure, then those items go to your cursor, so those items would need to be placed back into the container. Also, I remember reading bug reports about the Draught not working on recipes that give alternate items when a combine fails, but I don't remember what the resolution was. Another caveat: I've never used a Draught of the Craftsman, so I'm only guessing that it functions the same as salvage.

I would definitely recommend not using a Draught for tradeskills that have recipes with all vendor purchased ingredients. That includes Brewing (Brut Champagne [need enchanter to enchant gold bars]) and Pottery (unfired spherical bottle).

Additionally, you can go pretty high with vendor bought ingredients in Fletching (Rough Shadewood Compound Bow - silk trivials at 282) and Jewelcraft (a platinum bar and a ruby trivials at 279, a velium bar and a ruby trivials at 282).

Baking isn't too bad. You can get to 300 and max your trophy with Misty Thicket Picnics. It's annoying because there are many required subcombines, but each subcombine results in multiple final combine attempts. There are also not many farming requirements. Fruit is forage-only, but each fruit (assuming no failures) results in 72 MTP combines. You'll need to farm brownie parts, but each part is good for 100 MTP combines. An easy spot to farm them is the brownie village in Dragonscale Hills.

If you're only interested in getting your alts Jewelcraft skill up to make the type 18/19 augs, you can use vendor gems and metals to 279 or 282. There's really no need for a Draught, just keep buying more expensive metals/gems after the previous cheapest ingredients trivials. Keep several large empty bags in your inventory. When they fill up, sell their contents with a single click for each bag. Then you'll probably want to farm or vendor dive for diamonds and blue diamonds. A velium bar and diamon will take you to 290. A velium bar and blue diamond trivials at 302. Since the blue diamond trivials only a little above 300, you'll want to max your trophy before buying any of the EoK Jewelcraft mastery AAs just in case you've learned enough recipes to take your skill to 302 or higher.

I don't believe so - the books are read only - not scribable.

Curiosity has the better of me, I have to ask - why are you using NoS items just because you have a lot of them? As Gialana pointed out - with the later expansions there has been weirdness with the way DotC returns items on failures in some cases. You might not run into it if you're just doing random repetitive combines to raise skill - but still (edit: it's the items that require multiples of items that can get weird - like the containers IIRC). Seems pretty extravagant.

The Draught of the Craftsman is most beneficial for those who are doing TS skill ups who want to do thousands of combines without having to fully stock it.

For skilling up with the Draught, while successfully combines do give a better chance to skill up, you are benefitted more by failing becasue you are able to do more combines that way. For this reason, for skilling up you do not want to have the TS Mastery AAs purchased, because they greatly increase how many successes you get. The chance for a skill up is not so much greater with a success as to make up for being able to use the same set of items for multiple combines.

After you reach 300 raw skill however, buying the TS Mastery AAs (at least the first 3 ranks) is a good idea. That way you can get more successes to level up your Trophy faster.

Have more combines than you could possibly make prepared and a 2nd or even 3rd TS to work on in case you get lucky and max out earlier than expected.

The Freebie version is the one that grants you the refine ability. After you get the ability to refine it evolves as you refine more yourself. Goes from getting just 1 to 2 to 3.

The Collect version is just gives you refined ones.

Since NoS launched, I have been running Overseer research/harvesting/crafting tasks and collecting the tradeskill rewards from ToL. Return of the Music (Level 5 uncommon crafting) is giving 4 of item used for the baking, brewing, fletching, tailoring, and 15 of item used for smithing and jewelcrafting. The lvl 5 6 hour common ones return 3 and 11. The 24 hour common research tasks return 9 and 36.

Bank everything for a couple of days or weeks until you get 500+ of each and then do this:

Baking: Make the sub combines for Luclin Garlic Stir-Fry. Make Grilled Bloodied Fish and Luclin Savory Roast first and then finish off with Sauteed Luclin Tubers. EQtraders has the trivial wrong for the roast, it is 466.

Brewing: Make the sub combines for Luclin Berry Cooler. Make Luclin Barberry Juice and Luclin Sparking Water first, and then finish off with Chokeberry Juice.

Jewelcrafting: Make Honed Bloodied Luclinite

Smithing: Make Bloodied Luclinite Sheet or Bloodied Luclinite Chainmail Links

Tailoring: Make Bloodied Luclinite Leather and finish off with Bloodied Luclinite Heavy Fabric

Fletching: Make Bloodied Luclinite Board

I didn't use the draught and got them all up to 300... Other than running to Olwen in Western Wastes to buy items used for some of the combines, everything you need for them is vendor bought in PoK.

1 - With changes they made in ~the last year, the auto-combine no longer fails. It may miss a beat or two periodically, but keeps on trucking once it gets its bearings. Have used the feature in the last year, in PoK, and can vouch for this fix.

2 - The real key for using DotC to get to 300 was that you could "fail" your way there, and in doing so, need WAY less mats to do it. So, in the old days when mats were so much harder to get (in some cases), that was indeed the easiest and faster way to get to 300. Nowadays there are so many more recipes, and there are more ways to quickly gather mats which previously took a long time to get, that the impact/usefulness of the DotC is not what it used to be.

Add to that, it's situational for each player. What is easy for me without a DotC may not be for you, because I've saved 19,000 excellent silks in the past 10 years, and you have a stack of 14 saved up You may 12 box, and have Overseer going x 12 to gather a boatload of mats, and I may only have one account, and can't match that rate of Overseer gathering. You get the idea.

For me, where I'm at in EQ, I didn't need DotC at all for 7 of the big 9 trades, across 2 chars. That's between mats I had stored in 5 or 6 houses plus the guild bank, and collecting a few more key mats using Overseer x 6. YMMV. But for fletching and research, DotC may in fact really speed things up for me, by saving me time gathering mats. Since I only play ~8-10 hours a week, eliminating mat gathering in old, grayed-out zones saves me potentially weeks/months of play time.

I would disagree, the potion is completely useful for doing 1-300, very useful in fact. You just have to actually plan what you are doing and be prepared to switch recipes when the time is right. It is perfectly reasonable to start doing a 252 or 300ish recipe because by the time that you get to the raw score in the 200-250 point your trophy will have already caught up to it or be incredibly close to it.

At 5/7 you can do 350+ trivial combines and get the points. If your skill tier exceeds your trophy tier you get 10x the evolving xp you would normally get. Starting at 50 and having gotten the trophy already. Your trophy will have caught up by the time you get to 250 and are able to do 350+ combines.


The draught is about reducing how much time and money that you have to invest in gathering ingredients and doing combines. You can quite go from 50-300+max trophy in that 2 hour span for some of the TSs. But it can take longer if you are doing it without the draught, because you will run out of something, have to go farm more or buy more. You just have to have planned out the combines and had the books to learn recipes ahead of time as needed.

The draught is wasted on saving it for the rare expensive combine that you need for something, you will get the item and waste more than an hour and a half of the draught 99 times out of 100.

The draught is about saving time and resources. You could have got them all up to 300, maxed out your trophy, and still had combines left to do.

The guides for getting to 300 I've read online at eqtraders.com were last updated 4+ years ago. They don't mention using Overseer tasks to acquire resources nor do they cover using any recipes from the expansions since then. Were one able to run 3 24-hour level 5 overseer research tasks for 14 days straight, you'd have around 378 items ready to use for the various tradeskills.

Given that you are able to reach ~200 for most tradeskills using only vendor bought recipes, I'd start there, and then finish them off with the items from overseer tasks.

The choice then is at what point do you stop accumulating resources to use with or without a draught?

Pottery: If you have access to an enchanter, I'd probably do the Unfired Star Ruby Encrusted Stein (estimate of 70plat per combine) or Unfired Kranigan's Fist Ornament if you have a large amount of Planar Energy Shard's. But there is no resell value for the unfired items, so you'll have to assume that expense. Not sure that I'd use a draught for these though...

Didn't read a lot of this. I recently leveled my tradeskills to 300.

If you do this, it will be for certain tradeskills. Baking for instance, is not hard, because Broiled Raxil fish is not hard to get the materials for. You 6 box, so tabbing through them and fishing on 6 characters results in Raxil fish very quickly. Research on the other hand, that requires a large amount of rare materials, might be worth doing this for. The best course is you work the trades up that make sense based on the available materials, and consider a potion when you think you are going to hit a wall. Also, be sure you plan on successes because they will eat your materials.

I did not use a potion. I had help from my guild as this is my main. Tradeskill items not dropping in new zones really really sucks.

The major issue for research is the number of options you have to choose from based on what happens to be available.

I leveled my trophy on a mix of:

Combat Spellbook : Writing Ink (drop) + 2x vender mats
Guidestones : Ethernere Essence ( drop - were fairly cheep in baz )

On the other hand if you have been mass killing in older zones you may have a ton of binding powders and parchments you can skill up on.

Skillups also go faster with high int/wis depending on class. Same with learning Languages.