How do you get better at crafting? (and a few more questions)

I'd like to know how to get better at crafting/synthesizing. I've tried goldsmith (currently at lvl 4) a few times and I've had a few synthesis fail, because of durability not being enough. I'm also not sure how to increase quality of the items. How can I get better at this or any other discipline of hand?

Also, is crafting the only/main way to get impressive-looking armor that lvl 50 players often have? And doesn't the goldsmith in particular earn a lot of gil? And I found out you can "fight" as a craftsman. ...and it sucks lol. You can't earn EXP from it, so crafting seems like it'll be time consuming.

With you just starting out yea it's going to be a little hard just keep at it and don't worry about HQ yet just make any thing that is new on your crafting log you get a bonus for first time makes. Later you will want to obtain some cross skills from other DoH classes to get make HQ items. If your sticking with Goldsmith lvl Miner with it so anything you produce will be profit. Hope this helps also check Youtube plenty of ppl post DoH vids that can be some help.

At level 4 you don't have many of your skills yet. Essentially, "Synthesis" skills ("Basic Synthesis" for now, but you'll get some additional ones later) increase your Progress bar, while "Touch" skills increase your Quality bar. I believe your first Touch skill comes at level 5, so until then you cannot create High Quality results. (EDIT: Well, I guess it still is possible to have High Quality results occur. Using HQ ingredients gives you a bit of initial Quality, so if the RNG is in your favor, you might get lucky and have a HQ item result. But you can't do much to influence that until you get Touch skills. Eventually, you're going to want to use Touch skills to fill the Quality bar all the way to 100%, where you get a guaranteed HQ result.)

Eventually, you'll also start getting some skills that will restore some of the Durability you've already used up, providing more chances to use those Touch and Synthesis skills. (The first of those, Master's Mend, is unlocked at level 7, though it's rather costly in Crafting Points until you get a bit further). Then there's skills to improve your success chances with your Synth/Touch skills, skills that restore Crafting Points, and so on.

The Durability on a recipe (in combination with the number of Durability-restoring skills you have available) determines how many times you can use Synth and Touch skills. You need enough successful Synth skills to complete the recipe before your Durability runs out. If you have enough durability that you can do more than that, you want all the extra durability to go towards Touch skills to improve Quality as far as you can (and that part needs to be done before your final Synth skill that finishes your Progress bar).

At your current level, where Basic Synthesis is all you're using, I'm guessing it probably failed a few times for your synthesis to have failed. It'll take a few more levels before you can do anything about that. There's a Steady Hand skill you'll get at level 9 that improves your chances for success (though still doesn't guarantee it). And if you level Weaver as well, its level 15 skill, Careful Synthesis, always succeeds, and is available to use as a cross-class skill for all your other DoH classes. (It doesn't improve Progress quite as far as Basic Synthesis does, but it's worth it for the assurance that it will work when you need it to. Extremely useful skill to get.)

Basically, at this point, you just need to keep going a bit further until you get enough skills to have better control over your results.

Crafting isn't the only way to get the impressive looking armors for lv50 equip.

There are basically 4 paths to get gear: Craft, PvP, Raid, token exchange (tomestones).

Crafting progress is just a handy thing to have even if you don't make high level equipment, so you can repair, meld, desythesize things.

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Originally Posted by REPROBEAN_CHILD

EXP from it, so crafting seems like it'll be time consuming.

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It does take a while, but there are a few things you can do that are at least faster than just grinding out recipe after recipe:

• You can turn in Supply Missions at your Grand Company headquarters. Each day, they'll ask for a different crafted item from each of the crafting classes you have unlocked. You get a pretty significant XP boost for turning in that item to them (especially if it's HQ). It's a once-per-day turn-in, so you can't grind a bunch of levels at once with it, but in terms of XP per item or XP per time spent, it's pretty good.

• If/when you have a battle class that can unlock beast tribe quests with the Ixal (lvl 41 IIRC), they offer several crafting quests you can do with whichever crafting class you're trying to level up. You're limited to six of these quests per day, but that's enough to churn out a bunch of XP.

• Levequests. These you can churn out as many quests as you have Leve allowances for (making them more grind-able than the daily Supply Missions or Ixal quests). For the early levels, check Levemetes in or near the city that has the corresponding craft hall. Later levels follow level-appropriate areas. (You can Google for where once you get that far).

I'd mostly be echoing what people said here, but I did want to point out that pretty much every class has a useful skill at lvl 15 that can be used as cross-class, so if you plan to level your crafters, it helps to get as much to 15 as you can early on for those cross class skills. The WVR cross class skills at 15 and 50 are probably the most useful for Leveling, followed by the GSM 15 skill, so I'd knock out a bit of weaving too when you get a moment (it's right near GSM guild in uldah).