Weaver or Goldsmith?

I've never really crafted in a game before but I've been hearing nothing but praise for this game's crafting system so I'm trying to give it a shot.

Needless to say, it's a bit overwhelming.

Anyways, I've whittled my choice down to either Goldsmith or Weaver.

My question to you pro crafters out there is which one would your recommend? I plan to level them up via leves.

Which is the most expensive to level?

Which one makes the most money?

Any general advice / tips you could give to this inexperienced but eager noob would be so appreciated.

Thanks!

goldsmith from my experince is prolly 1 of the easiest to level mines only 20ish, but since ive been tryin to level all evenly i noticed goldsmith doesnt really depend on the other DoH classes for materials as much. dunno about at higher levels tho

They both have the potential to make a lot of money if you're smart about it;
Goldsmith can make a tody profit from making jewelry, whereas weaver shines in making higher levelled clothing, it all depends on what the market is like on your server.

All crafts can be levelled to 50 without spending a single gil though you have to be prepared to put in some legwork -

Level the appropriate DoL job, for Weaver it'll be Botanist, for Goldsmith it'll be Miner.

Save up all your leves; I've found it more efficient to grind a craft to 30, and then use leves as my main source of xp from 30-50. Though sometimes, you might find it easier to grind on something easy like linen for example: making a ton of the threads and making the threads into cloth is a nice way to grind out quite a bit of XP because flax is so easy to obtain via botanist.

You can grind on synths that are even 10 levels below you if it's easier to find materials, just pump up the quality and you will see a nice increase in your xp. Take your time with it and have some fun! Crafting only looks daunting, in truth when you figure it out, it's quite easy to get the crafts from 1-50.

It's cheaper if you have the gathering class to go with it. Just today I mined like 99 raw sunstones, flourite, lapis, malachite, etc. That should bump my goldsmithing up while saving my leves. Goldsmithing can make the tools for weaving, too (needles).

Weaving takes a whole lotta moko grass and cotton early on (easy to get with botany, right outside the town gate), and a whole lotta undyed cloth is needed for just about every weaving recipe in the early levels. As a result, you use up a whole lotta lightning shards. I was down to about 100, so I went and mined for like 3 hours to get 1200 so I wouldn't run out again any time soon.

Overall, if you're looking to profit from it, weavers really help out the caster classes and melding materia at lvl 20 into cloth is really useful, while I think goldsmithing uses more materials (which can be expensive later on), but is easier to level up quickly after you're able to farm the materials yourself. Why not do them both?

considering how jewelry sells for about half the price the mats you need to craft it does, i would go for weaver. (I am 50 goldsmith myself btw)

In addition to what the others have said, Weaver really benefits from having Leatherworker leveled to the same level. In fact, I would say it's almost a necessity unless you want to constantly buy leather materials from the market board.

One step further, Leatherworker relies on drops from monsters (their skins) in order to make things, so unless you farm the materials yourself you are going to have to buy them off other people.

If your goal is to make gil (rather than making clothing, weapons, or armor for yourself or friends), I would level Goldsmith together with Miner, and produce HQ jewelry to sell on the market. These can provide decent income and can be created completely on your own with just these 2 classes.

Jewelry typically sells well because it can be spiritbonded, converted into materia, and replaced easily. Especially at endgame, weapons and armor tend to get valuable materia attached to them and not replaced so often.

It is possible to make money as a weaver, but it really helps to be on the leading edge of the wave and/or be able to farm all the materials yourself through Botany. This works for things like Linen (from Flax) or Twinthread (from Crawler Cocoons)... but you can run into materials shortages when you are working with Fleece and Snurble Tufts for Wool and Felt around level 40 to 50.

Just my experience from playing the markets for the past month with level 50 in all DoH and DoL except Armorer and Fisher.

I have a 50 WHM that I wanted to take a break from (hoping the toxic endgame community gets better once the free trials run out...) so I started leveling Botany and Weaving last night and I'm having a blast. So far I have actually made a profit believe it or not.

The method I've done for leveling Weaving is - class quests, then leve quests for the level range once each (city and outside town quests), then I go back and finish out all the synths for the level range once. After that I go back and do more leve quests and make sure to make myself upgraded armor and at that point I have leveled high enough for another class quest and new range of leve quests and synths.

As for cash, I have been breaking down my old armor for both Botanist and Weaver and the Materia for that sells quite well. Some of the pieces I make while leveling actually sell decently as well. I sell whatever else I can and between that and quests is where I earn gold. Although materia and the occasional random DoW/DoM gear that sells really well are where I earn most of my cash. I have also been teleporting around and purchasing the occasional material off the auction house but that's really the only place I spend any money, most of my materials I either farm via my Botanist, or some of the other ones sell from various vendors in cities (Or in crafting guild vendors) for very cheap - including leathers and various metal pieces (another tip - always search on XIVDB.com to find out where various materials come from since often you can purchase them very cheap from some vendor somewhere if it's not easily farmable).

Just a few tips I picked up in the day I've been doing this. Oh also - don't use Quick Synthesis, even if you are making a ton of something such as thread. It only gives you half as much XP so it's far more worth it to click and craft each one manually. I've been watching tv while I click.

Whatever you do, level all your crafts to L15 first to access all the cross class abilities. Plus you get a ton of shards from the class quest rewards.

For making money, it just depends on how saturated your server is with each profession. GSM could benefit from miner, but on my server at least, the ores needed for gsm ingots are cheap. But be prepared to buy a metric s***ton of wind shards as those are need to make both ingots and gear.

A quick check might be to just search the AH for a variety of different GSM and WVR items to see their prices, then to check the cost of materials for those items. I do this quite often when I'm looking to craft a few things for profit.

I think that the high end gear that WVR makes is more sought after ( or in less supply) than GSM items. But again, this could be very different from server to server.

I'm leveling WVR right now. Not posting too many profits from WVR directly. I skipped crafting Velveteen and made my profits from selling the Diremite Webs I got as rewards from levequests.

I have seen decent profits from making HQ gear, but it's not much. Maybe about 2-4k profit per HQ Velveteen crafting gear (2500-3000g in mats, sell for 5000-7000g if HQ depending on market). I suppose it does add up, but a string of non-HQ synths can be a waste of time and you can barely break even off those.

I'm leveling both, currently at ~42 atm. GSM has been much, much easier to level. It's less dependent on mats from other crafters and you can grind through levels easily with gemstones if you have the mining levels to go with it. I've also made a decent amount of money along the way selling accessories.

Weaver on the other hand has been both annoying and painful. Get ready to pick tons of cotton and then deal with diremite webs and fleece if you choose to do it. You can mostly skip these two tiers though if you do the level 40 leve in order to skip wool, you'll still need some velveteen. NQ fleece goes for 400g on my server. Weaver also requires leather from time to time, which can be unduly expensive, as well as the occasional GSM ingot.

Anyone who isn't a crafter at heart but would like to try it should really look at Leatherworker.

Material for leatherworker is almost exclusively beast drops so gamers who prefer to kill the beasties as their main form of gaming will always have a resource that fits their play style. When you don't feel like crafting, you kill beasts that give you mats for a future crafting session.

Weaver is far and away the more demanding craft class. Every DoL, DoH, DoM and certain aspects of DoW use clothes made by a Weaver. It's true they all use jewelry as well but consider, while going out to level a class with no necklace might be fine for some, going out to level with no shirt or pants wouldn't even be a consideration.

50 Wvr and Gsm here, GSM by far. It is much much much easier to level and it's end game GSM gear is in much more demand because of spiritbonding accessories is really efficient. Felt, cotton, and diremite are severe bottlenecks and cost a lot of money to acquire so you are stuck on spamming level 35 leves till 50. But I still have a feeling LW is better than both of them -_-

I'm a 50 goldsmith and found it to be pretty straight forward. I was mining my own stuff till I realized my goldsmithing was moving much faster than my miner. Left my miner at 23 and I ended up doing a mix of leves and using the leve money to purchase higher level metals to continue than stopped and just did hq leves the rest of the way. I think I got gsm to 50 in 1.5 weeks casually. I can see someone doing it in just a couple long sit downs though if they knew what to do.

I'm a black mage and being able to hq all my accessories and melding them is really nice. I do some hq sales here and there to keep my gil up too so it's nice. I definitely plan on going back to my miner however to be able to get some of those high level ores for myself instead of purchasing them.

At least on my realm at the time of leveling gsm was dirt cheap. The mats were all incredibly inexpensive because of their limited usefulness and abundance Thanks to miners having to get several stacks of useless gemstones for leveling up. I purchased all of the ore I needed and stacks of each raw gemstone variety for between 1g-15g per item. This is probably why there are a million goldsmiths as well.

on the other hand, weaving is probably the most expensive and most annoying profession to level, even if you're farming your own mats because of the sheer amount of yarn and cloth needed, and bottlenecks like diremite and fleece that require workarounds to get through efficiently. Despite this, I still see more weavers than anything but goldsmiths.

In terms of what will turn a profit at 50, they all get much more competitive every day since everybody can be everything and leveling takes only a day or two of effort.