New player, any guides?

[Dyegov]

Hello there. I'm a new player (about to finish my free month gametime) and I'm really interested into gathering and crafting professions. I started both and started to suffer at around lvl 10, when gathering a node barely moved the experience bar at all!

I think I might be doing something wrong and that's why I come here. I know it's recommended to gather one of everything in the gathering log since it gives extra exp for the first time, but other than that, I don't know how to lvl other than gathering nodes.

Is there any newbie guide or some recommendations I can follow to get started?

Thansk a lot!

[Snugglebutt]

Grinding nodes is one way to do it but doing leves is by far the fastest way.

[Irondoll]

Leaves and great company dailies.
Grinding is good only on sellable items.

[Dyegov]

I'll try that, but I'm now wondering if I wanna lvl gathering/crafting or not :/

[LineageRazor]

I'll try that, but I'm now wondering if I wanna lvl gathering/crafting or not :/

I find crafting to be fun, because crafting an item is like solving a puzzle. You're given resources (progress, quality, and durability), and tools for manipulating those resources, and you need to puzzle out the best way to bring progress and quality to 100% while never letting durability reach zero (unless doing so will finish the synth successfully).

Gathering was less enjoyable for me, and I did it largely so that I'd have a way to obtain my own ingredients for crafting, and not be so reliant on buying stuff off the markets. I wish I could paint a better picture of gathering for you, but from levels 1-45 there's not much more to it than walking from node to node and whacking away with your tool to collect items. Even the leves are exactly like that, except you don't get to walk away with any real items (you do get more exp, though)! Things get more interesting at level 46 when you start to be able to access Unspoiled Nodes, and really take off 51+ in Heavensward when nodes start to express random bonuses, and Collectables come into play.

Fishing is possibly even more boring than Botany and Mining before you reach level 50, after which Big Fish start spicing things up a bit. The 51+ Fishing abilities really start to add some variety to the job. But 1-49, it's pretty much just cast -> catch -> cast -> catch, for hours on end, with only the occasional Mooch to liven things up.

tl;dr: Crafting is fun from the start if you like puzzles. Gathering gets fun later on, but it's kind of awful getting there. Gathering's nice for supporting your crafting, though!