New player question

[Wanderlust]

My wife and I just started playing this game. We're MMO vets but totally new to this world (and enjoying it).

After reading about crafting, we are frankly overwhelmed by the advice we keep getting that we need to level every craft in order to get the cross crafting skills we will need for high end crafting. We're not prepared to do that right now. My wife started Botany and I started Fishing and *thought* I was going to do Culinary as well.

Question: can we just level up the 3 DoL skills alone into the endgame or are we going to have to do the omnicrafter thing in order to be endgame viable? I'm willing to give up Culinary and just stay a Gatherer, if I need to. We actually enjoy gathering generally, but we are more of the specialist type than the omni type players.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions, we love this community and think we're going to be here for a while.

[Kalise]

Leveling DoL classes alone is perfectly viable.

Being able to craft isn't particularly necessary for DoL. Especially since you can still just make Gil by selling things you gather and simply purchase crafted gear to be able to harvest the highest tier items.

In addition, solo crafting jobs are also viable. Sure, you won't be able to as easily make all the highest tier items, but they should still be doable, especially if you make enough Gil to just purchase the crafted gear.

This should become even easier too, since Dev's have mentioned they wanted to take the focus off of needing to use cross-class skills on crafting jobs. Which likely could be done in ShB.

[MistakeNot]

You can certainly level up just the gatherer classes on their own.

Of all the crafter classes Culinarian is the one with the least dependencies on other classes.
But even so, if you are going to do any crafting I'd strongly recommend leveling all the crafter classes to level 15 at least for the first set of cross-crafting skills. For high-end crafting you will ideally want to level up all the crafters, but just getting them all to level 15 will get you quite far.
Getting to level 15 won't take more than an hour or two, and all the materials needed for the level 1-15 recipes can be obtained at the crafter guild or elsewhere in the same city.

[Frizze]

The reason that basically everyone will recommend going the omni route is that it makes everything easier. Cross class skills make completing high quality crafts easier. Being able to do your own sub-combines saves a ton of money. Knowing that if you need something you can do it yourself instead of finding a source just makes things easier. Without cross class skills you need to rely on luck more, on high quality ingredients more, and on out-leveling crafts more. If you cant do all the sub-combines then you might spend a lot of your potential profits on intermediary mats. Or failing that, you spend a lot of time trying to find people you can trade with(ill make you some ingots if you can get me some leather).

But can you single class? For sure. Just go into it knowing that youre doing it the hard way. And if you did have to pick one DoH class to do, Culinarian is the most independent. Very few of their recipes call for non-culinary crafted ingredients(as opposed to gathered ingredients which are split mostly between botany fishing and monster drops). And as for the question of doing just the gathering classes, you can absolutely do that. Youll end up buying most of your gear(either from players or npcs), but once you have gear a DoL class is set. Best of luck!

[Shadygrove]

The first set of cross class skills comes in at L15 and getting any craft to 15 is less than 1/2 an hour.

To get any craft to 15 just do every recipe once. The guild shop sells everything you need, except the cooking guild doesn't stock fish, you buy fish at the hyaline just off the aftcastle. The guild quests provide more than enough shards. Check with the local levemete before you dispose of the stuff you crafted, some of it will be levequest fodder.

Have fun.

[Iscah]

Botanist and culinarian (or all gatherers + culinarian) are actually a good team, since the vast majority of CUL's raw ingredients are gathered. (Alchemist is in a similar position, if you want a second crafter.)

As the others have said, it's worth getting all the crafters to Lv15 for their skills, then focus on your chosen class(es) from there.

[Wanderlust]

Thanks to all for the suggestions and confirmation.

As it turns out, my wife is not crazy about the gathering model in this game, she's more of a *gather things as her main is adventuring* type and doesn't particularly enjoy dedicating time to it. So she will remain a BRD only while I take on BOT, MIN and FSH, along with CUL. My main motivation is not so much the profits, since in every MMO we've ever played, entering the market after the game's been out for years is almost never profit-viable. I'm more interested in making my own buffs for the two of us, and the fun of it.

But I do do see how leveling each craft up to 15 is easy, my 3 DoL skills are all already 20+ and we just started playing (our mains are only just now hitting 40). I'll probably do the cross-craft skills thing in order to enhance the experience. The only downside I see is having to maintain so many different gear sets!

Thanks everyone, and I do appreciate any other tips or suggestions!

[Frizze]

The key to keeping gear sets manageable is to take levels into consideration. Aside from their main and offhand tools, each crafting class can use the same gear in each slot - and each gathering class can as well. So if you level 7 crafts up to 15 for extra skills, thats only one set of "wearable" gear with 7 different tool sets, then CUL would have its own leveled up set, and you could get BOT/MIN/FSH to share as well if you level them at roughly the same speed.

As for scrip gathering, i wouldnt worry about it. You can get them with any gathering class and spend them as you see fit. So using miner to collect then spending on fisher supplies(as an example) is perfectly viable. The reason that bot/min are usually paired separately from fsh is that fishing has a large amount of rng in getting what you want. Miner/botanist can walk up to a node and know what theyre getting and how much/how quickly. A fisher walks up to a body of water(etc), picks a bait, casts and hopes for the best. Whether thats a feature of the system or a reason to hate it is up to personal considerations.

[Kalise]

I'll probably do the cross-craft skills thing in order to enhance the experience. The only downside I see is having to maintain so many different gear sets!

Interestingly enough, if you keep crafters/gatherers at an equal level, then you only need 1 gear set for each. The only part that can clog up your inventory is main hand tools (As they share space with weapons used by all the combat jobs)

There's very little class specific gear for DoL/DoH and much of what exists is easily outclassed by more generic stuff.

Any idea what they were talking about, and is this a consensus view?

EDIT: I found the post. The comment was that Fishing for "red scrips" is ridiculously slow and boring and much easier to do with MIN and BOT. Does this make sense?

Does it make sense? Well, Scrips do. The talk about leveling up MIN and BOT before FSH doesn't...

Personally, I find it easier to get scrips from FSH than MIN/BOT >.>

That and a vast majority of my Scrips comes from Custom Deliveries which you can do after reaching level 55 with a DoH/DoL class and gives you up to 12 turn ins per week (With a further cap of 6 per NPC per week...) and can easily net you a TON of scrips and really isn't particularly difficult to do with ANY class.

But anyway, Scrips are a thing for when you're level 55+ and even further than that, they're even less relevant until you're at max level (Which will soon be level 80) because the primary use for Scrips is to unlock the ability to gather the highest tier items for the expansion. Which, obviously, is less lucrative or practical outside of the current expansion's stuff.

So don't worry about it, Mine, Harvest and Fish to your heart's content

Also, try and do the daily turn ins for your Grand Company too, they give some nice experience and are relatively easy to do (It's like, 10 of a particular ore/stone/plant/log and 3 fish (1 if it's Mooched)) and especially if you turn in HQ items for extra bonus.

This also works for DoH classes too, you can actually level them up by just crafting 1 item a day and handing it in to the Grand Company for a bunch of experience! (Though, doing the turn ins for ALL the classes can be time consuming for gathering the materials... But doing them on occasion, such as when they're on bonus will slowly level them up over time)

[Wanderlust]

Wow, great response, Kalise, many thanks.

From what I can understand of the upcoming expansion, Red Scrips are going away anyway, so I guess it's a moot point. That's part of the problem with researching this game, there's so much out-of-date information. Fortunately, the great community makes up for it.

>> "Also, try and do the daily turn ins for your Grand Company too ...".

We both joined the Serpents in New Gridania, but we don't see an option for a daily turn in. We go to the Twin Adders and every NPC there wants seals. We can't get any of the Supply missions, the message says a new one will be available in X hours, but there's never anything there. How do we get this started?

Thanks again!