What's the best crafting class?

[Sqwall]

Cullinarian has been my go to for crafting lately. I would say that CUL is pretty heavy in the gathering classes more so then any other crafter.

The PROS: Quick easy sales, minor price adjustments (if ever), make your own buffs (Chili Crab, Blood Bouillabaisse, Smoked Chicken), almost ALL recipes yield 3 items per craft.

The CONS: Insane amounts of prep with gathering, requires all 3 gathering classes if you don't want to buy your EXPENSIVE mats (looking at you Blue Crabs), inventory hog,

CUL is all over the place for gathering mats... Salt (miner), Blue Crabs (fisher), Night Pepper (Botanist). And that is a handful of items.

CUL is strong around Fridays and the weekend, as raider's gobble up all the food for clears weekly. I generally craft food heavy on the weekdays and save the postings for FRI into the weekend. It's not uncommon to rake in around 3-4millon.

While everyone is buying my food I'm back to harvesting mats, and I never pay for mat's. OK wait I buy crystals, I stopped farming crystals altogether as it's more cost effective to buy them then to waste time farming them. I consider my cordials are a waste when farming crystals, and I like having over 7000 of each shard, crystal, cluster as it fuels all my other crafts. Buying crystals is like a meat locker paying to keep the freezer running, and I wrap that into the cost of the sale.

The white scrip ingredients can be a pain, but necessary. I usually devote Wednesdays to scrip mats, and go nuts on grinding out collectibles. I usually like to have around 300 chicken thighs which is used in Smoked Chicken (melee DPS buff) and Fettuccini Alfredo (tank buff).

Then you have your ingredients that are just annoying to make. Frantio oil is easy to HQ and helps with getting your crafts up to 11k HQ. The downside is you will be making 300 of these suckers and running your quick HQ macro a butt load of times. I hate when I get low on Frantio oil....usually means I have to farm frantios for an hour or two, and craft till I vomit. All this work simply means I can get my HQ # just a little higher to save on white scrip HQ mats.

CUL is a highly rewarding craft when you understand how much work goes into it, and the CUL community is small as I have been competing with the same group of sellers for 4.0 and 5.0. I have actually grown to know some of them and we now work together in cornering some markets, and those are the most LUCRATIVE times as we approach patches. We basically set our own prices and purchase any undercuts and sell back at a higher price. I have had some crazy binges of being a day trader and having a lot of fun buying the undercuts all weekend and selling them the next making 60% profit. You can't do this in any other market as the prices become to high, but CUL, ALC can get away with this.