Talk:Blacksmithing

Introduction As you may have already noticed, there are three gathering skills and six production skills. The three gathering skills are mining, woodcutting and herbalist, and the the six production skills are blacksmithing, carpentry, armor crafting, tailoring, cooking and alchemy. The gathering skills serve the purpose of collecting raw materials, mining is for ores, woodcutting is for wood, and herbalist is for herbs. These raw materials can then be refined to more useful materials at corresponding workstations once the player purchases the recipes from the work skill instructors. The elite skills that are available to learn when players reach level 15/15, 20/20, 25/25 and 30/30 all require these kinds of materials. But the main purpose of these materials is to be used to manufacture items through the six production skills. Each production skill requires two different types of materials and the combination differs for all production skills.

The Production Skills There are six types of production skills, each one allows the player to manufacture unique items. Blacksmithing – 1-H Sword, 1-H Hammer, 1-H Axe, Dagger, 2-H Sword, 2-H Hammer, 2-H Axe, Shield Carpentry – Talisman, Scepter, Staff, Crossbow, Bow Armor Crafting – Leather (Upper Body, Lower Body, Head), Chain (Upper Body, Lower Body, Head), Plate (Upper Body, Lower Body, Head) Tailoring – Cloth (Upper Body, Lower Body, Head), Cape Cooking – Dessert, Food Alchemy – Potions It is important to know that you can train all work skills to level 20, six work skills to level 40, three work skills to level 60, and one work skill beyond level 60. For blacksmithing, the three skills that get the focus are Mining, Woodcutting and Blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing Obviously, this guide will be focusing on blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing is the production skill that allows players to craft melee weapons and shields. Its production requires ores from mining and wood from woodcutting. For recipes that are above level 10, one Frost production rune is used for each item crafted. It is a good idea to keep all frosts that you find from drops. The auction house is also a great source of frosts, just search in Materials – Production Runes.

Blacksmithing requires large quantity of money. The recipes that you have to buy from the NPCs is enough to drain your quest income. Aside from that, the production cost of most recipes is only slightly lower than the money that you get for selling the product to an NPC, making it impossible to gain any profit on most of the items that you make. Note that I used “most” instead of “all”, that is because the production costs of shields are extremely low and the money that you gain for selling them to NPC is comparable to all other items. That is why producing shields will be the only way to make a decent income from blacksmithing.

To begin with blacksmithing, you must first collect ores and wood that are required for the items that you want to create, you can find the resources scattered across the maps. Low level regions offer low level resources, high level regions offer high level resources. In most cases, ores are scattered near mountains and wood are scattered on flat land. After you collect a desirable amount of ores and wood, go to blacksmithing and carpentry tools and turn the ores and wood into sand and timber. Two ores give one sand and two wood give one timber. In addition, 6 sands can be refined into 1 nugget and 6 timbers can be refined into 1 lumber. The nuggets and lumbers are used in Enhanced recipes which will be covered in the next paragraph.

To level up blacksmithing, you must manufacture items to gain blacksmithing experience. The higher level the item that you craft, the more experience you get. It is important to note that a pattern exists in the materials required to make items. The same materials are used for a range of blacksmithing levels, the required quantity increases as the level goes up. At first it requires 2 sands and 1 timber, then 3 sands and 1 timber, 4 sand sand 2 timbers, and finally 5 sands and 2 timbers. After that, the next set of materials becomes involved in crafting, and the quantity restarts at 2 sands and 1 timber and goes back up. Although recipes with 5 sands 2 timbers give more experience than recipes with 2 sands and 1 timber of the same materials, the recipes with 2 sands and 1 timber give more experience for the same amount of materials consumed. If you have many frosts in stock, stick to recipes with 2 sands and 1 timber for maximum experience.

Normal recipes can be purchased from blacksmithing instructors located in selected towns/cities. Logar offers recipes ranging from level 1-20. Varanas and Obsidian Stronghold both offer recipes ranging from level 1-50. There are also recipes that allow you to upgrade items created with normal recipes to their enhanced versions. The enhanced items have green names and receive boost in abilities as well as an additional green stat. These recipes only drop from monsters. They can also be purchased from the auction house. Although the results of enhancing is satisfying, it requires a lot more materials. Enhancing requires one frost, same number of ores and wood comparing to the normal recipe except they must be nuggets and lumbers which are 6 times more costly than sands and timbers. Enhancing also requires the normal version of the item, and one rare sand. The rare sand is made from two ores of the same type. These ores are obtained with the same method as all other ores but they are less common.

The advantage of blacksmithing is the ability to make weapons and shields possessing 2 rune slots, higher level items with no additional stats and 2 rune slots are very desirable for inserting mana stones and runes. The chance of getting an item with 2 rune slots is approximately 10%. Note that when an item with 2 rune slots is enhanced, the rune slots reset. You can still get 2 rune slots with enhanced items but since the chances are low, a large quantity of materials will be required.

EvilJesus's Blacksmithing Guide

Step one: Learn the blacksmithing, mining, and lumber-cutting skills from the trainers.

Step two: Harvest lots of bronze and balsa wood while doing missions. If you get to the next area before you can harvest the next metal, you didn't do enough harvesting and need to catch up. Once you have harvested a lot of materials, you can either sell them on the market (prices are very high right now!) or use them to train blacksmithing skills. You will not make anything good for a while! Also you will level up slower since you will be spending time mining / harvesting instead of questing/grinding.

Step three: Get some recipes. You can get recipes from a few trainers, and from the auction hall. There is a bug in the auction hall where if you click on blacksmithing recipes you will find none, but if you click on just the recipes heading you will get all the recipes, including blacksmithing ones. I like to get all the recipes I can find (there aren't very many!) but you'll need a few. Some recipes require things made from other recipes - for example, most weapons will require brass sand, which is a recipe that requires 2 brass ore to make 1 brass sand. In order to use a recipe, you must be standing near the correct tool. (A forge or woodsaw area). Most blacksmithing recipes require metal and wood, and some later ones require production runes. Make sure you're using recipes for materials you can harvest in the area you are questing in for optimal efficiency.

Step 4: Give away your items. You will be lucky if anyone wants anything. You can potentially make slightly better items with "enhanced" recipes that require a _lot_ more resources per item and thus pay off with very little blacksmithing xp. Not all the items will be the same - some will have multiple rune slots and more durability, some will have less or none. If you get a good one, you might want to sell it on zone chat or the auction hall.

Step 5: Arcane Trasmutor your stuff. Alternatively you can skip steps 1-4 if you want to make good items right away. The use of the arcane transmutor is the topic for another guide, however!