:: Guardians of Valor ::

Crafting for Profit: Salvaging & Trinketing

Who this Guide is For

There's a lot of good money to be made in salvaging drops in DAoC. Better money than any cash farming location I know. There are also a lot of people who are interested in leveling a crafter specifically for salvaging and trinketing but aren't sure how to go about it. My goal was to find the most inexpensive craft and then determine the most economical way to level both the trade and secondary skills for salvaging. This guide is designed to give new crafters information with those goals in mind.

Of all the mundane crafts, Tailoring is the most inexpensive skill to level by far. So I headed off to roll a tailor to get some real numbers. The information in this guide is based on the knowledge I've gained through leveling four Legendary Crafters. It is by no means perfect, but I hope to have some good advice for new crafters based on my mistakes and experiences.

Powerleveling Cost

First, I leveled the Tailor completely clean room. I dumped money on her, leveled her skill and sold everything back to the merchants. No sales to customers, no commissions, no tips, nothing. Any transactions I did were through a second character who brought materials to the tailor for grey items she could craft. By doing this I didn't artificially skill her up or make her money on anything she made. This was the only way I could be sure what the real leveling cost was. While randomness varies, I’m hoping my numbers are fairly typical after 1100 skill points. It turns out getting a tailor to 1100 cost me less than seven platinum. In fact, getting to 1060 only cost six platinum (darn those last few points.)

Secondary Skills Cost

At each 100 mark I would stop leveling Tailoring and level all secondary skills to catch them up with my Tailoring level. So at 700 Tailoring I would get to 700 in Clothworking, Leatherworking, Metalworking and Woodworking. I tracked additional costs to raise the secondary skills separately from the Tailoring costs. It cost me just over 48 gold to raise the other secondary skills from 1-1000. Raising secondary skills is fairly inexpensive if you plan out how to use the other crafting skills in advance.

Salvaging / Trinketing

If you haven't done salvaging before here’s how it works. Your ability to salvage an item has nothing to do with your declared trade skill or your skill in any of the related crafts. It’s completely based on secondary skills. So for example, I can have Weaponcrafting at a skill of one yet be able to salvage arcanite (tier 10) weapons if I have 900 in metalworking. The catch is, your secondaries can never be higher than your main trade skill. So your actual trade skill doesn't matter, but you have to have it high enough to get your secondaries to the level you want. All mundane crafters (not Alchemists and Spellcrafters unfortunately) have the ability to salvage and trinket all materials by raising their secondary skills.

Leveling secondaries can be done through trinketing but it’s boring and slow. The best way to level secondaries is to take advantage of the other trade skills at their low levels. The most important thing is to plan ahead before you start your crafter. For example, you can fletch arrows to get a cheap and quick 400 levels in metalworking and 500 levels in woodworking. But if you do that at the start you’ll run out of cheap, low-level trade skills as you get close to capping your crafter and you’ll be stuck with the slow and more costly task or trinketing tier 7-10 materials to cap some secondaries.

What is trinketing you ask? It's a mechanism Mythic put into the game that accomplishes two things, first you can use it to raise secondary skills independently from the main trade skill. Second, trinketing can be used to turn raw materials into a product you can sell back to the merchants at about 98% of the purchase price instead of the 50% you get from selling back the raw materials. There are trinkets for each of the secondary skills like Hinges and Brackets for Metalworking; Dolls and Puppets for Clothworking, etc. So salvaging is only half the picture. First you salvage an item into its material components, then you trinket the item into a product to sell back to the merchant at a much higher value than the raw materials alone would sell for.

The first thing to decide is what level materials you want to salvage and trinket. Pre-Shrouded Isles the highest materials you generally saw were tier seven (Diamond metal bars, etc.). Darkness Falls seals were turned into gold by purchasing items and salvaging them for large quantities of Diamond metal bars which could then be trinketed. Many drops like the popular Finlaith Firebrand also yielded tier seven materials. To salvage and trinket at that level you needed to have 700 in metalworking or the comparable secondary skill like clothworking for cloth items. woodworking for staves, bows and instruments, etc.

But is 700 enough? At that level you can trinket one metal bar at a time with a yellow con trinket. You can’t increase your secondary skill beyond your main skill so if you’re only 700 in tailoring it’s going to take you a long time to get the trinketing done. I remember the first Firebrand I trinketed. 68 Diamond Metal Bars and I had to do 100+ 13 second trinkets just to get it converted to gold because I failed a lot on yellow. If you raise your skill to 750 you can make hinges. Hinges trinket two metal bars at a time, so you’d only need to do half as many trinkets, still all at 13 seconds though. If you raise your main skill to 800 and your metalworking to 800 then you’ve got it made. You’re successful every trinket, you can trinket two bars at once and the hinge is grey so each trinket takes only 6.5 seconds to complete. You can turn a Finlaith Firebrand into 151g in about eight minutes, not bad.

So, 800 sounds good? Enter Shrouded Isles where most of the high level drops now yield tier 10 materials. Now you need 900 skill in each secondary to be able to successfully salvage drops and start to trinket. One aside here; yes, you don’t absolutely need 700 or 900 skill to salvage an item of that tier. However, if you’re significantly lower than the required skill you may yield fewer materials or fail and lose the item altogether. Bottom line, the ideal goal is to have 1000 in all secondary skills. Then you can salvage and trinket everything in the game at half trinket time. You can buy drops off people and pay them a percentage of the yield value, you can salvage your own drops and make sometimes upwards of three times the money you made in gold and loot alone.

Leveling Secondary Skills

Okay, you're ready to start a crafter and get to salvaging those drops for cash? Sounds great, but let's look at how to get the secondary skills up first. Different trade skills raise different secondaries. Here’s a general rundown of what secondaries are raised by each trade skill:

Tailoring – Clothworking, Leatherworking (leather)
Armorcrafting – Leatherworking, Clothworking, Metalworking (scale)
Weaponcrafting – Metalworking, Leatherworking (blades, piercers), Woodworking (blunts, shields)
Fletching – Woodworking, Metalworking (arrows, staves), Clothworking (bows), leatherworking (instruments)

Note that not all items you craft in each trade skill raise the same secondaries. In fact, you can read that table the other way around and say “Tailoring requires Leatherworking and Clothworking.” As a tailor, if I level on cloth items to 1000 and then I want to make some leather items I’m in big trouble because I’m 1000 points behind on leatherworking. Same goes with Armorcrafting. As an Armorcrafter if I level on Reinforced to 1100 and then I want to make AF102 Scale I’m out of luck until I figure out how to get 1100 levels of metalworking. Fletching is the most challenging trade skill for secondaries as it requires all four skills to make the full range of items.

You can use low levels of the other trade skills to get the levels in the secondary skills you need though. How does this work? It's pretty neat. Let's say you're a Weaponcrafter and you've gotten 400 levels of woodworking already through making weapons. If you do some Fletching even though your Fletching is at level one and your Woodworking is at 400, as long as you're leveling on a non-grey item you're eligible for all the secondary skills that item grants. So you can use low levels of main trade skills to get your already high secondary skill even higher. Taking best advantage of this feature of crafting will save you lots of money and time.

Planning Your Leveling

Before you start on a trade skill you want to plan out how you expect to level your skill and secondaries. You should be able to get all secondaries to 1000 by using the alternate crafts in the inexpensive, fast low level ranges. By low levels I mean 500 in Fletching and 200 in Armorcrafting, Tailoring and Weaponcrafting in general. To raise your other three skills that high you’d probably spend less than 35 gold and in so doing you can get most of your secondaries in the 700-800 range. Your main trade skill will be leveling some of the secondaries automatically so the plan is to supplement the other trade skills to get the remaining secondary levels.

In general, you can’t get 1000 levels of secondaries by leveling the other trade skills at the low levels. So to level them as quickly and cheaply as possible you’ll need to trinket a bit at the beginning. Consider this; if you start at the beginning using the other trade skills to level secondaries, when you get to the higher levels in your main skill you either have to do more expensive and slower levels in the other tradeskills or you have to trinket higher materials. While trinketing has a good return on investment at over 98% of the materials purchase price, it’s so much easier to plan ahead and trinket early on. Higher materials trinketing will cost more and is much much slower. Low level trinketing goes by amazingly quickly and the cost is negligible.

Map out how you’ll use trinketing and the other trade skills to get to your target level. Once you know how many levels you can get out of the other trade skills start off by trinketing what you’re missing. In the Tailoring plan included below you trinket 300 levels of wood and metal initially to save time and money when you get to the 800 range further down the road.

Tailoring Template

Here’s a plan to get a Tailor to 1100. I stopped secondaries at 1000 since all trinketing is grey at that point. Note that actual levels are estimated, some skills may lag behind or ahead a bit. The goal is to get close to the ranges in the template. Skill totals increased at each step are highlighted in bold:

	Craft Task	Items to Craft	Skills Raised	Skill Totals
1.	Tailoring 1-700	Leather Gloves & Boots (Cloth does not yield Leatherworking)	Tailoring Leatherworking Clothworking	T – 700 L – 700 C – 700
2.	Metalworking 1-300 Woodworking 1-300	Metalworking: Bracket, Wrought Jewelry Box, Hinge, Small Lantern Woodworking: Breadboard, Curio Box, Whistle, Toy Sword	Metalworking Woodworking	T – 700 L – 700 C – 700 M – 300 W – 300
3.	Fletching 1-100	Blunt Arrows (Yields only Woodworking)	Fletching Woodworking	T – 700 L – 700 C – 700 M – 300 W – 400 F - 100
4.	Fletching 101-400	Bodkin & Broadhead Arrows (Yields Woodworking and Metalworking)	Fletching Woodworking Metalworking	T – 700 L – 700 C – 700 M – 600 W – 700 F - 400
5.	Armorcrafting 1-100	Scale Gloves and Boots (Requires Tailored Items you have the skill to make)	Armorcrafting Metalworking Leatherworking	T – 700 L – 700 C – 700 M – 700 W – 700 F – 400 A – 100
6.	Tailoring 701-1000	Leather Gloves & Boots	Tailoring Leatherworking Clothworking	T – 1000 L – 1000 C – 1000 M – 700 W – 700 F – 400 A – 100
7.	Fletching 400-500	Bodkin & Broadhead Arrows	Fletching Woodworking Metalworking	T – 1000 L – 1000 C – 1000 M – 800 W – 800 F – 500 A – 100
8.	Weaponcrafting 1-200	Blunts, Scythes, Shields, Spears (Items yielding Woodworking)	Weaponcraft Woodworking Metalworking	T – 1000 L – 1000 C – 1000 M – 1000 W – 1000 F – 500 A – 100 WC- 200
9.	Tailoring 1001-1100	Boots, Gloves, finish on Sleeves	Tailoring Leatherworking Clothworking	T – 1100 L – 1100 C – 1100 M – 1000 W – 1000 F – 500 A – 100 WC- 200

Fletching Template

For comparison here's a template to level a Fletcher to 1000:

	Craft Task	Items to Craft	Skills Raised	Skill Totals
1.	Fletching 1-100	Blunt Arrows (Yields only Woodworking)	Fletching Woodworking	F – 100 W – 100
2.	Metalworking 1-100	Bracket, Wrought Jewelry Box, Hinge, Small Lantern	Metalworking	F – 100 W – 100 M – 100
3.	Fletching 101-530	Bodkin & Broadhead Arrows (Yields Woodworking and Metlalworking)	Fletching Woodworking Metalworking	F – 530 W – 530 M – 530
4.	Clothworking 1-400 Leatherworking 1-400	Leatherworking: Bridle, Riding Crop, Scabbard, Saddlebag Clothworking: Doll, Puppet, Scarf, Bedroll Pillow	Clothworking Leatherworking	F – 530 W – 530 M – 530 L – 400 C – 400
5.	Tailoring 1-100	Leather Gloves & Boots (Cloth does not yield Leatherworking)	Tailoring Clothworking Leatherworking	F – 530 W – 530 M – 530 L – 500 C – 500 T – 100
6.	Fletching 530-700	Bows	Fletching Woodworking Clothworking	F – 700 W – 700 M – 530 L – 500 C – 700 T – 100
7.	Weaponcrafting 1-200	Pierciers, Blades (Items yielding Woodworking)	Weaponcrafting Metalworking Leatherworking	F – 700 W – 700 M – 700 L – 700 C – 700 T – 100 WC – 200
8.	Fletching 701-800	Bows	Fletching Woodworking Clothworking	F – 800 W – 800 M – 700 L – 700 C – 800 T – 100 WC – 200
9.	Metalworking 701-800	Diamond Bars – Salvage and hinge from DF and classic DAoC drops. Estimated 600 bars. Note: You can also level Armorcraft and Weaponcraft for another 50 points each to get 100 in metalworking.	Metalworking	F – 800 W – 800 M – 800 L – 700 C – 800 T – 100 WC – 200
10.	Fletching 801-900	Bows	Fletching Woodworking Clothworking	F – 900 W – 900 M – 800 L – 800 C – 900 T – 100 WC – 200
11.	Tailoring 101-200	Leather Gloves & Boots	Tailoring Clothworking Leatherworking	F – 900 W – 900 M – 800 L – 900 C – 900 T – 200 WC – 200
12.	Armorcrafting 1-100	Scale Gloves and Boots (Requires Tailored Items you have the skill to make)	Armorcrafting Metalworking Leatherworking	F – 900 W – 900 M – 900 L – 900 C – 900 T – 200 WC – 200 A - 100
13.	Fletching 901-1000	Bows	Fletching Woodworking Clothworking	F – 1000 W – 1000 M – 900 L – 900 C – 1000 T – 200 WC – 200 A - 100
14.	Armorcrafting 101-200	Scale Gloves and Boots	Armorcrafting Metalworking Leatherworking	F – 1000 W – 1000 M – 1000 L – 1000 C – 1000 T – 200 WC – 200 A - 200

Full Cost Breakdown

How much will all this cost? Here are exact costs for my Tailor and Fletcher, both whom I clean room power leveled. The Gold column is the total amount I spent to get all skills to that level. The Secondaries column is a cumulative total of the gold I spent to level the secondaries. I didn't follow the templates exactly from above as I learned a lot in the process but I was fairly close to what you see above. The overall totals should be a good indication on what actual costs should be however.

Tailoring Cumulative Cost

Fletching Cumulative Cost

Skill	Gold	Secondaries
100	0.1	0.1
200	2	0.3
300	7	0.6
400	29	6
500	108	7
600	277	10
700	629	19
800	1,260	25
900	2,113	43
1000	3,377	48
1100	6,971	48

Skill	Gold	Secondaries
100	0.08	0
200	1	0
300	2	0
400	6	0
500	37	8
600	1,177	8
700	3,605	11
800	6,320	20
900	10,377	66
1000	17,599	66

Best of luck with your crafting. I have to admit, I hated crafting at first but it grew on me and now I'm hopelessly addicted and I don't plan on stopping. If you have questions or comments you can email me at pharaoh@guardiansofvalor.com

Last revision: 2/12/2003

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