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GW2 Crafting Guide – How to level crafting

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Whether you’re just getting into Guild Wars 2, or just trying out crafting for the first time, it’s important to know some things. If you’re read out Guild Wars 2 crafting basics guide, you probably are already interested in crafting, so this guide is aimed at you. This basic guide will tell you what options to pick for when Discovering recipes, as well as the fastest path through the leveling process. The biggest hurdle to learning crafting in this MMO is time. It’s going to be a pretty big time sink to learn all the recipes, so put that off for now. Here’s a guide on the fastest path of leveling any GW2 Crafting Profession in Guild Wars 2.

For beginners, you will want to head to the racial starting zone of your choice, and look for the giant star shape on the map. The crafting discipline masters can be found there. They will be marked with a nameplate denoting them as a crafting master, as well as a mark on the map. Once you’ve picked out a crafting master to learn from, you’re ready to begin.

First, let’s recap the crafting disciplines. Armorsmith, Leatherworker, and Tailor are responsible for all the armor varieties in the game. Weaponsmith, Huntsman, and Artificer craft all the weapons in GW2. Chef, Jeweler, and Scribe can be used to create food, jewelry and other accessories to buff your character.  Choose one that works for you. it doesn’t really matter what you go for first, as the grind to level 400 out of 500 is your goal right now.

Discovery is Key

The first tasks you get given are to go and check in at the Crafting Station. When you first open up the Crafting Station, you will want to look at the left-hand tab. There are five tabs here, and you will become very acquainted with them during your time learning GW2 crafting. Here are the tabs you’ll see, and what they mean:

  • Discovery – This tab lists all the Recipes and Recipe Sheets your character can learn.
  • Production – This tab displays all the recipes that your character already knows.
  • Material Storage – This is where you can see what materials you have in stock.
  • Bank – This is the remaining items in storage that aren’t crafting mats.
  • Wardrobe – This tab is all the cosmetic items that you can equip.

Discovery Tab

Discovery is how you find new recipes. These are the templates you use to make new items from gathered and crafted components. Firstly, focus on getting materials together. Now you’re ready to start crafting. Discovery is part of this, but shouldn’t be your main focus. The basic idea is that you put the items to make an item in the four slots on the Discovery tab, usually three items in basic crafts, and you get the recipe from it. This is supposed to be a random exercise, but players have already broken the path down into an optimized series of recipes.

For example, you can rush through the crafting levels by discovering and crafting specific recipes. Here are the Weaponsmith items you should discover and craft to rush to 25 in that class:

All of these were pulled from the Pwniversity guide, and the recipes can be searched on Dulfy to know exactly what to put into the Discovery Tab. A slower path would be to use the magnifying glass icon in the Production tab, next to a recipe, to see what items ultimately go into that craft.

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Materials can be Tricky

If you’ve been gathering while leveling combat classes, this is much easier to deal with. Using Salvage Kits to gather materials from basic items can be worth it for later crafts when getting closer to 400. For now, just buy or gather the materials you need. Also, sometimes you will have to buy basic items from the crafting master for your chosen discipline.

Materials will differ based on your discipline, let’s use Weaponsmithing as an example. The general path, in this case, is Bronze to Iron to Steel to Darksteel. You will have to adjust this obviously, based on your chosen disciplines.

When crafting armor and weapons, at first you will need to use basic materials like Greenwood Planks and such to make basic material items like Small and Large Hafts. When you see a red number beneath that craft after you select it in the Production tab, that means you don’t have the required components for that craft.

When you see a finished craft such as a weapon in the Crafting UI, that’s a recipe. Also, when a recipe or material craft is colored yellow, that means it will give the maximum amount of crafting XP for your current level. Using the guides linked above follows the path that maximizes XP gain.

GW2 Crafting Recipe UI

The basic crafts are easy to handle, just requiring a few basic Tier 1 drops to make. It gets harder from there, much harder.

You will eventually progress into Inscriptions. These are key for making new items even on the path level 100. As soon as you can, start making as many of the basic Inscriptions as you can. When you unlock a new tier of materials, you will often get new Inscriptions. If you want to thoroughly plan everything out, use the Pwniversity guide to know exactly what material items to make for crafting all the way to level 500.

The more time you put in, the more you get out. You’ll be on your way to max level in GW2 Crafting in no time.

Things to Remember

For starters, you will need to be doing plenty of gathering. The more materials you can avoid buying off of the Trade Post, the faster this process will go. Crafting and gathering are pretty closely linked. Every hundred or so Discipline levels, you will unlock a new tier of basic materials. Levels range from copper tools for tier 1 nodes to orichalcum tools for tier 6 when gathering, the same is true crafting.

As you go up in material tiers, the GW2 Crafting process is the same—the materials just change with each tier.

When grinding to 400, don’t bother Discovering every single recipe. Find the easiest to craft items in each tier for your Crafting Discipline and spam that. The vast majority of players would rather buy materials for higher-tier crafting of Exotics and Ascended gear. You would be better served rushing to those levels as fast as possible.

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