i didnt play beta so yes i may sound like a newb but are crafters their own class here? like will there be newbs starting out as botanist or w/e? if so how the hell can they level their trade without a combat main? or is it like most mmos where tradeskilling is always a secondary skill
- They are their own class, and yes,you can be a tradeskill(s) main if you want. You could start with tradeskills, adventuring, or any mix, in any order, stop, start, change, whatever and whenever you want. There will definitely be some who focus on this before adventuring, and it's totally viable if you're into that sort of thing. There are some monster drop trade skill components that you won't be able to get on your own, but it's not necessarily prohibitive. If you must obtain these, you could use the AH, friends/guildmates, or keep an adventuring class in the right level range and get them on your own.
- Gathering / Disciple of the Land (DoL) classes, which are Mining and Botany, can be leveled without adventuring classes due to a few things: They start you off in areas with gathering nodes that have only neutral/non-aggro monsters. Later on (I went to level 30 botany in phase 3), you can still avoid many monsters, even ones that are aggressive. Additionally, you will have a stealth mode on your gatherer, which doesn't cancel just because you collect from a node. This means you can navigate areas populated with aggresive monsters and still gather. As expected, you will have a movement speed penalty while stealthed, but can use your sprint abillity (all characters have sprint) to somewhat mitigate this. The game is not designed to have the player quickly switch between gathering and a combat class. When you switch from a gatherer to a combat class, your fighting abilities will be on a decent length (I want to say 90-120 seconds) cooldown. So they want you to either avoid monsters or use stealth.
- Gathering nodes are your own and not shared with other players, so you don't need to worry about competition for nodes.
- You can easily have both Disciple of the Hand (DoH), which are your standard production skills (Blacksmithing, for example) and DoL going on at the same time. You may go out and use mining to gather materials for Blacksmithing, for example, on your mining class, and then switch to Blacksmith and make a bunch of stuff to increase your blacksmithing level.
- DISCLAIMER: I have no authoritative info on end game/max level crafting, my experience ends in the L25-30 range for both DoH and DoL.
