Innes' Everquest 2 Craftsman Tier 2 Fishing Income Tutorial
This tutorial covers how to become self sufficient in providing a steady income for your Craftsman Artisan, and more specifically in Freeport although also applies to Queynos. It requires that you have chosen to be a craftsman and are at least level 13. As far as I have found out this is the best way to earn a profit without having to deal with the broker and other player merchants at Tier 2, although it does require gathering resources this can also be a welcome break from the tradeskill instances' scenery as we all know is extremely tedious, it also takes a little amount of time. It also gives you a chance to go for a nice swim, and doesnt take too long so your skin won't go wrinkly.
So you have just hit level 13 and are a craftsman, well done. Now this method to becoming self sufficient is good because it involves gathering resources that are abundant and easy to find, fish, it also gives a good profit and is self sufficient because you do not have to rely on such other classes as the outfitter or scholar to provide materials/ingredients. When you hit 13 you will need to purchase the Craftsman Essentials Volume 13, I found this book at the Crimson Framers Society, Scale Yard, Freeport.
Gathering the Resources:
You will need to start fishing and get your skills up to 40 in order to be able to fish tier 2 resources. This is very easy, in Freeport I would reccomend the Sunken City. Just zone in via the Mariner Bell take your shoes off and jump in the water. You should find at least 8 groups of fish to harvest from. Harvest them all, either wait or zone out and zone in to a different instance and repeat. I seem to see no-one fishing so far in my experience of Everquest 2, maybe its just my server, I feel its a greatly underappreciated resource that is easily found and very abundant. Soon you should be up to 40 you can check this by pressing L on the keyboard as a shortcut.
Head to the Commonlands or Queynos equivalent where there are tier 2 resources. In the Commonlands there is a river which is a good source of fish, there is also a landmark called the Dog Pond. The Dog Pond is an excellent place for fish has usually around 10-12 bands of fish. From these you get Crab Meat, Cichlid Fish and Freshwater Grouper. You can either again wait for the resources to respawn or go to another instance. In no time you should have a good number of stacks of each, time to head to the Tradeskills Instance.
Time for Crafting:
Fortunately all this raw ingredients need the two submaterials to create a edible dish. These are coal (the fuel) and spice. You can either make the spice yourself or buy it from the trade merchant but costs you more than crafting it yourself. Its up to you, would you rather save time or save profit? Most of you do not have time to burn so buying the spice would be a good idea, perhaps using the broker to find it cheaper is another option. Using these two sub-ingredients (coal and spice) you can now craft away. Since you should be level 13 at this point I hope that you know about the tradeskills however, here is a short overview for this tutorial.
The tradeskills used for cooking are:
Awareness ---> Realization
Constant Heat ---> Slow Simmer
Seasoning ---> Spice Up
You can find these by clicking on the knowledge pane and dragging them to your quickbar menu numbered 1-10. I would advise this as it allows you to quickly counter setbacks you will come across when crafting. When a setback occurs an icon appears in you crafting panel and you should select the corresponding icon on the taskbar to counter this problem. If you do not you may lose either, health, power or progress on your item. Realization, Slow simmer and Spice up are all upgraded versions (Tier 2) of Awareness, Constant Heat and Seasoning (they also bear the same icons) and I would reccomend using these as they are much more efficient add more progress and also increase durability at the cost of more power.
With this you should be able to craft Baked Grouper, Crab Meat and Chichlid Steak. These all sell for 1s at the merchant trader. You only need to craft the 3rd class of each one to gain 1s, pristine offers no more in the amount of final product you receive or price. Savoury or bland of each offer only 37c for each. The crafting itself is not too difficult, and the Spice Macro floating about on Multiplayerstrategies can be adapted to create these three foods.
Doing the Math:
The important part, money. If you had time you crafted your own spice, all I can say is you've either got alot of time on your hands or your very dedicated!
To create one spice cost coal, salt and pepper each at 6c. Thus, total price you paid for spice was 18c. If you, like me, was a tiny bit lazy and bought the spice you paid 35c.
Therefore by crafting your own spice not only do you gain xp for doing so but you save yourself 17c in the process.
By harvesting the resources which are easy to find and quite abundant you have saved yourself alot of money and effort. Trying to find these resources on the broker at reasonable prices on my server is impossible, If you do though by all means go for it, I believe in the long run going out and fishing will save you money and increase profit.
Without Crafting your own Spice:
Coal, 6c. + Spice 36c. + Raw Material. = 42c
Profit per final crafted item sold = 58c
A stack of final crafted item sold's profit = 58c x 20 = 11s 60c
With Crafting your own Spice:
Coal 6c + Crafted Spice 18c + Raw Material = 24c
Profit per final crafter item sold = 66c
A stack of final crafted item sold's profit = 66c x 20 = 13s 20c
Conclusion:
So if you make 10 stacks which is feasible seeing as the resource is abundant you can earn yourself at minimum 1g 10s in profit. Granted its not a quick rich scheme but it is one that will not get changed by SOE. Bugs will come and go but when the do go this is just a strategy to fall back on. Using an adapted spice macro for the crafting is an interesting choice. It certainly takes the effort from the crafting side of things and would only require you to go gathering for a short amount of time to get a few stacks of each and then macro it over night waking up to a nice profit. For me it took about 10 minutes to gather 20 of each raw material, no-one went near the Dog Pond in the Commonlands but perhaps that is just my server
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