Fastest and least wasteful way to level your Cannith Crafting (post U32)

[Zistra]

This method isn't likely for everyone. To maximize effectiveness requires spending some DDO points. Still, it can be done without. You'll just use a lot more Cannith Essences. This approach takes a lot of the pain and repetition out of leveling Cannith Crafting skill.

Note that while this post covers the same ground with largely the same approach as Tols' "Cannith crafting leveling plan" ( https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...-leveling-plan ), it's somewhat less technical and possibly slightly more approachable. Still, if you want additional details, check out that post as well.

Background:
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The best crafting XP comes from crafting the lowest-success-rate shards. A single shard can propel you through multiple levels when your crafting level is low. Even when your crafting level starts to get quite high, it only takes a few shards to level up if you take this approach. This system requires at most only three things: Crafting XP bonus elixirs (CXP pots), Crafting Success Boosters (CSB), and Cannith Essences. This method is specifically aimed to get your crafting skill high enough to craft any bound shard. Beyond that, it might require tweaking and/or additional resources.

First, maximize the crafting XP you get for each shard:
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Pick a 'Double crafting XP weekend'.
Use Crafting XP bonus elixirs (you won't need many: really only 1 or 2 if you do this at one sitting). You can buy CXP pots in the DDO Store (up to +100% CXP for 30min), but you can also earn one Greater Crafting XP Elixir (+75% CXP for 30min) each life by simply running the Cannith Crafting Tutorial in House K (It's not available in the House C crafting hall for some reason). 50 House C Favor will allow you to buy 10%/30min CXP pots, but unless you're under time pressure, I'd skip them. More XP per success means crafting fewer shards and using (far) fewer essences..

Second, maximize your crafting success:
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There's only one way to do this of which I'm aware: Crafting Success Boosters. You can buy 10% CSBs from the House C Patron if you have 50 House C Favor, but again, this isn't ideal. The Cannith Crafting Tutorial will allow you to select x5 25% CSBs as your reward in lieu of a CXP elixir. However, for best results, x25 35% CSBs from the DDO Store are ideal. Again, higher success rate = fewer attempts and less resource use. You can also use a combined approach. Use 25% success boosters at lower levels where the number of essences/shard are low and switch to 35% boosters as the amount of essences on the line increases.

Artificer crafting bonuses DO NOT help:
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From DDOWiki:
"Artificer Craft Mastery

This feat grants you a +1 bonus to all of your Crafting Levels for every second (even) Artificer level you posses.
Your crafting level is first calculated based on what your current experience total would put you at, then the Artificer bonus levels are added. This means you save dramatically on leveling costs and time, particularly at higher crafting levels."

All this does is treat you as though you have more CXP than you actually do, making it more expensive in materials because you're crafting higher-level shards. At the same success chance, you get the same CXP.

Methodology:
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1. Make sure it's a Double Crafting XP weekend.
2. Activate your preferred CXP pot.
3. Craft ONLY Minimum Level shards. This limits your required resources to the CXP and CSBs listed above and Cannith Essences (at least with regard to the crafting levels under consideration.. say up to 320 or so).
4. Craft the shard that has the lowest success chance. At any given Crafting Level, there'll be a ML shard with a 3% or 4% success chance. Successfully crafting this shard will give you a huge pile of CXP (details follow).
5. Put the highest value Crafting Success Booster you can acquire into the Booster slot. If (as recommended) you use a 35% Booster, this will raise a 3% success rate to 38%. On average, you'll craft a shard every third try (ballpark). If you use a 25% booster, your success rate will be 28% and you'll use considerably more Cannith Essences. If not spending DDO Points is sufficiently important to you, this may be preferred.
6. IMPORTANT: Between shards, close and re-open the shard workshop window. This will refresh the listed success rates. They do not update themselves when you gain one (or more) crafting levels.
7. Repeat until you run out of boosters or essences, or attain the highest crafting level supported by this approach (somewhere between 320-340).

Results:
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Given a double crafting XP weekend and a decent CXP elixir, each shard should net you around 3K CXP. (This is based on my memory of having done this some while ago and idr what CXP elixir I was using.. probably the +75%).
A crafting level around 300-310 will allow you to successfully craft pretty much anything for your own toons (i.e. every bound shard). You'll know your crafting level is high enough when you can craft ML34 shards at a decent success rate.
This will require approximately 350K-400K CXP total, or about 120-130 successful shards crafted (out of around 300-400 attempts if you're using 35% Crafting Success Boosters; if you're using 25% Boosters, it would be somewhat more. It will also use up a ton of essences (though fewer than other methods). I'd estimate you'll probably use in the neighborhood of 60K-100K Cannith Essences. Regrettably, idr how many I used, and my estimate is based on an average of around 200-250/shard. In reality, a bound ML shard uses MLx10 essences. However, since at the lower levels it takes fewer shards to level, the average number of essences/shard will be on the high side.

Using this method, I leveled from Crafting Level 30 to 326 in a single day on one of my toons. Unless you intend to craft items for sale or for friends, this crafting level is all you'll ever require (at least unless/until they change the system). As a bonus, the only side-effect produced will be a series of ML shards, of which the majority will tend to be of higher levels (at lower levels, one shard may gain you more than one crafting level whereas at higher levels, more than one shard will need to be crafted per level). At most you'll have 34 stacks of shards of various MLs, which means not much storage wasted. And ML shards are inherently useful, so there's unlikely to be a need to deconstruct them for 10% of the essences used to craft them. Simply save until needed.

[Tilomere]

You can also just decon your way to around 320 crafting to make anything for yourself, and sell 99% of the essences and keep 1% for yourself to craft with. Just decon everything you don't use. Don't sell anything to a vendor or broker.

Each stack of essences is worth 80-100 astral shards or 3 million gold, or about the same amount as a meteoric star ruby. Instead of crafting 15 stacks away, you can instead sell them for 1200 astral shards, or 45 million gold.

[Zistra]

You can also just decon your way to around 320 crafting to make anything for yourself, and sell 99% of the essences and keep 1% for yourself to craft with. Just decon everything you don't use. Don't sell anything to a vendor or broker.

Each stack of essences is worth 80-100 astral shards or 3 million gold, or about the same amount as a meteoric star ruby. Instead of crafting 15 stacks away, you can instead sell them for 1200 astral shards, or 45 million gold.

That'd be a long-term approach. You get about 5 CXP per item deconned. And it takes over 414K CXP to reach crafting level 320. That would require deconstructing almost 83,000 items. How many lives does that take? And how much time out of your playing, to consistently stop by the Item Deconstruction Crafting Station? If you're running with a fast-paced group, sometimes it's hard to find the time to simply sell and repair, let alone decon items.

All of which amounts to: Your suggestion has merit, but would be extremely long-term and grindy. Nice to have all options considered, though. It's probably ideal for some (especially F2P).

And, of course, combined approaches are almost inevitable. In order to collect the essences to use my approach, you already have to decon a huge number of items (unless you're willing and able to simply buy the essences off the AH or DDO Store). Ballpark, I'd guess you get about an average (over a lifetime) of about 15 essences per decon (It runs fairly close to 1 per ML of the item, if my memory is accurate). That means deconning should give you about 3x as many essences as CXP. By the time you've collected 60K essences, you'd have 20K CXP from the deconning, which would put you somewhere in the vicinity of crafting level 140. Collecting 100K essences would bring your crafting level up to 150-160. (These are all ballpark numbers, obviously.)

If you spend a lot of time playing at or near cap, the ratio of CXP to essences would be more like 1:6, which would put your crafting level some 20 levels lower in each case.

In any event, by the time you collected enough essences by deconning to use my approach, you'd be starting at crafting level 120-160 instead of the 30 where I started (I underestimated how many essences I'd require and bought a lot in the process). It won't change the process much, though. L140 is only about 23K more CXP than L30. Like many an XP progression, the curve steepens at higher levels.

[Firebreed]

Pick a 'Double crafting XP weekend'.

Speaking of which:

When was the last time this happened?
How many times per year does it happen on average? Because I've been waiting for it to happen for ages (I know I missed it once).
Any idea when it'll happen again? (rough estimate, next month, next 6 months, next year etc)
Lastly, where would one be notified of it being active? Only the DDO Chronicle?

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

[Svanlaug]

I second Firebreed's question … how often do Double XP crafting weekends happen?

And another question … it says in the DDO store that Boosters will not let you craft something with less than a 50% success rate, and there are no elixirs for sale, which would seem to throw a wrench in this plan as it is laid out. Was this a restriction added by the Devs after the original post, or is there another way to acquire elixirs? And given this...

Has anyone done the math to figure out the sweet spot for maximizing Crafting XP, i.e. what success rate shards to craft with and without boosters?

[Mercureal]

Speaking of which:

When was the last time this happened?
How many times per year does it happen on average? Because I've been waiting for it to happen for ages (I know I missed it once).
Any idea when it'll happen again? (rough estimate, next month, next 6 months, next year etc)
Lastly, where would one be notified of it being active? Only the DDO Chronicle?

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

A quick domain search of the DDO Chronicle site shows crafting bonus days in February, May, July and October of last year.

http://tiny.cc/frjvjz