Here’s a pretty simple and basic guide about crafting and gathering in Warhammer Online.
Note: This Guide was created by Nick of Warhammer Forums.
Nick’s Warhammer Simple Guide to Crafting and Gathering
You can find much more in-depth and complex analysis in each gathering/crafting skill’s separate subforum, the point of this post is to give new players a basic introduction to the crafting system.
So, first of all, there is a clear and separate distinction between Gathering skills and Crafting skills. Gathering skills get you resources, which you then channel through your Crafting skill in order to make stuff. The skills are:
Apothecary (Craft): This Crafting skill uses resources you gain through Butchering or Cultivation to make potions and dyes.
Talisman Making (Craft): This crafting skill uses resources you gain through Scavenging or Salvaging to make… You guessed it, Talismans.
Cultivation (Gathering): You plant seeds to turn into ingredients for potions.
Butchering (Gathering): You skin dead beast mobs to make ingredients for potions.
Scavenging (Gathering): You rifle through dead humanoid mobs’ pockets for Talisman ingredients.
Salvaging (Gathering): You break down magic items for Talisman ingredients.
You can have one Gathering and one Crafting skill. Not two Crafts, not two Gatherings.
Crafting and Gathering do not use your character stats in any way, shape, or form, so unlike some other games there’s no “ideal” craft for each class. Sorcerers do Magical Salvaging just as well as dumb Choppas, in other words. So you can give literally any character literally any combination of Gathering and Crafting skills. Do note, however, that while ther’s no ideal craft for each class, the Gathering skills do have ideal Crafts to which they’re linked. Salvaging and Scavenging do nothing for you if you’re an Apothecary, and Butchering and Cultivation do nothing to produce Talismans.
Now, all that said, while there are no optimal gathering/crafts, there are still some good ideas. My healer is a Salvager because people always need healers for city Dungeons, so when I run BB/BW on him I can break down all those useless BoP drops we get. My Sorceress is a Scavenger because she can AoE lots of mobs at once. My Witch Elf gets lots of killing blows, so Scavenging seems like a good idea for her, but if I’m stopping to loot bodies in the middle of a fight, my priorities are all wrong… So she’s a Cultivator because I can do that almost reflexively at this point. Tanks can do pretty much whatever they want, since they’re desirable for dungeon pugs and can handle multiple mobs at once for Butchering/Scavenging.
Now to the nitty gritty:
Gathering Skills
Butchering: You pick up Butchering by talking to the NPC with “Butcher” under their name in Chapter 2’s camp. If you want to change later on, there’s a trainer in your capital, or you can always fly back to that Chapter. When you kill a Beast mob you will see flies over the corpse and can right click to interact with it. After a couple seconds of a squelchy sound, you’ll be given one or more items. Zoic Cores are stabilizers (see Apothecary) while just about everything else is a main ingredient. Butchering drops are dependent upon the type of mob being butchered, so all wolves will drop the same general items, for example. There’s a healthy degree of overlap in items that drop in order to ensure a healthy stream of stuff. Each mob can be butchered multiple times (twice for regular mobs, three times for champions, and four times for heroes) and will give random stuff each time. You may also occasionally find pigments on corpses (They’ll be the green-named drops with the Apothecary: 1 skill requirement) which you can turn into dyes via Apothecary, the process of which is described with that skill. Rank up Butchering by killing higher level mobs. A good rule of thumb is that if you multiply a mob’s level by 5, you can get to that level of Butchering by farming those mobs. It’s not a hard and fast rule (I’ve gotten to 40 off of level 5 mobs, for example) it’s a good general indicator.
Cultivation: You get Cultivation by talking to the NPC with “Cultivator” under their name in the same warcamp as all the other craft skills. From that same NPC (And other Merchants in other camps thorughout the game) you can buy level 1 seeds amd level 1 soil, nutrients, and water. Cultivation makes ingredients for Apothecary, same as Butchering, and there’s a large degree of overlap between the two. Except for certain Liniments, anything you can make with Cultivation you can make with Butchering. Conversely, Butchering has a few items that are unique to that craft (Damage absorption potions, Elemental resist potions, and certain other Liniments). What makes Cultivation more popular is that it is self-sufficient. When you plant a seed it goes through several stages that are vastly more simple than they look and can safely be ignored. Let me emphasize that: You do not need to use soil, nutrients, or water at this point. You can, and doing so will shorten the planting time while increasing the chances of better ingredients, but you don’t have to in the least. If you simply plant your seed and wait for the full germination (30 seconds for a level 1 seed on up to 3 minutes for a level 200 seed) you can harvest the results, which usually grants two Ingredient items. You can then Control+Right click those Ingredient items (“Reaping”) to produce a resin (Stabilizer) and another seed, all of the same level. So you can very easily turn a single seed into dozens of seeds. There is a small chance of a Critical Failure, in which case you harvest a Wilted Wild Weed that has no use outside vendor trash and lose your seed. There is also a chance of a Critical Success, which will give three Ingredients instead of two. Next, there’s a small chance of a Special Moment, which gives three Ingredients instead of two, as well as an ingredient of the next tier and a pigment. If you get a Special Moment with a level 1 seed, for example, it will produce three level 1 plants, one level 25 plant, and a pigment. If you just keep planting, harvesting, and reaping, eventually you will rank up Cultivation while at the same time getting the seeds needed to further rank it up. When you eventually reach Cultivation rank 200, you might start to notice certain blue-named seeds dropping off dungeon bosses, PQ heroes, and BO heroes. These are Liniment seeds, which are special in that when planted they will return to your inventory infinitely, even if they’re a critical failure. Liniments make special potions, which are described in the Apothecary bit. Whenever you plant a seed of a level up to 50 less than your current level, there is a chance you will level up. If you are at level 60, for example, you will potentially reach 61 by planting either a 50 or a 25 seed, but cannot go further using 1 seeds. The odds are better the higher level you use, so try and use the best at any given time.
Scavenging: Pick up Scavenging by talking to the NPC with “Scavenger” under their name in the same warcamp. It functions exactly like Butchering with two key exceptions: 1) You can only Scavenge a corpse one time, and 2) You Scavenge humanoid mobs. A video at release explained the difference as, “If it’s smart enough to have pockets, you Scavenge it. If it’s an animal without pants, you Butcher it.” This includes other players, which makes it a fairly popular Gathering skill. Instead of Apothecary ingredients, you receive Fragments, Gold Dust and Curios (Talisman Making ingredients) through Scavenging. The use of these items is explained below with Talisman Making. Leveling Scavenging is the same process as Butchering.
Salvaging: Pick up Salvaging by talking to the NPC with “Salvager” under their name (I swear there’s a reason I keep saying this, just bear with me) in the same warcamp. Salvaging breaks a magic item (one with a name that’s any color but white or gray) in your inventory down into a Fragment, a Gold Dust, and a Magic Essence. These items are then turned into Talismans with Talisman Making. When you select an item to break down you will be given a prompt asking which stat you want to extract, this determines the type of Fragment you get. If you pick Strength, then you get a Strength Fragment, Weaponskill a Weaponskill Fragment, and so on. The color of the Fragment will normally be one step below the item you’re Salvaging (so purple items give blue Fragments, blue items give green Fragments, and green items give white Fragments), think of this as the item degrading as you break it down. If you hover your mouse over an item before selecting it for Salvage you will notice a percentage ranging from 0% (Impossible) to 100% (Trivial), this is the chance of success on the Salvage. If you fail this test, you only get dust and essence, no fragment. Salvaging anything with a rate below 90% will potentially raise your level.
Crafting Skills
Apothecary: Apothecary creates consumable potions that give stat buffs or apply weird stat debuffs to your opponent (such as snares or DoTs). To create a potion you need a container (vials, which can be bought from merchants or won in PQs), a Main Ingredient (gotten from either Cultivation or Butchering), and up to three Ingredients (also Butchering or Cultivation). The better the ingredients you have, the better the resulting potion will be, but also the higher required Apothecary skill you’ll need. The three Ingredients cause a little confusion at first, but to put it simply, you need to stabilize your potion before it can be made. This is done by adding Resins (from Cultivation) or Zoic Gores (from Butchering) into the slots until the little sentence at the bottom says “This potion is stable” in friendly green letters. Leveling up Apothecary functions along the same lines as Cultivation–If you use a Main Ingredient up to 50 levels beneath your skill level, there is a chance you’ll increase your level. You may also create dyes with Apothecary with which to color your armor. Dye-making cannot raise your Apothecary level. To make a Dye, use a Mortar and Pestal as your container, add the pigment, then add Alum Root Extract and bre the potion. Mortars and Extracts can be bought at all merchants.
Talisman Making: Talismans are items that can be added to certain items (ones with Talisman slots at the bottom of their tooltip) to give that item a permanent stat boost. Where a potion will only last for a certain amount of time before it’s gone, most Talismans provide this boost for as long as you equip the item. (Certain powerful talismans have a lifespan, but don’t concern yourself with that at this point…) To create a Talisman you need two things: A container (a Box which can be bought from Merchants or won in PQs) and a Fragment. The type of the Fragment will determine what stat the resulting Talisman will boost (so Strength Fragments will create Strength Talismans), and the level and color will determine how much that stat is boosted. In increasing order of strength, the colors are white, green, blue, and purple. That is to say that a level 25 blue Fragment will create a Talisman that is stronger than a level 25 green or white talisman, all other things being equal. What other things? Well, in addition to the required Fragment and Box, you may optionally add one Gold Dust, one Curio, and one Magical Essence. Adding any of these will further increase the power of the talisman, adding all three will greatly increase the power. The effect of these three items is solely dependent upon their level, so a level 100 gold dust is equal in power to a level 100 curio or essence. If you recall, Essences are exclusive to Salvaging and Curios are exclusive to Scavenging. This is what drives the economy as players buy the missing ingredient from one another off the auction house (or simply create an alt to gather that ingredient for themself).
That’s basically it. There are more complicated bits that give the system some more depth, but you can figure those out as you go along. The crafting boards on this fora are full of in-depth analysis and formulae (especially for Talisman Making), but that’s all advanced stuff… If you’re a brand new player to the game, or even just an existing player who never cared all that much, then you don’t need to know that yet. You need to know that Talismans are made through either Scavenging or Salvaging before you know how much more important a Fragment’s color is compared to all that other stuff.
Related posts:
- Warhammer Online Guide to Cultivation
- Cabal Online Basic Crafting Guide
- Sword of the New World Crafting System – Item Manufacture Guide
- Cabal Online Guide – Professional Crafting Martial Set
- Warhammer Online General Leveling Guide
Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 5:59 amand is filed under Warhammer Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Disclaimer
I do not claim ownership to the videos,images and some information. Please refer to the source links provided. Please think twice when submitting comments. I appreciate well thought out comments and not some profanity laced garbage that doesn't make any sense.
The guides posted are for reference only. If you feel that you have a much better guide, feel free to send your own guide (in english) and I'll be sure to post it on the site with full credit.
Send guides to
Leave a Reply
