Guild Wars 2

I just picked up the game last week and I am still picking my “main.” Before I get too invested I wanted to know if in general it is more efficient/cost effective to level all crafts on one character or to spread them out between alts so I don’t have to always swap crafts. Is swapping expensive? Is there a perk to doing them all on one character? Downside? Thanks for any help!!

Taking on a new discipline is free, switching to one you’ve started costs 10 copper per level and switching to one you’ve gotten to 400 costs 40 silver. (I assume the same applies after 400 for the 3 that have been recently upgraded, so switching to one at 500 will cost 50 silver.) But other than that you can switch as many times as you want and there are no consequences. You won’t loose progress in ones you swap out or anything like that.

So the upside to spreading them out is that it’s cheaper. The upside to having them all on one is that you don’t need to swap characters and get that character to a crafting station every time you want to make something. You could even have a crafting alt who just stays at the stations.

Personally I spread them out just because I made 4 characters when I started so it seemed logical to give each 2 disciplines.

On a related note the armor and weapon crafting disciplines use a lot of the same materials so its probably easier to focus on just one at a time, plus cooking and/or jewellery making,

It makes no difference. Swapping takes 2 lines of dialog with a master crafter. Your material bank is account-wide, as is your wallet (so you no longer have to worry about moving money around from character to character if you’re buying/selling crafted stuff).

I did them all on one because I just powered through them in a couple days. You can spread them out if you want to use the experience to level several different characters, perhaps. I like having them all in one though because it’s easy just to park him in Lion’s Arch and swap to him when I want to do something. Also, if I need to accumulate a lot of extra material (either stuff that’s not considered a collectible for crafting or stuff above and beyond the 250 item limit from the collection tab) it’s nice to just keep them on one character.

It’s entirely up to you. Recognize that taking a craft to 400 is quite expensive (and taking weapon/huntsman/artificer to 500 is ridiculous) so you won’t want to do it more than once per craft. Taking them to 50 or 100 on multiple characters though isn’t that big a deal, and is a nice little boost of experience for lower level characters.

I spread it out because of the xp gains, because I don’t like switching, and because I wanted crafts that made items the individual character could use.

I have however just thought of one big concern with this for someone more likely than myself to want to reroll characters: you’ll lose all that crafting skill if you delete the character with it. So making one craftsman is more efficient character-slot-wise.

Thank you for all the excellent answers.

I think I’ll focus on one character, but still do low level crafting for the xp on everyone. The rerolling issue is a very good point. I am testing out all the professions to try to avoid deleting high levels but you never know. Right now 40 or 50 silver seems like a lot when I only have about 3 gold, but I imagine at 80 it’s not so much.

Considering it will cost you like 60 gold to get your crafts to 400 if you do them all (and possibly another 100+ to get to 500 for even a single weapon profession), yeah 40-50 silver is nothing.

If you want the biggest bang for your buck. Leveling a crafting profession from 1-400 grants you roughly 10 levels worth of exp. So it’s advantageous to only level 2 professions per character so you can get the skill points per level AND the levels themselves.

Just a small correction; with the latest updates crafting from 1-400 only gains you about 8 levels of xp, with crafting from 400-500 yielding the last 2 levels, for 10 levels total per profession, at least for those crafting professions that go up to 500 at the moment.