Guild Wars 2

I have been trying to level up weapon smithing but mothing I do seems to move the bar and there is almost nothing I am allowed to craft anyway. I have multiple stacks of full 250 materials in higher quality stuff, but am not allowed to use it because I can’t get my level to go up. This seems to happen in most of the crafting disciplines. It doesn’t help that some of the intermediate materials don’t have storage slots in the bank for some reason (dowels, bronze weapon parts, seasonings, etc.), so I have to craft them and then sell them because I don’t have room in my inventory for items that don’t have a function out in the world.

try following a few of the guides on this site (I always use it when levelling a craft) http://gw2crafts.net/

The colors are the same as for item quality, progressing from orange for recipes near your current level to yellow, green, blue, white, then gray for recipes that no longer grant any crafting experience.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crafting#Production

It sounds like you’re not making use of the Discovery tab.

The way crafting works is you use raw materials to make intermediate parts like dowels and weapon parts, then you go to the Discovery tab and combine them to make complete weapons, which you can either sell or use.

Discovery grants a lot more XP than simply making the default recipes, so it’s not surprising you’re struggling to level up if you’re not making use of it. (Although more importantly the crafts are fairly useless without it because you can’t make finished weapons.)

I never discover anything because I don’t have the room to stock up on any items that won’t go into the bank. It’s a catch 22. If I keep items to use for crafting, I can’t do anything else because I’ll have no inventory available. If it is only for crafting, it should have a bank slot.

Then discover a thing, salvage it for mats, and discover the next thing. Crafting XP is almost completely gained from discovery, if you won’t use that part of the system you aren’t going to skill up.

You don’t need to make lots of things and store them in the bank in order to discover new recipes.

Almost every weapon recipe has 3 parts: the 2 weapon parts and an Inscription (made from a dowel). So for example you could craft 1 Bronze Sword Hilt, 1 Bronze Sword Blade and 1 Mighty Green Inscription, then go to the Discovery tab and immediately combine them to make a Mighty Bronze Sword.

That you can either use, sell or salvage to get some of the materials back. You will have to make a lot of things you don’t need in order to level it up but you’ll have a much easier time doing it if you take a recipe through to completion instead of making the basic components and then scrapping them because you can’t store them in the bank.