Guild Wars 2

Hi, I just got GW2 today, I became a tailor and artificer on my Elementalist. Should I be leveling them? Will I be fine without them? They kinda confuse me, the black lion trading thing confuses me too lol.

Crafting offers some excellent XP and you can put on levels when crafting items/discovery.

Is it “necessary”? No, it’s optional but can be worthwhile if you master it and also helpful for gearing up any leveling alts and making some coin on the TP.

The Trading Post is the Auction House, not to be confused with the Black Lion Trader tab which is the Gem Store/Cash Shop.

I’ll reserve comment on the UI for the TP…there’s plenty of irritation left in its design elements even for veteran players.

Cooking is useful. Many of the ingredients are bought with karma and in spite of the NPC warning you to be sure if you want to try it, it can be the cheapest one to get to 400.

Unless you enjoy crafting or want to do it for the experience, then no, I don’t recommend it while leveling. You can buy gear cheap on the trading post while leveling and most level 80 gear can be bought for far cheaper than what it would cost you to level that crafting profession and then make the gear

The only real use imo is to craft ascended weapons and armor, which many people don’t bother with and can’t be used before level 80 anyway.

One of the only benefits I can think of that hasn’t been mentioned is it can get you some more achievement points, which really only matter for achievement chests. Don’t think you get any until you hit at least 400 in a crafting discipline though, and more at 500 (which can take a bit) for everything but jeweler and cook, which still max at 400.

It is a good idea to level crafting at least a bit because it gets you useful experience and items (although more for alts because it’s hard to keep up with your first characters level) and later on there are some items (including ascended gear, the highest tier) which require crafting.

It’s confusing at first but you’ll get the hang of it. For armor and weapons the basic system is:
Use fine materials to make an upgrade (inscription or insignia), make the two basic pieces of the item (e.g. focus core and focus casing) then use the Discovery tab to combine them.
Discovering new recipes gets you more experience than re-making ones you’ve already discovered.

Kuldebar.1897:

The Trading Post is the Auction House, not to be confused with the Black Lion Trader tab which is the Gem Store/Cash Shop.

For people who never played WoW calling it an ‘auction house’ could be even more confusing, because the trades aren’t auctions.

When I was new I kept thinking I must have missed a tab or an NPC or something that let you actually auction off items. Until someone in my guild finally explained that it’s just a hold-over from a game I’d never played.