Lvling a alt
Alright if you want to power level with crafting have about 80 gold and go to gw2crafts.net
Of course, you’ll need to grind the gold first. Or buy Gems to convert to gold.
Not my idea of a shortcut.
I found out it’s possible to level really fast in WvW, which made the whole exercise fun instead of a pain.
Why would you wanna powerlevel to begin with?
That’s half the fun and it gives you plenty of time to learn it and try different things before you finally commit with stats and weapon combination.
You can gain about 10 levels per tradeskill that you max out. It also helps to have a crafting booster from the gem store. Any character can learn all 8 skills, you just have to drop one to learn a new one (you keep the skill level though, and you can change back at a cost). Theoretically you could make it to 80 or very close just by crafting, but each skill to max does cost about 10 gold on average.
Honestly I enjoy leveling by meta events and bosses vs crafting, but I turn to it when I hit some boring levels or get tired of zones. With the upcoming updates and crafting legendary precursors/ascended weapons and armor it wouldn’t hurt to get your main crafting professions to maximum anyway (preferred weapon crafting skill + armor type crafting skill).
In my opinion lvling through crafting is much more practical when your lvling alts, and not your first maybe even second character.