I played a lot of open world PvE, and still do that often. I and sometimes a few regular buds make our own adventure, very much casual, so this advice is intended for new-ish players who just want to stretch out, not necessarily ready to dive into PvP or dungeons, and especially if you like to explore, craft, collect as part of your journey rather than leveling as a means to an end. This is just something to keep in mind, adapt it as you will or ignore it, there is no good or bad choice, just a few things I think are overlooked. This is to avoid as much grind as possible while attempting to make useful crafters. And the disclaimer, there are other ways, just consider this one way, and weigh it accordingly.
1) Lets assume this is your first toon that you really want to keep and you want to craft as you go and expect some benefit. Yes, you can do it, but you will outlevel if you try to craft everything, and the grind is steep so don’t be afraid to buy or use drops. So rule #1, pick something that helps you with either armor or weapons, and armor is probably better. An ele would not choose armorsmith or leatherworker, but tailor or potentially artificer or weaponsmith. You should be able to craft from drops, harvests and salvage and stay on-level between your gear and your craft skill, for that one discipline. I’ve done it with multiples and know it can be done. Do not choose chef or jeweler for this (they are ideal secondaries).
2) choose a secondary skill that does not leech too many materials from your primary. Chef is the hands down perfect default, and jeweler is good if your primary is neither armorsmith or weaponsmith because those will have to share ore. Do not choose one that requires sharing of fine materials, you won’t have enough to level in sync with your skill without buying materials wholesale.
3) Once you have a jeweler, consider chef as the only viable secondary. Or no real secondary at all. You won’t miss it thats for sure. And rerolling a hard fought crafter is a little easier to stomach than rerolling one that has two 400+ disciplines. My preference is to buy new slots when they are on sale, but frugal wallets may be tempted to combine crafts on fewer toons. Don’t do this until you have exhausted your other options, you may end up sharing too many things.
4) level this one up first, getting them to 400 in the primary before you move on. This is generally to keep you from having to share materials with another profession on another toon. Its not a hard and fast rule but it is very frustrating when you have two disciplines and two toons far above what they can craft for and both are stuck using drops or buys.
5) Try to keep in mind what your next toon will be, and what synergy you can leverage. If you think you’ll do a guardian after your warrior, then they both benefit from armorsmith, and both from weaponsmith very well. A good choice would be armorsmith/chef for the first and then weaponsmith/none for the second. That opens up a very good path for a third as a necro tailor/jeweler. Which opens a nice doorway to an elementalist artificer. Just for instance.
I have found it most rewarding if my current main is dedicated to a single discipline so that I have enough drops as I go to support that one discipline on level for my advancement. Try not to level simultaneous disciplines that compete too much for materials and you won’t encounter too much extra grind outside of your normal leveling. You can buy gear cheaper than you can buy the materials needed to level a discipline and craft the item you need. Once you get a good stable all this goes out the window of course, this is for early leveling.
Chef competes with nothing and goes well with anything.
Jeweler competes with armorsmith and weaponsmith, slightly less so with huntsman, and a little bit with artificer. Goes well with tailor, leatherworker. Don’t use it with chef, as your second crafter will need a non-competing secondary.
Tailor is the unique cloth user, while leatherworker is the main leather user, and huntsman really doesn’t need too much leather to compete. Likewise artificer really likes wood, but huntssman and weaponsmith also use a good portion.
Armorsmith, weaponsmith, huntsman and jeweler use substantial ore quantities. Huntsman, weaponsmith and artificer are coupled closely for wood use. These are combos to avoid early on.
And most importantly, everything share huge amounts of fine materials except for jeweler and chef. That is why those two shouldn’t be combined and make great secondaries. And also why you will fall into a frustrating early grind if you combine any of them with each other, even something like tailor/artificer. You’ll have the basic materials covered but will have to scramble for the fines.
Taking this into consideration you can probably come up with a good fit for your plans.
(edited by RollingBob.8502)