Guild Wars 2

My first character is an Engineer.

I’m guessing I could go the gear route of Huntsman/Leatherworker or go the accessory/buff route Jeweler/Chef.

Any advice?

Thanks

Unless you know you’re going to make multiple characters it’s best to choose ones that are useful for your engineer.

Chef is useful for everyone because everyone needs food.
Jeweller is also universal, but less useful since they introduced ascended jewellery which is easy to get with laurels and can’t be crafted.

Leatherworker is a solid choice – this will enable you to make medium armor, and in particular (once you reach the max level) ascended armor which is extremely hard to get any other way.
Huntsman is also a good choice, they can make pistols, rifles and harpoon guns, 3/4 weapons the engineer can use.

Weaponsmith is probably not bothering with, the only thing they make which an engineer can use is shields.
Armorsmith, Tailor and Artificer are completely worthless to an engineer.

Alternatively if you think you’re going to make at least 4 characters just pick any 2 crafting professions on each, everything they make is either account bound or freely tradable so swapping it between characters isn’t a problem.

Great, thanks Danikat. I will probably craft on 4 characters eventually but I think I’ll start with LW/HM to start.

Thanks again.

Its also inadvisable to start crafting until you have a stock pile of basic and fine mats, and a hand full of crafting boosters (usually obtained through leveling or map completion).

The reasoning here is that crafting all possible items in a given tier, using only the trained recipes and discovery, will still leave you short 25% of the next tier. This is a major problem for unfamiliar crafters, as that section of the tier uses a larger amount of the fine mats, and can get very expensive if not planned ahead of time.

This problem is compounded by the massive cost of Tier 2, 3, 4 cloth, which is required in all Armor crafting disciples. Weapon crafting disciplines are notably easier to deal with, as wood and metal can be collected in level relevant areas.

Jeweler can be personally lucrative since it can generate trinkets for your characters. However, ascended trinkets can be obtained via laurels and guild commendations, and give significantly more stats……. Jeweler for the most part is currently only useful for some rare stat combinations, and only up to exotic. But the metal and jewels they use are in a abundance; so there is no reason not max it, as it regularly becomes involved with seasonal event crafting.

Cooking is discouraged unless you have a large amount of ingredients stocked up in the bank, have enough backpack or bank space, and at least 2-3 hours to do it in one go. The problem with Cooking is that it generates a LOT of intermediate ingredients that can’t be easily stored long term. This is why no one recommends incremental cooking leveling, as you’d end up with 2 tabs of just dough balls, spice bags, frosting, etc while you’re trying to gather more base ingredients to continue discovery.

For got to mention about armor and weapons……. you can bet both of these very easily via Dungeon tokens for additional cost, other then the effort of 20 “daily dungeon” paths (most people run 2 paths a day). For common stats exotics, you can’t get any cheaper then these….

Huntsman & leatherworker sound good to start since you’ll benefit from them. I usually try to keep 2 active ones where the base mat’s don’t interfere with each other too much. Like i don’t want 2 crafting disciplines that both use a lot of ori/ancient wood, or else you’ll be going through your stock very quickly and hit a standstill on both of them.