Life skills tier list discussion

[red gale]

Hello all!

I think it would be fun and neat to hold some civil discussion on what we feel are the best and worst life skills! With stamina being limited, it can be valuable to consider and know what skills should get that precious resource and which skills should be put off.

I’ll start by giving a brief comprehensive list and explaining how I feel the tiers should be ordered, and I welcome any and all civil discussion on how it might be changed. Keep in mind this is assuming that you are playing properly and not, say, duping things for luno and in a hyperinflated and unreasonable market.

Tier 1 - Economically and objectively practical

This tier is basically things that both sell well and provide ample personal use cases. These tend to have lower investment ceilings and have materials that are easy to gather with minimal or no effort.

Tier 2 - Practical and prioritized

This tier is things that either don’t sell and are purely personal use or that serve a function of necessity for the playerbase (I.e. gathering).

Tier 3 - Impractical picks

This tier is more or less just things that really don’t add much to the overall experience outside of one or two niche things, and is likely sparsely populated.

For tier 1, I feel like Culinary, Smelting, and Gemcutting are the big 3. They all provide ample benefits to investing points into and all provide high-selling goods that carry direct tangible benefits to the player as well. What’s more is they tend to be mastery-light, that is to say that you can generally get a large amount of benefit from a smaller point investment by focusing on specifically what you yourself use.

Tier 2, I would say probably mining and herbing are easy picks as without scripting they take at least some effort to gather (unlike culinary which you can afk auto farm materials for). Weaving and to some extent artistry are here too as they can provide valuable weapon and armor crafting but outside of dyes and furniture they don’t give much else.

Tier 3 I would say everything else not listed above goes. Alchemy gets my special mention as maybe possibly being tier 2 but I’ll be honest my knowledge on it outside of making the class-skill potions is meager.

If there’s any thoughts here on why something should be higher or lower, don’t hesitate to say so! With the weekly quests giving big chunks of experience, a lot of the cross-profession requirements are easier to meet so I feel like we can judge them mostly on their own merits of what they’re providing.

[celest hamlet]

I'd put alchemy in tier 1,5-2.
The amount of dmg increase is substantial, th materials are a bit harder to get though

[balmy yarrow]

Gemcrafting is definitely really nice. But I think it's tough if you're gathering all the materials yourself. Another downside for the gems is that for your own benefits, it's almost a one and done situation. The gem hype might die out once most people have it, but who knows what direction this game is headed so early on. Maybe there will be enough new players to keep selling it. Plus of course the future level gems too

Culinary and Alchemy are good because people will constantly use these items, especially once bosses and dungeons get harder later on in the game. And if they added revive crafting, that'd be a biiig lumo income

Botany, might be good for you if you're doing Culinary or Alchemy things. Shop constantly gets sold out, probably because of the Guild Cargo. So if you ever have spare items from your Culinary or Alchemy, you can just sell it. As OP said, easy money. Imo this and Mineralogy might be less effort than everything else even without scripts. Gemcrafting, Culinary, Alchemy, you need to gather items and use lots of Focus to craft things or use lumo to buy stuff and profit off of. So you have to stalk the Trading Center hard, which is kind of difficult. I stalk the Trading Center pretty frequently by just spam clicking in and out of it, and whenever something low gets put on, it's gone in an instant. Takes longer to get good deals than just gather raw materials and dump in Trading Center. Gemology is good too, but I think it has a cap on how much you can get per day ?? I could be wrong, but I swear it stopped giving me gems after a while

Mineralogy, as I said above, easy to do, not sure how well it sells. But the Mineralogy section just got cleared pretty much. Likely because we now need Mech Shards for gear and that's craftable in Smelting. Mineralogy and Smelting might get really nice later on

And somehow, i forgot OP included power to tiers 😵 So that's mostly just the lumo side to it xD But hey, high price for a reason i hope 😂

I think any skills can be really good to have because a lot of them are connected to each other through crafting. It really depends on your own playstyle. If you choose Gemology, doesn't make sense to not have Gemcrafting. If you have Smelting, you might want Artisanry and/or Mineralogy. Because all of this can benefit your growth or damage greatly as well as your wallet. Except Weaving, outputs really just...yeah. Get your furniture grind on I guess 😅

[red gale]

I agree on a lot of that, but with weekly upgrades I could see an argument where stuff like smelting doesn’t really get your limited stamina points because you’re almost always going to net more benefit just doing the weekly and leveling that way, but the things you want from it generally are available with next to no real investment needed. Same with Cooking and gems.

Meanwhile (presuming you can buy some materials like from the exchange vendors), a lot of the crafting professions can be more or less funneled. Beyond some choice examples, basically anything you’d want to craft you can just have the materials for from NPCs.

Alchemy can maybe go higher but I’m remiss to put it above 2 personally. You can get a lot of the shards and fragments from AFK farming but it’s not as universal of a benefit as cooking has where most of the routes you get from point investment lead to generally useful things. It feels too precise for me, though once the content gets harder and master opens up I could see it growing to tier 1

Like for the items in tier 2, most of what you can spend focus on to make are either not going to be economically strong but will have personal use cases, or will just not be worth the investment of points/energy for how much you can get for it (I.e. Dyes. Easy to sell, but too costly to justify making or investing the point into beyond personal use cases)