Making bows and arrows

[Serenya]

My alt is a ranger. For roleplaying reasons, she has always been a bowyer in any game I played, and I understand that for EQ2 that means woodworking. Is there a 'tier' at which it becomes particularly useful to be making ones own bow and arrows? I tend to try to keep crafting and adventuring in synch, but with another adventurer and two other crafters, I'm thinking I might let this slack for awhile, she is only 16... Thoughts?

[Zendaken]

You'll probably find that you want your crafter side ~10 levels higher. Remember, when you make items for a tier, they become usable at levels near or at the bottom of the tier, even if you cannot create them until you're higher in the tier as a crafter. If you want to use what you make (other than consumables), you'll want to be able to make use of the stuff you make as soon as you make the level to use it. (Ok, so I had too much fun "making" stuff. :D )

As always, remember that T1 goes by in hours, T2 can be only days (or less), while T3+ start taking more time.

[Serenya]

That's a good point. My current crafters are a carpenter (boxes) and a provisioner, which doesn't seem to have as big an impact, but I can see tiering would matter with the others. (My provisioner at 25 made her first level 30 food for example, and my 24 guardian is happily using level 20 food/drink). And yes, the fact that all 3 of my tradeskillers are craftsmen strikes me as weird too :rolleyes:

[kieroth_whiteleaf]

Echoing Zen:

The other thing to keep in mind is that if you want imbued items, you can only do them on the x9 levels (19,29,39,etc) even if the base item is creatable earlier.

So if you want absolute top quality gear for a level 20 char, your crafter would need to be 29.

Having said THAT:

I typically keep my levels roughly in sync, so I'm a little bit underpowered for a few levels and I rarely have serious issues. If I feel like I need it I work on my crafters a bit and bump them up a couple levels so I can get decent stuff.

I GENERALLY use pristine normals for most of my gear and supplement that with HQ'd items and SO FAR (I'm 43) I haven't had much problem in groups or solo. I know that better geared characters do significantly better than me (take on riskier mobs successfully) but I do alright as long as I don't fight heroics or things too many levels higher than me. In groups I still do the bulk of the dps (I'm a ranger) even with better-geared people in the group. My cleric repeatedly gets complimented on her abilities even though I'm using mostly basic crafted - Mana still holds out fine and spell damages and stuff are fine even with my *slightly* lower stats. I'm even using T2 food/drink instead of the T4 food I SHOULD be using and I VERY rarely need med time.

So if you keep your TS'er within a few levels of you you'll be fine.

SFG