Right click on each of your buffs to find out what they do. The information window will tell
you what events are countered by each buff, what the buff does, and what it costs to use it
(I have also included this information for you in a table in the Appendices section). You will
see that you have one which increases your progress but lowers your durability, one that
increases progress at the expense of power, and a third that increases your progress but
lowers your success chance slightly.
This is where the other use of your countering buffs comes in. You don’t need to wait until
an event occurs to use these skills – you may use them any time you like, to increase your
chances of successfully completing an item. It is extremely worthwhile to learn and
remember as soon as you can exactly what each of them does because using these skills
correctly will make a big difference in your success as a crafter.

Open up your knowledge book and click the Tradeskills button. You’ll bring up several
pages of skills. These are what you counter crafting events with. When you see an icon
appear in your crafting window, you must click on the corresponding icon from your
knowledge book to counter the event. There are different sets of icons for each tradeskill.
When working with Alchemy, you will use the icons that use the Chemistry technique.
You can hold your mouse over each icon to find out which technique it uses.
You must use these specific buffs to counter Alchemy events, but they also have another
use apart from countering.

Inside the crafting instance (any of them will do) you can speak to the quest NPC to get
started on the “Choosing a Profession” series of crafting quests. If you no longer have the
quest active (or you didn’t get the quest starter), you can buy a note from the quest NPC
that will give you the quest when you examine it.
There are eight quests in the series, one for each crafting class. This is my favorite way
of leveling an artisan crafter, as you get a lot of nice rewards out of the series –
experience for making the items and for completing each quest, a few copper for each
quest completed, a free copy of each of the Artisan Essentials recipe books, a ten slot
backpack which holds only harvested items, and a tunic which gives a small bonus to all
the crafting skills. These quests are very easy, and if you gather all the resources you
need before you start, you’ll complete all the quests very quickly as well. With that in mind,
the following list tells you exactly what you need to complete all the quests in the series.
Harvested Items Purchased Items
Frog Leg (2) Dough (1)
Leaded Loam (1) Kindling (1)
Malachite (1) Candle (1)
Lead Cluster (5) Incense (5)
Tin Cluster (7) Filament (5)
Elm (6) Sandpaper (6)
Rawhide Leather (6) Coal (9)
Roots (9)
For each item, you’ll need to use a different set of buffs to counter events with. Don’t
worry too much if you don’t get pristine on these, as any quality item will advance the
quest (but you will get more experience for pristine quality items).

While you are crafting, you’ll notice various icons appearing at the bottom of your crafting
window. These happen fairly often and are called crafting events. When they occur, you
have a chance to counter them. Successfully countering events can increase your
crafting progress or durability, and sometimes both. If you are not successful at
countering, your item may lose durability or progress, or both. In addition you may take a
small amount of physical damage.
There are also three rare crafting events, with special outcomes. These occur
infrequently, and give you extra rewards you when you successfully counter them.
Alchemist’s Insight is an uncommon event that grants you a bonus to durability and
progress for the item you are working on, and gives you a short duration buff that
significantly increases your Chemistry skill. Complete Efficiency is a rare event that
automatically finishes your item to the highest possible quality level when you successfully
counter. In addition, your finished item will not use up any components. The rarest event,
Favor of Innovation, automatically finishes the item you are working on to the highest
possible quality level, and in addition grants you a rare harvest for the level range and skill
you are working in. When you are working with Alchemy, the rare harvest given is
precious metal.

If your main goal is to level as quickly as possible and you’re not worried too much about
the expense, then it’s more efficient to concentrate on making the most difficult combines
in each level, and use your buffs as often as possible to try and get pristine items for the
experience bonus. It’s difficult to achieve pristine quality at this stage, since you don’t
have the skills to buff durability. When you do manage to make a pristine item, move onto
making a different item. It is possible to get to level nine in less than an hour if you have
enough resources on hand and concentrate on trying to make pristine versions of recipes
that con even or higher.

You may wish to try crafting bags or boxes to increase your carry and storage capacity.
For new players it’s a good way of killing a few birds with one stone, as you will gain
experience, make some useful items, and save yourself some money all at the same time.
The recipe for the bags you’re able to make is in the Artisan Essentials Volume 6.
At level 5 you will have a recipe to make elm strongboxes – these are very heavy but have
more carrying capacity than the backpacks. These are also worthwhile to make as they
make good storage containers for your bank and house vault.
As a crafter you are going to need as much inventory, bank, and vault space as you can
get so if you find you’re short on money, making these items yourself out of the things you
harvest is an economical way to level.
Don’t forget that if you decide to try your hand at making food, bags, or boxes, you’ll need
to organize your buff icons for the relevant skills as they use buffs which are different from
those used for Alchemy.

Until level 10 your experience will flow fairly rapidly and although in later levels it will be
much more efficient to make as many different recipes as possible, at this point it’s a good
idea to make a few useful items several times rather than trying to maximize experience.
Making food and drink is a good way to get through a few levels, as you will not get new
food and drink recipes once you level past nine, and buying crafted drink can be
expensive for new players.
Using good drink is vital while crafting as your ability to counter and buff effectively is
partially dependant on your power regeneration.

The island is a good place to learn the basics of crafting, as you have easy access to all
the different node types. However, you won’t be able to progress any further than level 9
until you leave the island, and since you can’t do the Artisan crafting quests here there’s
not much benefit in leveling to 9 before you leave. However, it is worthwhile getting all
your harvesting skills up before you leave as there’s not usually much competition for
nodes.
For the purposes of this guide I’ll assume you’re planning to do your Artisan crafting in
your chosen starting city. If you do decide to stay on the island for this, most of the
following advice will apply, except you are not able to do the crafting quests on the island.
If you stay on the island you can achieve level nine as an Artisan, and even gain up to
220% XP towards further levels, but you cannot get to level 10 until you complete a short
quest in your home town. Also, because the highest level recipes you have access to are
only level 6, you’ll level a little slower than if you head to your starting city first.
Also, you don’t have access to a broker on the island and this is another big advantage in
heading to the city – the broker gives you access to resources if you don’t want to harvest,
and allows you to sell the supplies you don’t need as well.
In each of the starting city zones, there are instances for crafting. Outside each instance is
an NPC who sells all of the different crafting recipe books. Inside ach of the instances are
several of each type of crafting table as well as a few different NPCs. There is a vendor
who sells fuel and a few other essential crafting items, a broker, and a quest NPC who
you should talk to if you want to complete the Artisan crafting quests.
There are several different strategies for leveling to ten. They’re all useful in different ways
and no matter which method you choose you’ll level fairly quickly.

As you increase your crafting level you’ll learn the value of setting aside a couple of hours
every so often just to harvest items that you need to craft. The first few levels will fly by
without too many resources used, but of course as your level increases, so will the
amount of time and resources it takes you to achieve a new level.
The first thing you need to do before you start harvesting is set up a hotbar. It’s a good
idea to turn to a new bar that has no other keys on it so that you have room for other
things that will be useful while you’re harvesting. Open up your knowledge book, and
switch to the Abilities section. Here you’ll find several skills, including those for
harvesting. Fishing isn’t something you’re going to need to spend time on, so all you
really need is Gathering, Mining, Foresting, Trapping, and Collecting (if you spend enough
time harvesting you tend to find a lot of ?s as well). You may wish to simply use the
double-click feature, but I find it’s more efficient to use hotkeys in this way because you
can queue them so that you begin your second harvest immediately after the first one is
over, and so on. I recommend adding keys for sprint and /yell, and a runspeed buff and
invisibility or stealth if you are able to cast any of these. If your tradeskill level increases
far enough past your adventuring level, you may find yourself heading into dangerous
areas to gather your materials. This can be fun and exciting but it’s always good to be
prepared as well.
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EverQuest 2 Alchemy Guide
The second thing I think is most important about harvesting is to harvest everything in
sight, rather than only what you need for yourself. There are a few reasons for this. The
first is that if you walk around in a particular area harvesting only one or two types of
nodes, eventually you are going to end up finding that the nodes you want become
scarce. Secondly, you stand a greater chance of harvesting rare items if you don’t limit
yourself to certain node types. In addition you can supplement your income by selling
(or trading) anything you harvest but can’t use.
For now, harvest all the items you need for the Artisan quests – see section 3.1.4 for a
shopping list. You won’t have space for much more at this time, but one of the rewards for
completing the Artisan quests is a bag for harvested items so this will ease your space
problems if you’re having them.
When you harvest, you will yield anywhere from 1-10 items each time. This is dependent
on your level in the relevant harvesting skill, in relation to the level of the node you’re
harvesting from. The higher your skill level, the greater your chance of getting multiple
items each time. Also, higher skill levels give you a small bonus to your chance of getting
rare items.
Lastly, your local woodworker can now make tools which make harvesting faster. These
are great items. You just equip them and they reduce the time each harvest takes to
“cast”. Definitely recommend taking advantage of these new items, they really speed up
the process. With all the changes in LU24, harvesting is quicker and easier than ever and
it’s more fun too.

2. Learning to Craft – The Artisan Levels
2.1. Introduction
When you land on the newbie island, you can try your hand at crafting here in addition to
learning about the adventuring lifestyle. You will find a crafting instance by the base of the
tower, and you can talk to the NPC standing outside the instance for some basic
information about crafting. When you zone into the instance and talk to the NPC behind
the counter you’ll get a note to examine which will start you on your first crafting quest, but
you’ll need to go to your chosen starting city to make any headway with that. In the
meantime, the NPC in the instance will also give you a copy of Artisan Essentials volume
two, which contains several recipes of different types. Talking to the NPC in the instance
will also automatically level you to two.