Hey everyone, I am sure quite a lot of you are curious about the crafting system in Guild Wars 2! For those who have not had a chance to try it out, here is a brief guide that covers the basics of the GW2 crafting system. I will have a couple more in-depth guides coming up for some of crafting disciplines soonish!

What crafting disciplines are available?

There are eight crafting disciplines available in GW2. Three are weapon making (Huntsman, Artificer, Weaponsmith), three are armor making (Tailor, Leatherwork, and Armorsmith), and the last two are Chef and Jeweler.

For those of you wondering which professions use which armor and which weapons, here is a chart to help you out!

How many crafting discipline can I learn at a time?

You can have a max of two crafting discipline at a time. However, you can easily switch to another crafting discipline without losing any progress on the one you just switched out of. It does, however, cost coins to switch back to a prior discipline (10 cooper/crafting level, at max level 400, it would cost 40 silver)

How do I obtain raw materials?

There are two main methods for getting raw materials for crafting: gathering and salvaging. You should pick up both as early as possible. Going back to lower level zones to farm for supplies can be a pain as you are scaled down in levels and repair costs are expensive if you die.

Keep in mind that all the raw materials have a corresponding tab in the bank where they can be deposited. All you need to do is right click on a raw material in your inventory and select Deposit Collectible. This will send it to the bank automatically without requiring you to visit a bank. Of course, when you need to retrieve it, you will have to visit a banker located in most cities.

Gathering is the act of collecting raw materials from the resource nodes you will encounter during your travel. It is not tied to any crafting discipline and anyone can pick it up if they have the appropriate tools. Unlike other MMOs, resource nodes are not shared with other players. Other people gathering from the same node as you will not cause that node to be depleted for you. Nodes locations are not random, allowing you to come back to the same spot to gather after a node has being replenished.

There are three types of resource nodes, each requiring a different tool.

Gathering tools are sold by various merchants you will encounter in your travels, their cost varies according to the their tier. Higher tier gathering tools can gather more advanced resource nodes (as well all the lower ones) but will cost more and require your character to be of a certain level. Each gathering tool come with 100 uses and all three can be equipped simultaneously in a special section of your Hero Menu.

There are also special nodes mining nodes with a pre-fix Rich (i.e. Rich Cooper Vein) that allow you to gather much more before it is being depleted. Those harvesting supplies for the Chef discipline should also look into “farms” for certain cooking raw materials. These farms have 8 nodes of a specific cooking raw material (i.e potato) with a respawn of 23 hrs. Each type of raw cooking material have no more than 2 farms in the game. Here are some of the known farm locations. 

Salvaging: Players interested in making armor, especially the tailor discipline, will need to invest some time into salvaging. Salvaging is the act of breaking down items such as armor and weapons into its raw components. This is especially essential for the armor making disciplines as it is only route to obtain some of the raw materials. Like gathering tools, salvage kits can be purchased from merchants. There are different grades, with higher grades having a higher chance to yield more rare components. However, unlike the gathering tools, even the most basic salvage kits will able to salvage everything fine if you are just interested in the basic raw materials. 

Karma: Karma, the currency earned by participating in dynamic events, can be used to obtain some raw materials as well. This currency is especially important for the Chef discipline as some of the materials and recipes can be only obtained via karma at certain vendors who open up after you have completed a task for them. You can also use karma to purchase some armor for salvaging if you don’t feel like farming mobs for them.

Trading Post: If you have lots of coins and don’t mind spending them, the trading post is a place where you can acquire almost everything that can be traded. Trading posts are also cross-world, ensuring that there is always someone there to supply you if you got the coins.

What are these trophies I keep getting?

Trophies are special crafting material that are obtained sometimes from mobs you have just killed. They will have a list of crafting discipline that can use them in their description. An example is the Vial of Weak Blood shown below. 

These special materials have very important uses, here is a list of their potential uses.

• Make insignias used by the armor making disciplines
• Make inscriptions used by the weapon making disciplines
• Part of components needed to craft boxes, bags for your inventory
• Part of components used by artifiers to make potions
• Part of components used by jewelers to refine gems.

Much like the raw material you gathered or salvaged, trophies can be deposited in the Collectible tab of your bank. These trophies sell for quite a lot, so if you don’t need them, you can make quite a bit on the trading post. 

Crafting Interface – Production

The first time you open up a crafting interface, you will see two tabs: Production and Discovery. Production is the place where you craft items from a list of known recipes. All of the armor and weapon crafting disciplines have a similar layout in this section. Jewelers and 

Refinement: This is where you refine the raw materials you obtained from gathering/salvage into refined materials used for crafting.

Crafting components: There is where you make the basic building blocks for the various gear that you will make. These components take the refined materials you just made + the vendor brought materials.

Insignias/Inscriptions: Insignias and Inscriptions are used to give additional stats to your crafted armor, depending on the name of the insignia/inscription. Insignias are used for crafting armor (tailor, leatherwork, armorsmith) while inscriptions are used for crafting weapon (huntsman, artifier, weaponsmith)

Each insignia/inscription, once crafted, will have special prefixes and suffixes that indicate the stat bonuses that they provide. Here is a list of some of them and the type of trophies required. 

Upgrade components: This is the place where you make runes and sigils that provide additional stats to your armor/weapon on top of the stats provided by insignias/inscriptions

One key thing you will notice is that most of the recipes for specific armor/weapon piece will require 3 things: 2 crafting components (i.e. strap and padding) and 1 insignia/inscription or trophy. This is something to keep in mind when we move on to the next part of the crafting interface – discovery. 

Crafting Interface – Discovery

Unlike other MMOs, most of the recipes in GW2 are learned via the Discovery tab rather than purchased from merchants. Discovering a new recipe also grant you a large experience boost, allowing you to gain levels much quicker than just crafting the same items over and over.

Discovering recipes is fairly simple. For weapons and armor, it usually follow the formula of crafting components + insignia/inscription or trophy. For insignias/inscriptions, you usually need a trophy + some refined material. Knowing this, you can start making all the crafting components needed for a specific piece and some inscriptions/insignias.

After you have crafted them, you need to switch to the discovery tab and place them there. Once you put in the first component inside, the window on the 

Once all the required components for a possible recipe are placed inside, either the craft button will light up or you will get a red text with the difficulty level if you are not high enough to craft that recipe yet.

Here is an example for a boot I am crafting, you can see I put in two crafting components and an insignia and the craft button light up, allowing me to learn the recipe and craft the item. 

Once you learned a recipe via the discovery tab, it will be in the production tab, where you can craft more of the same item to level up if you run out of recipes to discover to reach the next set of levels in your crafting discipline.

Anyways, this covered the basics of crafting with some details specifically on the weapon and armor making disciplines. I will have a guide soon for the jeweler and chef disciplines, which are more involved (especially chef).