Im curious to learn the pros and cons of these Trades, if anyone else would be willing to part with the knowledge?

Herbs
Alchemy
Bookbinding
Tailoring

Thanks in advance to those who offer help.

Herbs is highly lucrative, and pure profit, but you're directly trading your time for money. It requires the least work, mentally, in that you just pick some herbs and sell for whatever you value your time at. The other tradeskills require a bit more business acumen. Also the only skill that I know of that's perfectly acceptable, in quality, at inept. The only thing that changes is which herbs you can pick; someone with no training beyond SKILLCHOICE SELECT HERBS has flax just as good as Transcendant flax.

Bookbinding pretty much blows as a moneymaker. Not many want books, and very few want any significant quantity. Larger books require a lot of comms and a decent chunk of gold for the outlay. They're also not required for day-to-day living or fighting, aside from protection, and maybe a bit more now, healing.

Alchemy is nice if you can find work. Kegs hurt Alchemists without shops, but if you work at it, it's still doable to a good extent.

The only perks I've seen with bookbinding are RP. The language thing rocks for that. If you want a tradeskill and actually have a trade, no NOT go for bookbinding. The Admins did reduce the gold outlay for some thing a while ago, but everything is still so ridiculously expensive that people don't use books for anything, they'll use Projects or newsposts. Books I'm sure would be used in a much more RP fashion if they weren't so darn expensive.

Yes, the main reason Im asking about this is because I dont know whether Id like to try and make a good sum off my trade or to roleplay it out more. So Im trying to find out a bit of information inbetween novices and raids.

Too many novices than I can handle right now.

from my experience... trade skills will not produce much profit if you don't invest -alot- of time and energy in getting a shop and repeatedly restocking. I always found it much easier to get gold from hunting, and far less time consuming.

A jeweler could generally make a good profit with a jeweler's hammer... but in general, it doesn't worth the time.

But I am sure others would disagree, so I bid you best of luck

No, with some trades it all comes down to how much to go after people to buy your wares over anothers. Though, a shop does seem to be a big nice thing for trades, how much you really really work into putting time and effort in creating things and the good ol' how much gold and credits you put into the skill.

You can make a very nice some with some, not so much with others. Im not picking it right away, infact Im getting Glassworks, Thirdeye and Ringwalk before I even select the skill.

I guess a tradeskill shouldn't be seen as a quick way to make money. For example, if I concentrated on nothing else except bookbinding, and even in just the Serenwilde constantly harped on it, sold scrolls of healing/protection to shops for restocking and always kept the supply there, I could probably make decent gold. But, I treat bookbindings as a "side job", so I make "side job" money off of it, if any money at all.

Herbs can't really be treated as a side job, though. It takes a huge amount of time.

Tailoring anyone?

If you do it right. If not, you won't make much if any money.

I suggest herbs then. You can do it in your free time, after teaching novices and in between raiding/defense, not unlike the others. Just announce your stuff over the market afterwards.

And you get to pick buyable herbs even at lower skillranks too.


If you dont have a shop, no. If you have a shop, its a good choice. Though clothes are, in my opinion, used just for rp reasons and is not really a necessity. (did I get that one spelled out correctly?) except for greatrobes of course, but they decay long enough that the demands are comparably lower than other trade skills's products.

I hated alchemy. I would spend half my time wrangling herbs from herbalists and then turn around and sell them all out to a full-time basher and only just barely make any kind of profit. I'm not saying that you can't make a profit but the amount of work that goes into it doesn't justify it for me. As an enchanter all I'd need from other people were powerstones and then I'd sit at the pentagram until they ran out. I actually had a lot of fun with poisons and only dropped that one because I never had time to bash.

My debates mostly about Alchemy and Herbs, mostly cause theres a good lack of Alchemists lately and the fact that my skills seem to revolve around help herbs grow (nature skills BTW) and its something I can do in what free time I have.

Oh right, you're a dreamweaver. Well if you had ecology poisons would be good!

I decided I wanted a sneaky escape from the Novices.

Was origionally going to be a Poisonist Ecologist, then decided nah.

If you go Herbs, Gloves of Harvesting will save your sanity. Gives you either twice as much gold, or takes half as much time.

Alchemy, though I admit to not putting 100% of my effort into it, made me a grand total of -4.5k profit in all the time I had it. Most of that is stocking herbs so you can fill on demand. I never got to a point where my outlay on herbs was consistently higher than my profit from refilling.

I make at least 6000 per keg, which is enough for my needs. With alchemy, you can just invest enough lessons to be able to do Health kegs and you'll make a suitable profit from that alone. Of course, I'm not sure how much money you can make from it as a Serenwilder, but being an alchemist in Glomdoring rocks at the moment.

If only I could. But I really think something mind-numbing is exactly what I need.

Gloves of harvesting will never cover their actual credit cost though...

Mine are 170,000 gold short of covering their actual credit cost. (Sorry, lost a 0 my first time through. *coughs*)

The herbs in my rift currently are worth about 350,000. Take half that (as without the gloves, the same amount of time harvesting would be half the herbs) and it makes me break even. So anything harvested from here on is 'profit'.