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Just recently started a trader alt, and I've always liked trade-skills in general. What skills should I invest in at these levels? I can't go much higher than 3 skills, since IP is really tight at the first few levels afterall.
What skills will I be able to make a bit of good money of, and how? What do I do? :)
Being a lvl 51 trader, I don't have that much experience. But I've focused my trade skills on mechanical engineering and pharmatec. I like to make jewellery, and I can always find rings, gems, bracer and bracelets to keep me doing it. As for pharmatec, it gives you the oppertunity to convert monster parts to blood plasma, and then to emergency treatment kits if you want to. (Not too sure if this is worth the money or not. See other thread.)
I haven't bothered to work on weapon smithing and nano crystals yet. Don't know if I'll do either, as I haven't given much though or IP to it yet. And there are allway someone better at nano programming for implants, so I think I won't bother about that either. But converting gems for rings is fun! :)
Kirikiri
Weaponsmithing is likely to prove frustrating and unprofitable in the long term, although it's fun to make yourself a gun sometimes, just because you can. The pitfalls are the unreliability of the process and the fact that the database has moved on a little since the weapon construction manuals were implemented. You can usually buy something better than you can build, in other words.
Popular tradeskills are nanoprogramming and jewellery making (not sure if blood plasma really counts in this context). Yes, there are better nano programmers out there, but it's incredibly handy to be able to make your own implants when you outgrow the pre-builts, so you might want to keep this skill high in any case.
Jewellery making is really just another cash enhancer, but it's a much more involved cash process than converting monster parts. It just feels more like a proper tradeskill, which is largely what it's all about for me. However, since it represents such an easy source of cash for the first few levels I'd recommend dropping a few IP into pharma tech anyway and getting yourself a bio comminutor - never mind whether it's a "proper" tradeskill or not, it's useful.
Cheers,
~R~
Tradeskills before title4 cap are a hard drain on IP. Wouldn't suggest it. If you're tight for money missions are what you need.
Trader NP is still 5 per level, same as NT/Engy/MP. With ASM you're as good as the MP ;) I just started this now, you can get just over 1000 NP without implant swapping at title5 cap, with ASM and 1k board of course ;) Plenty of demand for that.
3 tradeskills, even pure green ones, sounds like you're really hurting yourself somewhere else. I didn't see enough spare IP to keep a tradeskill maxed until 130, even then I spent it in things more useful to me at the time like MC/Runspeed/Duck/etc.
161+ looks great for tradeskills though. 80k IP/level with pretty much everything already maxed. You can do the whole damn tradeskills tab if you want ;)