[GW2] Crafting Cost

Crafting Costs: Even Scarier Behemoths

EDIT:  Update 1/2 - instead of using GW2wiz, take a look at ErrantQuest for crafting guides.  Much cheaper.  For cooking, Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide (always chooses the cheapest route).

One of my favorite features in GW2 is the ability to level a new alt entirely via crafting.  Since each crafting discipline gives around 10 levels of experience, it is possible to level a character to 80 by advancing through each crafting profession. Leveling a new alt takes hours, not days.

In the early days of the game, this was fairly inexpensive. Alternating between crafting, story quests, and hunting down skill points, I was able to level 4 alts to level 80 for about a gold per crafting discipline. Recently, I've become interested in leveling another character via crafting, but wondered how crafting costs have changed since the early weeks.

To track the cost of crafting, I used crafting shopping lists from GW2 wiz and price data from GW2 spidy.

Here is the cost of each crafting discipline over the past few weeks:

Armorsmith, leatherworking, and tailoring have all dramatically increased in price over the past few weeks (and are much more expensive than I'd remembered!).  Breaking down each craft by materials cost, the culprit appears to be the fine (blue-quality) crafting materials:

While gatherable components (metal, leather, cloth) have held steady in cost, fine materials (scales, totems, blood,...) have risen at an alarming rate.

The rise in crafting costs is distributed fairly evenly across all tiers of materials, though Tier 5 goods have increased in price more rapidly than Tiers 1-4.

For the curious, over the past week, here are the average prices of leveling each crafting discipline:

armorsmith   artificer    huntsman     jeweler 
       7.80        8.69        9.30        7.59 
    leather      tailor weaponsmith 
       7.23        8.65       10.06 

This leaves cooking as the cheapest craft to level (estimated at 1g!), followed by leatherworking, jewelry  and armorsmithing.

Personally, it looks like I'll be leveling any new alts the old-fashioned way!