Heavy Metal Platinum

I've been playing rift for just over 2 months now and I'm still having loads of fun with it. I've already changed mains and have every profession at max skill level. In addition to that I have every token recipe purchased and basically every recipe from plaques learned as well. That being said I think I'm well on my way to having my "crafting empire" in full swing. That and playing wow isn't even a consideration at this point. I say all of this because today I want to go over my favored market in rift and the one that is making the most platinum out of all of the ones I have open to me.

To date armor and weapon smithing has gotten me more profit than any of my other markets by a large margin. My best selling gear is plate dps oriented and my biggest profit margins are from anything that's purple. The epics sell for a high profit margin because people expect them to be expensive and they actually are pretty expensive to make. By knowing how my customer base is thinking allows me to get away with much higher prices in this market as opposed to any others. Just as it was in wow, the most popular items are all melee oriented which is still the most popular class.

It seems that the generic melee and generic caster "names" of classes attract the most attention. This could be because people are lazy and don't want to find out wtf a cleric is so they go with warrior (rawr smash!) or a mage (rawr 'splosions!). Or it could be because that's their preferred style of play, who knows. Regardless they all come to me for their shiny gear. For epic weapons, the best selling items by far are the black iron hatchet and the fleshreaper which are 1h and 2h items respectively. When I don't have an augment on them they tend to sell extremely slow, but any time they do their rate of sales is fairly consistent.

As for the blue weapons, the best ones are typically tank or caster focused. 2h maces sell to clerics and 1h maces and swords sell to clerics, mages, and warrior tanks which are all in the same level rage of late 40's. This is likely because the ones you get from questing and normal mode dungeons don't typically have the most important stats for these classes: hit, focus, and avoidance.

A weapon that you get at level 38 is going to be better than one you get at 50 if the low level ones has the primary stats you need. And without a certain amount of these stats you won't get into the expert mode dungeons so these are both extremely popular and necessary. Without buying them you could spend 12 hours doing random dungeons just to get two specific items so that you can do what you're really wanting to.

After that we have armor smith that makes lots of gear for every role for clerics and warriors. Clerics are the generic healing class, but can fulfill every role from tank to support and wear chain mail armor. If you're a melee cleric you will by default have a caster stat to melee stat conversion so anything that's chain with non caster stats is going to be a slow sale. That's because while a cleric tank does like parry, they have a talent that increases your parry by X% of your spell power so 1 sp = 3 parry. That's a lengthy explanation I know, but it is needed to understand why I don't focus on certain items.

The most popular epic armor I craft are the faith forged spaulders which is a cleric piece with generic caster stats. Every cleric in game should want these when they hit 50 as they are loaded with everything you need even if they are a tad expensive. Though oddly enough the epic armor for warrior dps is severely lacking in the sales department. The best selling rare items from this profession are the darkmetal sets for both warriors and clerics. This is again due to the fact that they have hit and focus on them or are just loaded up with crit. Out of all the stats in game crit seems to be the most important one after reaching the cap on focus or hit so anything that has that over ap/sp is going to be a hot item.

Out of all the things I can craft in both professions, I was let down the most by the ranged weapons. I barely sell any guns or bows ever for any level range outside of a sub level 20 bow. Why this is I cannot begin to guess other than the fact that there are only a few classes that use them. But even still there is little to no competition in these markets so why they still sell so slowly is beyond my understanding at this time.

All in all these professions are pretty fun even though they take a lot of inventory management with all of the different materials they both need. And they need everything but flowers. I only hope that rune crafting starts to pick up a bit more later on, but unless pugs start forming and doing better in raids and the harder rifts I don't think this will happen. In a solid raiding guild you'll have every profession covered for consumables and that includes RC so they typically won't need to go to the AH that often. But we shall see.


Thanks for stopping by!