Spellcrafting Guide
by June
This guide is mostly for spellcrafters, but also for Scholars, too, since they share the same skillset.
The first thing to know about being a spellcrafter is that the way to succeed is to know as many formulae and techniques as possible. Not only will this give you options in leveling, it will make you into a viable businessman. Get as many formulae as fast as you can! Techniques are less important initially, but you will eventually want to be able to offer your clients a large selection of options. Aside from adventuring for forms/techs/lore tokens/bounty markers or simply buying available spells in the consigner's store, you can get yourself a good number of lore tokens by doing the tasks your trainer offers you.
As a spellcrafter, you have 5 ways to gain experience: refine essence, refine stone, make stone tools, make spells, or deconstruct tools and spells. Of the 5, essence shaping is probably the least worthwhile because you cannot do anything with essence orbs per se. You can either sell them, use them in enchanting, or use them in spells, but none of those is a terribly viable option. Both spells and tools can be deconstructed, which is a valuable source of experience you shouldn't ignore. Deconstruction gives you a quarter of the experience it took to produce the item back, as well as up to half of the materials needed to produce the item, depending on your efficiency in making the item. This allows you to make nearly double the items you would receive if you didn't deconstruct, not including the extra quarter you get on each item deconstructed.
So, tools or spells? If you make spells, you get experience for making bricks from slabs, spell shards from bricks, and spells from spell shards. Tools, on the other hand, only give you experience for making the bricks and then making the tools. You do save time with tools though, as you can make them right in the quarry at the stoneworking pedestal. So how do you find out what to do? It all comes down to efficiency. As your skill goes up, it takes less and less material to make the same number of finished products. At the same time, the experience you receive goes down and the amount of material you get back from deconstruction goes up. Compare how much experience you get per brick of stone between your products and you'll be able to determine the best way to level. It's not usually the hardest thing you can make, because it costs so much to make the item and you get so little back from deconstruction, despite the high XP yield. Also, bear in mind that some spells and tools require an odd number of bricks or shards to create. Do not make these to level. Say you are efficient in two spells - one that takes 4 shards and one that takes 5. When you deconstruct them, you get 2 shards back, meaning you lose 1 shard each time you craft. More often than not, the difference in XP from the harder spell will not be worth it.
Once you pass level 20, you might be tempted to do nothing but work in slate. This isn't the best course of action for several reasons. You will quickly discover that at level 20, slate is very hard to quarry! You are far more adept at working in sandstone. At this point, tier II spells should just be a money source, not an experience source. You will still be able to get a vast amount of experience out of your most difficult spells - Arcane Refusal and Fiery Strike. These two have a difficulty of 180, so you won't be efficient with them well into your late 20's. Since you will be completely efficient with sandstone by now, it shouldn't take longer than half an hour or so to produce 500 spell shards to make into fiery strike spells. At over 100 experience per spell for quite a few levels, you should be able to net 20,000 experience for your load of spell shards easily into your early 30's. Even at level 33, a load of 500+ spell shards is worth over 10,000 experience and is very easy to make. Beyond level 33 though, you'll probably want to switch to slate. Don't forget though that tier II spells require both slate spell shards and pale essence orbs. Fortunately by this time, your essence harvesting and quarrying will be reasonably high, so it won't be nearly as hard to get your slate and essence. The same is true about switching from slate to Granite and Granite to Obsidian, except to a greater degree, since Granite and Obsidian do not spawn anywhere near a refinery.
I suggest making spells that have just reached efficiency. First off, when you reach efficiency, you get half of the materials back when you deconstruct. If you make the hardest spell you know, you will only receive a quarter back from deconstruction, if you are lucky, not to mention the fact that your hardest spells will cost double or even triple what a freshly-efficient spell requires. Also, spells that have just become efficient will still be worth a good deal of experience. My hardest spells net me over 500 XP a spell, but my current XP-making spell is worth 250 or so still. The XP I get from making the spells themselves is probably more than I would get from making a batch of very hard spells.
To summarize - learn as many spells as you can as soon as you can, and don't give in to the temptation to move on to slate as soon as you can.