What You Actually Need to Know About Weaponsmithing
Weaponsmithing is one of the two crafting disciplines that works with metal in Guild Wars 2. If you pick it up, you are making weapons, armor, and tools from ore and scrap. It is not complicated, but it has some quirks that will waste your time if you do not know about them upfront. I am writing this because most guides skip over the stuff that actually matters once you are two hours in and your materials look wrong. The discipline lives under the Artisan section. It covers weapons ranging from staffs and greatswords to axes, maces, and hammers. You can also craft weapons that scale with level and equipment that goes into the armor slots for armor, which is where most beginners get tripped up. Yes, weaponsmiths make armor too. That detail alone will cost you materials if you assume otherwise and try to craft plate chest pieces when your plan was just for weapons. The crafting loop is simple: smelt ore into ingots, use ascended materials if you want high tier gear, and follow recipes. Where it gets annoying is the material tracking. Every crafted item pulls from multiple sources. A basic iron greatsword needs iron ore and copper ore, but the numbers change depending on the weapon type and the quality level you are aiming for. I spent an entire evening trying to figure out why my crafting queue kept erroring out. The problem was not the recipe. It was the order. The game requires you to have all required materials present before it starts the queue, and it does not tell you which slot is missing. I worked around it by building the queue one item at a time instead of dumping five into the artisan window at once. It adds about three minutes per batch but saves you from watching half the queue fail silently.
There are two sub-skills under weaponsmithing. The primary one is forging, which covers weapon creation. The secondary path is refinement, which handles ore processing and ingot production. Most players skip refinement and just buy ingots from the Trading Post, which is valid for casual play. But if you are doing this for profit or self-sufficiency, refinement pays off after about Level 400. Before that, it is cheaper to buy refined materials. After that, you break even and then start making margin on your own ingots. The crossover point is roughly 600 refined bars for a solo crafter. Below that threshold, you lose gold per unit by refining yourself. Above it, you save roughly 15 to 20 percent on material costs compared to purchasing from the market. One counter-intuitive thing about weaponsmithing that nobody mentions in the beginner threads: the material cost scales non-linearly with weapon tier. A level 80 crafted weapon does not cost twice as much as a level 40 one. It costs about three times as much in materials but gives you only marginally better stats relative to what you can buy off the Trading Post. This is especially relevant for ascended crafting. An ascended weapon requires soulbound materials that you cannot get from the market. The total material investment for a single ascended sword runs roughly 1000 gold at current prices, and that is before you factor in the gathering time for mats you need to source yourself. Most people do not realize this until they have already spent three hours mining dragonite ore and still cannot afford the recipe. Here is another nuance that trips up new crafters: the difference between crafting quality and item quality. You can craft an exotic weapon at fine quality, but it will still be exotic tier because the recipe determines the base item quality. However, you cannot craft a rare weapon unless you have the rare recipe for it. The common misconception is that higher crafting skill unlocks rarer items automatically. It does not. You need the actual recipe for the item you want, regardless of your crafting level. I learned this the hard way when I hit Level 500 weaponsmithing and tried to craft a rare weapon that had never been released in the game. The skill level meant nothing. The recipe was missing. I wasted a full stack of orichalcum ingots on a ghost item that did not exist.
For materials, the basics are iron, steel, and the higher tiers like mithril, tortoise, and orichalcum. Steel is the workhorse for mid-level crafting. It covers everything from Level 25 to about Level 75 depending on the recipe. Mithril is where things start getting expensive. Orichalcum is the endgame material and it dominates ascended crafting. If you are just starting out, focus on steel first. It is cheap, easy to smelt from your own ore, and covers the majority of weapons you will actually use before you hit the late game. The real bottleneck with weaponsmithing is not the skill cap. It is the material supply chain. Mining is time-consuming and the yield is inconsistent. A single ore node might give you zero to three ore depending on luck and the node type. I typically spend about 20 minutes mining a full stack of orichalcum ore, which translates to roughly 40 to 60 individual nodes. That is before you factor in the smelting time. Smelting orichalcum ore into ingots takes about 30 seconds per bar, so 60 bars is another 30 seconds. Not much individually, but it adds up when you are building a full ascended weapon queue. If you are serious about weaponsmithing for profit, consider specializing in one or two weapon types. Staff and greatsword are popular choices because they have high demand on the Trading Post. Axe and mace are less competitive but also less profitable. The margin on a staff usually runs 5 to 15 percent above material cost, while a greatsword might only net you 2 to 5 percent after fees. These numbers vary with market conditions, but the staff consistently outperforms other weapon types in terms of volume and profit ratio. The trade-off is that staff recipes require more materials overall, so your upfront investment is higher.
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There is also a hidden mechanic worth knowing: crafting skill affects the chance of bonus materials, but only at certain thresholds. Hitting skill levels that are multiples of 25 gives you a small boost to bonus chance. This is negligible for low-tier crafting but noticeable at the orichalcum level. A Level 500 weaponsmith with maxed bonuses might see one extra ingot per 20 craft cycles on average. That is roughly one bonus bar per hour of continuous crafting. It sounds small, but over a full ascended weapon run it can save you a significant amount of time and gold. For a practical starting path, here is what I recommend: pick up refinement first and get it to Level 400. This lets you process your own ore up to mithril tier without buying from the market. Then focus on weaponsmithing and get it to Level 500. During this process, craft mostly steel weapons to build your skill and fund your expansion into higher tiers. Avoid ascended crafting until you have Level 500 in both disciplines and a solid Trading Post buffer of at least 500 gold. Trying to go straight to ascended with no material savings will drain your bank account faster than you can mine your way out of it. One more thing about the daily crafting contracts: weaponsmithing appears in the weekly contract rotation sometimes, but not reliably. When it does, the reward is usually 5000 experience and a material bundle worth about 5 to 10 gold on the market. It is not worth restructuring your entire crafting schedule around it. Treat it as a bonus, not a goal. I used to prioritize contract completion over actual material needs, and I ended up with warehouses full of unwanted orichalcum scrap and nothing I could actually craft. The contract rewards are decent but the opportunity cost of ignoring your real material gaps is higher than most players realize.
If you want to check recipes and current material prices, the official wiki is the most reliable source. It lists every recipe with exact material costs, required crafting level, and whether the item is account bound or tradeable. Keep it open while you craft. The difference between guessing and looking up a recipe costs you nothing in time and saves you from wasting materials on items you cannot use or sell.
