This is a guide to Clothier and Clothier crafting in Elder Scrolls Online. We’ll go through the basics first for the benefit of newcomers, and then outline advanced techniques below.
Crafting uses Inspiration points, which is, for all intents and purposes, experience. There are five skills under Clothing: Refine, Creation, Deconstruction, Improvement, and Research.
Refine is self explanatory. Creation is where you build an item from scratch. In Deconstruction, you pick apart what a piece of clothing is made of. Improvement is when you raise an item’s effectiveness and quality. Finally, Research allows you to add magical properties to clothing.
To Refine, you start by refining raw materials, or deconstructing existing items into usable core components. You do not earn experience by refining raw materials, but you do if you deconstruct the items.
There are dedicated slots for the magic you are researching and the item you are extracting the magic from. Therefore, if you get magic from a boot, you can only apply it to other boots.
There is another limitation to applying magic. If you extract the magic from a light armor boot, for example, you can only apply it on other light armor boots, until you find a medium armor boot to research and apply the magic on.
Research is an expensive process. It can take as much as six (real world) hours, and when it is done, you will no longer have the item you got it from, and you won’t have the core components it was made from either. Even worse, if you research another magic in the same skill slot, it will double that time, and that would keep going to as much as 32 days.
Therefore, you want to have several research clocks for several traits ticking simultaneously at any one time, and generally work with other players to get the traits you want.
During creation, you want to pay attention to item level, as well as cloth selector. You can add more of a component to increase effectiveness, but this will make creation more costly.
Remember: you can’t wear everything you make. Whether you can wear something you create or not is still dependent on your own stats.
Improvement has an interesting risk / reward mechanic. When you add a component to an item to improve it, there is a probability of success percentage that comes with it. The more of that component you add in, the higher the chance it will succeed. Considering core component can’t be bought, and have to be obtained via deconstruction, you have to choose how much of an item you add in for improvement carefully. One more thing: if you fail to improve an item, you lose it.
When you improve an item, it raises item’s stats all around save for item level. However, you will on occasion have to use a different tannin, aka clothing type, to keep these upgrades going.
Advanced Techniques
Now that you have the basics down, here’s some ways to get more efficient at making clothing:
The experience reward when you create an item is based on item level. However, bigger pieces require more pieces than smaller pieces. Therefore, to make leveling up easier, stick to smaller items.
You will have to test to figure out which items provide the most benefits when you make them. There’s a balance, again, between using a select number of components, and the experience your raise as a result. Basically, you need to watch out for diminishing returns.
On the deconstruction end, it is important to note that depending on your character’s skill level, they get more experience from deconstructing the same item. In general, lower level characters get more experience. Therefore, if you have multiple characters in your account, you’ll want the higher level clothier to pass along his/her lower level items to newer characters.
Again, in this case, you are incentivized to work with other players. Craftsmen are very valuable in ESO. You will find your own allies and guildmates will be more than eager to share clothing items to you to help speed up your leveling up process.
However, if you can get items at a considerably higher level than where you are, you yourself can get more experience quickly, assuming you’re high enough to deconstruct / research said item.
