Smithing Guide
This guide is intended to help players understand many of the nuances of Smithing. This is not a beginners guide, it is intended to be a 'tips and tricks' guide for players wanting to make the most out of smithing.
Contents
Gear and Enchants
Generally speaking, there are a few items you must have for smithing:
- A piece of jewelry with Haste. ideally u would use a Prismatic Necklace due to the fact it adds smithing effective levels .
- A piece of jewelry with Pyromancy,
- A Chaos Crest with Pure Metals.
- The default enchants on Smith's Golem Legs and Smith's Golem Torso.
- Tongs with Metallurgy.
- Refining on your boots/gloves (try to get to 7 slots; it's worth it). Refining is basically your bread and butter. A lot of the time, refining will be more of your revenue than the bars (especially in Forge 2).
- Inferno on your boots/gloves (try to get to 7 slots; it's worth it)
Now, there are two skill-defining items outside of that: the Dwarven Manufacturing Pendant and the Elven Logistics Pendant. Each of them is extremely valuable—Dwarven for making you super fast and Elven for making you super efficient. To add to that, a lot of the time you should play around with them to reach breakpoints. Sometimes you might be able to "push" a breakpoint.
General Gear Priority List
From most important to least important:
- Refining on boots or gloves: This is the most important.
- Inferno: This is next in priority.
- tong: Get a tong
- Jewelry with Haste: Then focus on the piece with Haste.
- Dwarven and Elven Pendant: Acquire these pendants next.
- Chaos Crest: Since it requires no shards, allowing you to progress towards legendary tongs.
- Legs and Torso: For the set bonus.
- Legendary Tongs: By now, you should, in theory, have your legendary tongs.
- Cloak of the Void: Get this last.
Priority for Augmenting
The priority of what you should augment first follows a flow chart:
- Do I have smithing shards?
- Yes: Upgrade your legendary tongs to the point where the cost exceeds the benefit of upgrading another piece of your gear.
- No: Upgrade your Chaos Crest , then the Elven and Dwarven Pendants, followed by the Cloak of the Void, and lastly your Prismatic Necklace.
Refining
Refining is the enchantment that will be your bread and butter. It will account for the majority of your profits in Forge 2 and provide a decent boost in Forge 3. Now, what does it do and how does it work? Refining works in a few ways:
- Refining Enchantments: The general percentage is based on how strong your refining enchantment strength is.
- Ore and Heat Intensity: The more heat you have, the higher the percentage per enchantment (you can get those refining stacks via slots on your gear, event tokens, and the soon-to-be-implemented talent for forge 2).
- Forge Power Ranking: The percentage proc chance is tied to the forge you are in. Each forge has a power ranking:
- Forge 1 (City Forge): Second most powerful in terms of the percentage proc you get per enchant.
- Forge 2 (Dwarven Forge): The most weakest in terms of the percentage proc you get per enchant.
- Forge 3 (Volcanic Forge): The most powerful of the three forges in terms of the percentage proc you get per enchant.
Additionally, refining has an extra feature for each forge, providing unique drops:
- Forge 1: Infernal Dust, used to make Infernal Lances.
- Forge 2: Molten Ashes used to craft the dungeon key Burning Feather.
- Forge 3: At high heats you get Core Fragments, which can be processed to make core ingots for the smithing dungeon.
General Tips
Your goal in smithing is to reach breakpoints and calculate your costs. There are three forges, two of which are useful:
- Forge Number 1, aka the City Forge: this one is pretty much only used in the extremely early game before players can move on to the higher forges. one small benefit to it is it does drop infernal dust from refining and provides a lot of essence compared to any of the other forges.
- Forge Number 2, aka the Dwarven Forge: This is a very low-economy (low-cost) forge because it requires very low resources per hour, making it a prime location to use the Dwarven Pendant. In the Dwarven Forge, refining, which is the most important aspect of smithing (more than the bars a lot of the time), will dominate your revenue. Your goal here is to crank the heat as much as possible, unless you are using an ore/core frag that needs a different heat—work that out yourself. Use the Dwarven Pendant because the cost per hour will basically never come close to your profits from refining.
- Forge Number 3, aka the Volcanic Forge: This is an interesting one. It is by far the fastest forge, allowing you to smith a lot of ores into bars in a very short time, but it is also high-economy (costs a lot). The heat cost and material cost mean you basically must use the Elven Pendant because the heat alone can save you tens of thousands of heat per hour. It is generally very efficient with your ores, so you can make a lot of bars
Smithing Dungeon
The smithing dungeon is generally a very costly yet powerful tool in your arsenal to progress your smithing journey. As stated in the refining portion of the guide, you get core fragments from high-heat Forge 3 refining. Using these, you can make them into core ingots.
Generally speaking, if you want the most core ingots and thus keys, you use Forge 3, but this is an expensive way to do it. You can also use Forge 2, which produces fewer keys but at a significantly lower cost.
These keys drop two major things that we care about: Lava Hearts (used to make smithing pants and chest) and smithing shards (used to upgrade the smithing gear dropped by this dungeon and your legendary tongs). Each key drops 25 shards, which is equal to 2 hours of smithing. Since shards are time-gated, this should be used when you want to push for an extra level on your tongs or get your smithing gear up to the max you can.
Talents
Now we come to talents. When it comes to talents, if you are not going to go all in on smithing, you can narrow down your options to these few:
- Pyromania: Even a 5% reduction in heat use will save you millions in the long run.
- Smithing Master: It’s cheap, only costing 3 points, and provides a significant benefit.
- Overheating: This talent is generally amazing. More heat is beneficial in both Forge 2, where it costs very little and has a meaningful impact, and Forge 3, where it could provide another option when market conditions make running at higher heat viable.
- Slag Refinement: This is quite good because slag is essentially worthless, and you get a lot of refining procs over time.
- Molten Metal: This is a weird one because it almost always isn’t the best option due to economic reasons, except for scenarios like working with core fragments.(probly not worth it for most people)
- Dwarven Refinement: This will likely be a must-have due to the power of refining, but it is not yet implemented.
You can visit the Talents page to see what each of these talents do.
Extra Tips and Advice
Forge 2: Recommended Ores: Gold and Runite ores are generally recommended because they are readily available and usually come at a low price. This makes them prime targets for using the Dwarven Pendant and max heat in Forge 2.
Alternative Options: Iron bars can be efficient if you can hit a good breakpoint with the Elven Pendant. I found that at heat 11, iron ore is the most efficient (outside of Forge 3) per ore. However, if you can’t reach heat 11, it’s generally most efficient at heat 7. With the new talent, using pure metals on your tongs might increase efficiency even further (though I haven’t tested this yet, it could be promising).
Forge 3: Basic Strategy: Equip an Elven Pendant and calculate the math to determine what will give you the most bars per price.
Advanced Tips: With the new talents, the ability to reach heat 12 without heat enchants opens up potential niche use cases for pure metals or other enchants. While I haven’t fully tested this, it could offer interesting opportunities.
Useful Terminology
Smithers generally refer to the Dwarven Forge as Forge 2 and the Volcanic Forge as Forge 3. As for Forge 1, it’s the cousin we don't let out of the attic.
Heat intensity is just called heat. Some even shorten it to F2H11 (for Forge 2, heat intensity 11).
- guide written by Zoomba, an extremely accomplished smither.
