[Rodin]

i guess it depends, i found that skilling up required alot of research into what materials i needed, where to get them and at what cost. while skilling if you take time you will drastically reduce costs. with smithing there is no point throwing endless amounts of gil into it over a short period of time as you will be consistanly out of pocket. you need money to make money.

As regards making money from smithing many people argue that they cannot seem to find the profit synths. i beg to differ, people expect to make x,000,000g+ instantly and yes that can happen sometime but very rarely. best money is in the consistent synths that sell well and are produced at a very good cost.

in the end if you are careful about what you spend your money on and research what you can synth you will always make money. there are good days and bad days. but that is the fun of it.

Seeing as you're DRK and a PLD, I would say that Smithing would definitely be the best way to go. The signed HQs you can make for yourself would definitely be worth it. This is why I chose clothcraft, since I like the mage type jobs better, it just seemed right for me. Most people on my server level it because it's "high profit". Right now, clothcraft is soooo overleveled that desynths don't make as much profit as it used to. Mahatma slops were down to 900k at one point. (I bought two pair, sold 2 months later for 2 mil a piece )

Basically, if you're looking for money with a mid-level craft, what you'll want to do is either do what I call a "Transition Synth". This is like what I do with spider webs on clothcraft. I make about 100k profit on every stack of rainbow thread I make. It used to be a LOT higher, but the market is flooded at the moment ; ;. Something you might want to do would be make Darksteel Ores into Darksteel Ingots, or Sheets. They tend to make a lot of profit. When I level clothcraft to 80, I know I'm going to synth webs to threads, then to cloths. I believe this will make me about 500k profit each successful stack of cloths I make.

Also, desynthing is a very good way to go if you want to make some good cash. It can be costly though, if you break. I believe you'll get a desynthing enhancement if you fill your mog house with tarutaru stools. But a good money maker with smithing would be to go to Beaudeaux, and kill Quadavs. You can desynth their backplates, and the HQ3 of that is Darksteel Ore. A friend of mine and I did that for about a month. Spending about 1 hour a day on farming them, we made 10 million gil split right down the middle.