Eldara Skill Training Priority

Eldara ships seventeen skills in version 1.0. They are Melee, Range, Magic, Defence, Hitpoints, Mining, Smithing, Woodcutting, Fishing, Cooking, Fletching, Firemaking, Cultivating, Cremating, Crafting, Thieving, and Hunting. Every skill has passives, milestones, a pet, and at least one other skill that eats its output. This page ranks training priority, not flavour. It sits under the skill, pet, and build rankings hub. If you want recipes and input chains, use the seventeen-skill map. If you want copy-paste tables, use the early-mid-late planner.

The ranking rule is simple: anything that speeds every other skill outranks anything that only speeds itself. That is why Firemaking sits at the top of early, mid, and late lists. Lighting fires is a global XP accelerator. Logs from Woodcutting feed those fires. Food from Cooking keeps combat parked. Bars from Smithing and parts from Fletching or Crafting turn a style into a gear set. Pets lock in when you master a skill, so “finishing” a skill is also a companion decision — see pet rankings by domain before you tunnel a vanity level.

Early priority: light the account

Early play is the first stretch of idle hours, before you are living in dungeons. The job is not to max a combat style. The job is to make every later tick cheaper.

S-priority early

• Firemaking. Keep it warm. Fires multiply XP across the board. Exact percentages can move in patches; the role does not. If you only remember one sentence from this page, remember this one.
• Woodcutting. Logs are the fire fuel. A wood pile you never burn is a delay, not a bank flex.
• Cooking. Auto-eat is what lets you leave Melee, Range, or Magic running. Hungry characters stop. Fed characters print XP and drops.
• Mining. Ore starts the Smithing lane that eventually becomes armour and weapons.

A-priority early

• Hitpoints and Defence. You do not need them maxed, but you need them high enough that a parked hunt does not become a corpse. Pair this with the combat styles explainer.
• Smithing as soon as you have bars to make. Even crude gear beats the starter kit when you are about to leave a fight overnight.

B-priority early

• Fishing and Cultivating once food and fire are stable. They are gathering engines, not first-hour stars.
• Fletching if you already know you will main Range. Otherwise wait.
• Crafting if you already know you will lean Gilded Hammer. Otherwise wait.

Skip Thieving, Hunting, and Cremating as focus skills in the first nights. Touch them when a quest, a dungeon input, or a pet is the actual bottleneck. Early accounts die of unlit fires and empty stomachs, not of missing hunter traps.

Mid priority: pick a lane

Mid game starts when Firemaking is no longer a panic button and you can keep a fire and a cook loop running while you look at combat. Now you choose a lane: combat, gathering, or artisan. You will still train all three over a full save. You should not train all three as if they were equal this week.

Combat lane. Raise one of Melee, Range, or Magic, then keep Defence and Hitpoints in support. Eldara gives you three gear sets, not a hybrid super-set. Park the matching hunt. Refine that set. The combat loadout rankings explain why mixing styles overnight stalls refinement. The three mythic world bosses are melee-, range-, and magic-themed; your mid-game style is also your late-game exam.

Gathering lane. Mining, Woodcutting, Fishing, Cultivating, Thieving, and Hunting feed everyone else. Verdant Circle donations like this lane. A gathering-first account still lights Firemaking. It just spends more idle blocks on raw materials than on boss camps.

Artisan lane. Smithing, Fletching, Firemaking, Cooking, Cremating, and Crafting turn those materials into gear, food, fires, and bones-to-ash loops. Gilded Hammer likes this lane. Firemaking remains the XP engine; the other artisan skills are how you stop buying (there is no cash shop) and start producing.

Mid-game S-priority regardless of lane

• Firemaking maintenance. Do not “finish” it and walk away. New log tiers and new fires keep the accelerator honest.
• The support skill your lane actually burns: Woodcutting for fires, Cooking for hunts, Mining for smiths, Fletching for rangers.

Mid-game A-priority

• Your chosen combat style plus Defence and Hitpoints.
• Smithing if you are melee or need armour; Fletching if you are range; Crafting if your gear story needs it.
• Cultivating and Fishing to keep food and reagents from becoming the new bottleneck.

Mid-game B-priority

• Thieving and Hunting as scheduled blocks, especially when a dungeon or a pet is gated.
• Cremating once you have a bone pipeline from combat. It is a real skill with a pet, not a junk drawer, but it wants a corpse supply.
• The two combat styles you are not maining. Dip them for Codex and future rebirth flexibility; do not split your refined gear across all three.

House standing can nudge mid-game order. Ashen Legion likes combat donations, Verdant Circle likes gathering, Gilded Hammer likes artisan work. Donations shift reputation — raising one house can cut the other two — so do not let a mid-game gift rewrite your skill queue unless you mean it. Details live on the three faction houses page.

Late priority: pets, dungeons, rebirth

Late game is not a new skill list. It is the same seventeen skills with different reasons to click them.

1. Finish pets you still lack. Each mastered skill unlocks a companion with a permanent domain bonus that survives rebirth. That makes a “dead” skill suddenly high priority if it is the last empty pet slot. Named examples — Steelfang, Sharpeye, Whisper, Sprout — are covered with the rest of the roster on the skill pets page.
2. Feed dungeons. Sunken Crypt and Ignarath’s throne want more than a high combat level. They want the food, gear, and sometimes gathering outputs your artisan loop should already be producing. Walk those routes on the dungeon guide.
3. Prepare refinement, not clutter. Rebirth keeps Codex, collections, achievements, and pets, and it adds about +5 gear refinement per cycle toward a cap near +50. It does not keep Eternal Forge Echoes. If your late-game plan is “one more Forge rank,” read the rebirth reset planner before you prestige.
4. Park mythics on-style. The three mythic world bosses punish a messy loadout. Bring the matching set, not a souvenir from another lane.

Hardcore is a modifier, not a new tree: one life, half XP, half gold. Late-game greed is how hardcore saves end. If you play that mode, the early Firemaking rule is even stricter, because you cannot buy back wasted nights.

Combat vs gathering vs artisan at a glance

Domain	Skills	When it is high
Accelerator	Firemaking	Always
Combat	Melee, Range, Magic, Defence, Hitpoints	After food and fires are stable; one style at a time
Gathering	Mining, Woodcutting, Fishing, Cultivating, Thieving, Hunting	When a recipe, a house, or a pet is gated on raw inputs
Artisan	Smithing, Fletching, Cooking, Cremating, Crafting (plus Firemaking)	When gear, food, or bone loops are the bottleneck

There is no secret eighteenth skill. There is no paid XP boost. Offline progress already runs. The only way to fake a higher tier is to leave Firemaking cold and then blame the combat style.

Keep Firemaking lit even when your next goal is a dungeon key. The global XP lever pays for every other row in this list, which is why it stays at the top from the first log to the last rebirth.