Crafting

Yesterday got tailoring on my mesmer to 415. Today it will get to 500 with some luck. Went with tailoring because I heard that gearing a mesmer can be expensive so it became an obvious choice.

Then came the next question, what gear to craft for the different game modes? Minstrel for raids? What about PvP and WvW? It's not like I'm going to do any of those things right away, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Also, while doing HoT story I acquired a few crafting recipes, but at the time I did not have any crafting skills learned. I am aware that as long as you have been taught a crafting skill, the recipe will be ready for you when you get that high. However, do you still retain already consumed recipes on your account/character if you did not have any crafting at all beforehand? Or are they forever lost?

Oh, btw I forgot to ask - I've seen ppl leveling alts to 80 with cooking. Does it work with the other crafts? If you want to lvl armorsmithing on a lvl 2, any idea how many levels can it give 0-400?

I'll knock this one out real quick. Don't worry about gearing anything for PvP. The proper title for it is sPvP, or Structured Player vs Player. Your stats and everything are all normalized in the PvP lobby, such that your stats are only granted from the PvP Amulet you choose, as well as the PvP Rune and Sigil system. Nothing you get on Tyria helps you in PvP.

WvW is another matter entirely, however, and one I am not familiar with enough to comment on, but here your armour stats would be taken into account.

As for your Recipe question: You retain all recipes you have ever consumed, regardless of your ability to craft them or not.

If you are speaking about ascended, craft berzerker and swap stats in m. Forge. If exotic hot stats are very expensive so i wouldnt bother and craft berserker/ assasis. Speaking about pve

In WvW, you can choose the legacy armor reward track and eventually kit yourself with exotics of any stat sets.Exotic is more than enough for WvW.There are a few builds for WvW depending on group or solo roaming, metabattle is a good starting point to read of a few builds.

I would focus on ascended weapons before armor. Which means you'll need weaponsmith and artificer depending on the weapons you'll be using for mesmer.Ascended weapon sets will be a little easier to start with than armor and the stats, afaik, make a greater difference to attack power than asceneded armor vs exotic.

you retain all recipes once consumed, and they're account bound. So all characters have access to them.