QUOTE(Cats Lover @ Oct 17 2013, 18:39)

What is the cheapest and easiest way to increase the Forge level?
To repeat to buy a crude heavy armor and upgrade its mitigations, or to buy a crude staff and upgrade its prof.?
What's there to know, the point of forging crude equipment is to lessen the impact of forging has on your purse. You can find the price of any binding from the Item shop bot and the cost for low grade materials, you just need to pick the lowest costing option.
The only reason for increasing your forge level is to be able to recover up to 90% of bindings and materials from an equipment to be salvaged, instead of 80% for those with no forge experience. Forging a crude equipment might be the most cost effective method to gain forging experience, but in order for you to get to the 90% recovery rate will still require a very significant amount of credits. I have forged 65 times on 4 pieces of equipment and I am only at Forge Lv4, Novice. I have no idea where I am at on the recovery scale but I don't care, I am forging to make my equipment better and not just for the sake of gaining forging experience.