Guild Wars 2

Cooking is useful for endgame yet the other professions seem pointless

e.g Mystic forge > every profession except cooking

Scrap mystic forge and let crafters gain rare recipes/discoveries and lets have a nice economy

Used to be able to make a small profit selling rare lvl 80 weapons. Its useful if you plan on throwing a bunch in the MF as well, since its usually a lil cheaper to craft them yourself than buy it off the TP.

None of the crafts are meant to be very profitable. Max-stat equipment in the GW series is meant to be reasonably easy to obtain.

I make a bit of money crafting daggers, which people then toss into the mystic forge, or I salvage them for ecto, which considering the price of ecto keeps rising makes is better sense financially.

I don’t know how demanded the food stuff is, that you can craft with 400 skill, but below 400 I haven’t seen prices higher than 2s for any food. And the 1.5 – 2s were mostly on Halloween food. So to me, cooking seems not really profitable. Especially when the costs of raw materials for a piece of food is 5s or more. And 5s is easily reached if yopur recipe requires vanilla or the likes. Some materials cost 5-6s alone.

So unless the 400-food is really demanded and prices are around 4-5s a piece, cooking is unprofitable. Other professions can at least make some money back by selling stuff to players or NPCs or salvaging rare stuff for ectos.

The reason I maxed out cooking on my Mesmer is because of the exp gain and the fact that I am able to make decent buffs for my group members when we enter FotM or dungeons.

But I do hope that ANet eventually does something to make crafting profitable. Or at least more useful than for quick levelling of twinks.

Are we talking profitable, or usefulness in general? Because I don’t think any of the crafting trades were meant to be profitable.

As for usefulness, cooking gives you buff food, the weapon making crafts give you the second buff (Weaponsmith=sharpening stones, Articifer=potions, Huntsman=maintenence oils), and the armor making crafts all can make bags.

And where do you think your exotic weapons, armor and jewelry are coming from? Mob drops from farming? Yeah, no. They are being crafted by players.

You also can’t discount the MASSIVE amount of XP you get from getting a trade from 0 to 400. At level 80, I was getting a good 5 full levels worth of XP per trade. That’s 5 skill points. It can get you from 70 to 80 just sitting in Lion’s Arch. And for those of you that care about achievement points, or whatever ANET calls them, you get a bunch for getting a trade from 0 to 400.

Actually, crafting has been profitable. But it’s not easy or straightforward, because GW2 has (mostly) an efficient market economy. Here’s the explanation:
http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/crafting/How-can-crafting-be-made-profitable/first#post672289

TL,DR – you’re in competition with all the other players (competitive free market, right?), so you have to out-compete them to make a profit. If you enjoy that, great! If it’s not your favorite thing, enjoy a different part of the game and leave the competitive free market stuff to the players who enjoy it.