Guild Wars 2

Credentials: I am 400 Leatherworking and working on 400 Huntsman. I also have 400 cooking, if that matters. I’m part of a network of crafters, and together represent all professions at 400. I’ve made most of my wealth in the past few days, and I’m currently around 40g and counting. Before that, I spent weeks learning what’s profitable in this game. It is not crafting.

So why am I (and may others) saying that crafting sucks? Here’s why:

• You can only craft one set of items per tier. There are dozens of unique looking item sets at every level tier, from drops, dungeons, and vendors. People have many different tastes. Crafting is having a restaurant that only serves a single dish, while the joint next door has a whole buffet. How do you expect to get any business? This is broken.

• The cost of crafted items are completely out of balance with drop rates. This makes crafted items much more expensive than looted items of the same stats. This wouldn’t be an issue if crafted items had something unique about them to compensate. They don’t.

• I feel like crafting is designed as a leveling gimmick, and players are meant to buy themselves experience, not make anything of value. This is why the market is filled with crafted items selling at major losses. The fact that exotic recipes are duct-taped onto the end of crafting does not justify it as a profession for making things.

I don’t know why crafting was designed this way. It’s great for leveling your character and wasting time/money. In some very small corners of the market, crafting can actually be profitable. But those minor victories do not paint over the worst attribute of crafting, and that is making something of value. This is where crafting fails horribly, and this is why crafting is broken.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix crafting. Here’s how:

• Give us more sets to craft. We need to be able to craft more than a singe set per tier. Allow us to discover new sets, or reverse engineer sets from dropped loot. Crafting needs more eye candy.

• Give crafted items more perks, to make up for being more expensive. I believe some crafted items have a lower level requirement for their stats, which is a start. It would be nice to craft coats with two upgrade slots, or possibly give crafted items slightly better stats than dropped ones. Even a small increase would help immensely.

• Give us pre-400 recipes that do not grant discovery or experience, so you can justify giving us better recipes. I understand the imbalance in giving recipes that are valuable in both gold and experience, so remove one and allow us to make marketable recipes at lower levels.

• Allow us to sell upgraded items. I can craft both the items and upgrades, and sell them separately. But if I want to put them together, I can’t sell them anymore? Everyone is allowed to sell dropped items with upgrades, but not crafters? That does not make any sense! Please remove this silly restriction!

• Allow us to transmute items, or upgrade items to a higher class/level, so that crafters can recycle visually appealing low level items into something useful. I don’t know if this is technically possible with your item database, but this would add such a level of depth to crafting, that other games would pale in comparison.

• Give us an auction house and trade chat. I could make an entire thread on how much of a mistake it was to not include these two things. The tradepost was designed for commodities and low value items, not high-end items. This is the reason why exotics are an incredible pain to sell at decent value, including crafted ones. I’m tired of babysitting buy orders every 5 minutes, or losing 5% on a listing fee because someone undercut me by 1 copper. There’s a much better way, we invented it a long time ago, it’s called an auction house.

• At the very least, please give us trade chat and C.O.D mail. These are very basic features and there’s absolutely no excuse for it to be missing in GW2 . I don’t want to hawk my expensive wares in map chat, but the tradepost is awful and there’s no other alternatives. Please fix this!*

I want to close this post by saying thank you to Arenanet for making such a wonderful game. There are a few things that need some more TLC from you guys, especially crafting, but overall the game is wonderful and I have enjoyed it very much. Thank you for reading!

Edit: Based on Strzalka’s advice, I changed the thread title to something less offensive. Thanks!

Edit2: Based on the moderator rules, I changed the post title again. ^^

I must say that you are spot on sir. I do love crafting, and discovering new recipes is a constant joy. However the terrible cost/profit ratio and the lack of unique crafting items is a slight turn off.
I think it would be neat if some of the professions could cross-craft. (Ex. crafting jewels to place into high lvl armor sets or weapons with unique skins)

However the game is young and I believe there is more than enough time to implement even more crafter friendly features into this already amazing game.

Very good well written post OP. I cannot disagree with any part of it. Id love to see your fixes implemented.

Please, implement some (if not all) these fixes.

ANet, you guys got the mechanics all correct. Very easy to learn but also suitable for master crafters as well.

But it needs fixing.

I am currently a level 275ish Armorsmith, and I am level 62 warrior.

Most of the stuff I make always ends up being sold, because 1. the armor looks so bland and 2. dropped items tend to be better.

The only reason why I keep crafting is not for the armor sets, but just for the experience and to get 400 so I can craft my own 80 armor.

But I hate crafting right now. It just eats up all my money and doesn’t give much in return.

Maybe once I hit 400 I might see the value when i can craft some kickass stuff. But right now its just one way to get a few levels.

Most posts I see on “why crafting is broken” are people whining about stupid things, trying to get their way, and mostly because they want to make higher-end gear faster and cheaper because they don’t want to farm like the rest of us.

This, however, I find completely accurate and every idea is appealing. Also, a proper trading system – every single game I’ve ever played has one. The trading post is always bugged out and not a viable option for more expensive items, especially considering we don’t get our listing fees back. One way to fix that, though, would be the ability to edit an existing posting or “Relist”, allowing us to adjust the price, without any further listing fees. Take people selling exotics and legendary items right now – some 50g+. The listing fee on that is quite a lot, so having to relist and pay the fees twice? Not helpful, anet.

I’m pretty sour about not having a proper trade-between-players option. Also, yes on making upgraded items not account-bound. That’s just ridiculous.

You can transmute with stones, as far as appearance goes – so you can craft an item and use the appearance of another item, if you really want. That’s usually what I do. I just wish I could choose the appearance of the items I craft – especially armor. There are multiple types of medium armor. Most of the crafted ones? Not as appealing.

Spot on. I hope ArenaNet implements your ideas.

Great post! I really hope that at least something from that list will be implemented.
As for now… Crafting for level up – it’s just wrong, i think. Profit? Forget about that, crafting for profit is too dull and uninteresting.
Maybe that was intentional, to make crafting useless money sink. I don’t know for sure.
I just speculate on TP and waste profit on crafting and discoveries.

And about listing tax. Inability to change sell orders without losing profit – that’s final and fatal strike.

I agree on what’s wrong with crafting, but I’m not sure all of your solutions are the answer. Fisrtly, they can’t makr crafted items better stats, as the whole level playing field of the game would turn back into a best-gear-wins situation. This is one of the issues as crafting gets it’s inherent value from making something “better” or more accessible than loot, which at the moment it isn’t.

Wth the system being so accessible to everyone, the fact we have thousands ++ of people all able to make the exact same thing I see as a lot of the devaluation of crafted materials. I would like to see uniquely obtainable recipes that are in demand for some reason, that you have to put considerable work into getting, be introduced.

Even then, with such a large player base, making something truly unique is almost impossile, and the structure of the TP does not allow unique items to be listed, there has to be set pieces so they can be sorted/searched/stacked. I think this may be one of the biggest limitations to how the crafting system can be customised. One of my ideas in beta was to allow us to sell specific coloured pieces, giving crafters and incentive to be dye completionists, so they could sell custom coloured sets. But alas, it seems this is not possible due the TP limitations as well, and may also be why we can’t sell upgraded items.

I was originally focussing on Chef, dues to the consumable and “high level” nature making it valuable. Unfortunately, since all the power levellers raced to 400 and everyone can make their own or their friends food for nothing now, and with no merchant aloud to keep prices up, food it cost be 1s to make, doesn’t sell for 2c on the TP, making. Chef a dead craft while all these 400 levels exist, unless something new is added that wasn’t automatically available, or available easily to these people who have no interest in crafting really, but were just in it for the levels.

Oversupply and undervalue. Some of your suggestions would help, and it’s a great summary, I’m just wondering if it’s too late to shut the gate after the horse has bolted.

Allow us to transmute items, or upgrade items to a higher class/level, so that crafters can recycle visually appealing low level items into something useful.
Thats kinda part of their gem shop… You know transmutation stones, i dont like that we cant name em ourself while making em soulbound and that transmuting 2 items that you would wanna sell gives you a soulbound item, but it is part of the “profit model”.

It’s really a beating to craft at your level. I tend to out level the gear I’m trying to craft because of the xp reward. This seems very odd. Not to mention how parsed out crafting nodes are making it very tedious to acquire and also adding to the fact that you will have to avoid killing anything less you get XP and once again out level anything your actually trying to craft and “use”. I like the crafting system itself but it’s implementation is flawed.

I agree with the changes you recommend. But do think they should give either less required mats for item crafting or just more nodes to farm. Feels very tedious ATM and like I said the XP reward throws us off. Maybe the reskin idea you made would suffice so we can actually still “use” the item we were looking to craft and not just out level it.

That sums it up pretty well. The only thing I want to elaborate on are the skins and trade. As already pointed out, they have tranmutation stones which are monetized. So I doubt crafters will be able to choose different skins.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It gives a reason for the players to accomplish whatever task is necessary to get a piece of gear with the look they want, instead of a crafter handing it to them. Keeps people out in the world and then the player can use his stone to pick the look they want. I realize that skins can add value to a crafted item if they are unique and attractive but I’m not sure if that would work in this system, even if all your other changes are implemented.

Lastly, although it is artificial, I like that all trading must be done through the Post. It helps keep the place active.

When I read the title of your topic I thought… well here is someone who thinks he got it, don’t know if I will agree…

I read your post und must say… you got it.

The worst thing I think that currently – at least with tailor – the stuff you can craft looks worse and worse to me. The silk light armor is one of the most rediculous stuff I have ever seen in an MMO. It almost felt as if someone wanted to nag me because I where so crazy investing so much time in a computer game…

MightySkip.7091:

It gives a reason for the players to accomplish whatever task is necessary to get a piece of gear with the look they want.

While I am totally against grinding – especially for aesthetics – the problem is that the current system does not work for anybody…

If you’re in the “I want to earn my good looks” department, you get the best looking armor as story quest reward before level 20. So no accomplishment there.

If you’re in the “I want to craft cool stuff” department, you’re completely lost, at least until you reach max level.

great post OP i could not agree more especially with……..‘The cost of crafted items are completely out of balance with drop rates.’

i have stopped crafting because with the money i make off selling mats + regular drops, rather than using a salvage kit, i can afford pretty great gear anyway….so why craft….

I think its very fixable and yes i like this game quite a bit as well, however if i was dedicated crafter i might feel very disappointed .

I had made a post on about what my Ideal MMO would be and one of the sections was on Crafting:

you can check out the link here,
http://spaceblasterx.blogspot.com/2012/07/design-my-ideal-mmo-part-3-crafting.html

But what I want to pull from that post is the ability to have a wide variety of results based on the skill of the crafter. With GW2 being a heavily skill based game requiring good timing on skills and planning for various fights, I think a crafting system in which Crafting results are determined by skill based minigames would be interesting and a lot of fun.

Being able to find high level mats and then put them at risk to gain a special reward for your skill in crafting would be a lot of fun. Many games (and it seems GW2 employs this a lot) facilitate risk vs reward because it makes doing something worthwhile. Not many games use this system in regards to Crafting however and to me at least it is a shame.

I don’t mean you have a % chance to lose mats no matter what, but that your skill level would determine the result of your crafting. For example, a click based mini game comes up with armorsmithing and you click to “hammer out” the ingots for your armor. If you click every icon that pops up in time and with accuracy, your armor would be say: Masterful Iron Haubark, as opposed to Iron Haubark or if you suck at the mini game, Weak Iron Haubark.

Now, I don’t really think GW2 has the resources to put this in the game at this time, which is a shame, because I think this would make crafting not only worthwhile to turn a profit, but fun as well.

TL;DR: Crafting needs more risk vs reward involved, but not based on luck.

Auction houses suck.
C.O.D. is awesome.

THAT IS A LOT OF WORDS!! I MAKE COOKIES!! Given up on leveling up anymore, it’s a waste of time.

I agree with you, bu I believe what you are saying is too extreme. I’d say we should be allowed to craft Dungeon Sets and Mystic Forge Legendaries or Mystic Weapons at a reduced cost which rewards you for leveling your crafting skill. That or reduce crafting prices a bit, a very tiny bit.

Crafing flawlessly follows GW1’s itemization model, which is :
1. Maxed out items are accessible to all players
2. Cool looking items are hard to get

I love this boh in GW1 and GW2, ArenaNET has done an awesome job and we shouldn’t go to such extremes criticizing it.

TLDR : Exotic crafted level 80 medium armor looks better than all dungeon armors…

I agree to OP’s post! Very well written and good to understand. +1

I disagree with your solutions (at least the core one). The reason crafting is pointless is because everyone can do it. You can’t get someone to pay you a profit when 1000’s of other people are offering the same service, AND when you can do it yourself.

There is absolutely zero barrier to entry for crafting, preventing any kind of unique feel between professions.

This can be fixed in a few ways:

1) You need specialization in disciplines. This splits up the amount of people who can do any one thing. But realistically due to the amount of people using the trading post, there would need to be a HUGE amount of specializations to accomplish anything. Upwards to the amount of servers.

2) Have many more ‘unique’ and ‘rare’ recipe drops. You said have more crafting options…youre on the right track, but they need to be rare drops.

This is fundamental game design which has been in WoW since the start. There is a REASON its there. The TP currently has nearly everything selling at cost because there are too many people(everyone) doing the same thing. No one offers anything customized or unique.

The only way to make crafting a viable way to make money in any game is to put severe barriers to it, so that only a small percentage of players actually does it.

If everyone can do it, then just about everyone WILL do it. As it stands, the number of people that just want to buy crafted gear are vastly outnumbered by the number of people that want to craft. As a result, almost everyone wants crafting materials, while almost no one wants crafted goods (because they can make them themselves). Mats have higher demand than supply, thus prices are high. Crafted good have higher supply than demand, thus prices are low. Taken together, cost to make an item > price of item. This will never change until the vast majority of the player base becomes non-crafters, which will be never.

I do like most the points you have made. However, I don’t feel that the thread heading is appropriate. Coming from a Customer support background in Video Games, if someone starts off in such a manner as “This sucks” I immediately lose respect for anything that follows. I did take the time to read your post though and agree with your points.

I also don’t think “Crafting” sucks, I feel that a more accurate statement would be that “Being a Crafter” sucks. Because the actual system of crafting I think is actually really well done. The interface, the access to storage, the various mechanics of crafting/refining in bulk, are all really excellent ideas.

Strzalka.9451:

I do like most the points you have made. However, I don’t feel that the thread heading is appropriate. Coming from a Customer support background in Video Games, if someone starts off in such a manner as “This sucks” I immediately lose respect for anything that follows. I did take the time to read your post though and agree with your points.

I completely agree. I was kind of in a rush and so I should have worded the title better. I changed based on your suggestion. :-D

I don’t believe crafting was added to make money, nor should that be a requirement of the crafting system. The whole point of the game is to have fun, and crafting is fun as it’s not a simple system, and getting the materials is a challenge all to itself. I don’t want that challenge raised to the point where it takes excessive farming, then it won’t be fun, but it may then be profitable.

What could ruin crafting for me is the lack of decent skins. You would think a craftsman would be able to have some control over what his product looks like. I am only at tier 2 so far, and already I have had to transmute my crafted armor to keep the looks of tier 1 as I could not stand to wear it.

I don’t like the idea that I may have to spend real money to be able to craft armor that looks cool. I see that a few Karma vendors sell armor recipes. Maybe they can have really nice skin recipes for a high (but not ridiculous) cost.

Since I am still not very far along, I am not sure what that fourth slot was for, but I was hoping it was an ingredient that would modify the skin.

All of the OP points are valid and especially the latter part of the post regarding
1) actually making profit by crafting instead of selling the resulting items below mat prices
2) selling items on TP is a no go at 15% cut and being undercut all of the time
are of critical importance.

About making gold with crafting: right now, i think there is too much offer, because of the large number of players who are powerleveling their professions buying gold with gems, and not really worrying about what they craft.

These people WILL reach the cap and hopefully cease to sell exotics for silvers. I really hope so

Till then, crafting to sell is a waste of time. Farming materials to craft and see that someone sells for half the material costs really depress me. I am crafting only what is needed to level up (the barely minimum) and will go back to rare and exotic recipe when the fuss is lower (hopefully with the migration of WoW panda players ).

The OP points are all valid, except the auction house. Trading post is fine, the problem is inflation, not the system. The TP will work fine with fewer powercrafter selling stuff for nothing.

My biggest problem with crafting right now is the extremely low drop rate on stuff like scales, bones, and blood in the level 45 – 50 zones. You just don’t get enough of these mats to be able to keep your crafting up with how fast you level. This wasn’t a problem in the lower level areas so it seems like a tuning issue to me. Especially considering that you need about double the amount mats for rare recipes.

Another problem with the TC is that I think a lot of players abuse the ability to be able to post stuff anywhere and essentially turn the TC into an “insta-vendor” that they can sell to at any time, anywhere on the map. This could easily be why you’re seeing so many goods selling on TC at vendor price. As convenient as it might be I’d actually like to see this option disabled, forcing players to be at a TC agent in order to sell. Like the old days.

When it comes to crafting unique looking items, there are recipes strewn throughout the game from various merchants that allow you to craft such items.

Crafting has the recipes just given to you at X levels, the recipes you get through the discovery system, Mystic Forge recipes, and then recipes you have to buy from these special merchants.

An example of what I’m talking about is the Grawl weapon recipe you can get from the Grawl merchant in the Norn starting zone.

Bravo, KDragon. Excellent post(s) and points. I hope someone from ANet reads them and takes note.

Jewelcrafting on my character is around 330. My Artificing is at 230 and that’s AFTER I went to the Trading Post to buy several vials of blood and such.

JC is the only profession that really seems to have the intended flowing design path. As you quest and explore, you mine what you find and you generally have enough materials to push the profession up a few levels depending on how lucky you get with gems (This is made easier as later on trees can have hidden stashes that carry the gems you need).

All the other professions need large amounts of enemy only drops meaning that where with Jewelcrafting your exploration and normal gameplay will guide the leveling along the other professions require you to stop and grind a certain section of enemies and hoping you get several of their drops.

400AS/400WS here, and I agree. All the stuff I craft looks freakingkitten and I don’t even know WHAT I am crafting until it is discovered/done. I can make Rare and Exotic Heavy Armor that is either Berserker/spiky looking, or Draconic armor that looks like I am wearing a freaking dress. The Rare and Exotic Weapons I make are Krait and Pearl, can we get any more bad looking? Give us more options, and more customize-ability.

Honestly, you should make crafting the cornerstone to everything in the game and just ditch karma all together. Make Karma give you the ability to buy recipe looks for gear/weapons, or special materials. But making everything from crafting look stupid as hell, while having all the good looking stuff from Karma Vendors and drops is stupid.

The best looking stuff should be a combination of all things in the game (like the legendary weapon stuff), I would like to see similar stuff in game that is not as large of a commitment, as well as armor that is even legendary.

Hell, maybe some of this stuff is there, we just haven’t found it yet. But overall, I am pretty disappointed at what I have access to at max level crafting. And of course, the material costs are justkitten You can sell mats for more than the items themselves. This is why I think more focus needs to get put on crafting, and less on stupid stats such as magic find and items just dropping left and right for nothing.

Am I allowed to bump? Because this thread is an amazing suggestion!

I salute you for getting to leatherworking 400. I’m stuck at 112 because I can’t get another thin leather and wool. Before that it was rawhide and jute. The drop rates on mats for leatherworking suck once you out level the zones.

I have yet to see a “critical” craft. Am I correct in believing that these exist? I have always loved a “+1” craft system… but my goodness if criticals exist, I have yet to see them at 400 Armorsmithing. Very unfortunate, because I think these could be better incorporated (even if it is a small visual upgrade or small stat upgrade).

OP, great post. I refuse to level a second craft, because I have to save money for exotics… quite sad.

I’ve found that leatherworking has been useful for filling the gaps in my rogue’s armor, and armorcraft/weaponsmith has been useful in the same way for my guardian. I’ve definitely had to pull over and farm a bit of the rare mats occasionally, but not so much that it has annoyed me. So I guess I don’t agree that it’s useless or broken.

However, I do think that a couple of your suggestions are good. I’m not sure on the rationale behind not allowing upgraded items to be sold — is it perhaps to prevent them from being broken down and sold at a profit? I’m too lazy to do the math right now, but that seems unlikely.

Don’t agree with the trade chat, only because it always devolves into some terrible spam filled dirge channel (my experience from AoC, WoW, and Rift anyway… I think the local chat in Lion’s Arch should be fine for that type of thing.

On the other hand, a COD option in mail would be nice.

Findecano.8124:

I have yet to see a “critical” craft. Am I correct in believing that these exist? I have always loved a “+1” craft system… but my goodness if criticals exist, I have yet to see them at 400 Armorsmithing. Very unfortunate, because I think these could be better incorporated (even if it is a small visual upgrade or small stat upgrade).

OP, great post. I refuse to level a second craft, because I have to save money for exotics… quite sad.

you definitely have. crits in crafting don’t change the stats, just give additional xp.
i’m of the impression that crafter can learn new sets beyond the crafted default (theres something you do with a chestpiece of the desired set, a bunch of mats and something else at the mystic forge and you get a recipe for a box of that armor) but there may be limitations to that.

the problem is that it’s too easy to loot something equivilant to what can be crafted. looking at the difference in the price of copper and iron, i’d say that most people haven’t gotten their crafting very far. if there was something unique about crafted items (maybe if looted items didn’t have the sigil/rune slots?) then maybe you’d see it become worthwhile. currently it’s only a method of getting items with specific mods (love my berserker lb).

I support this message. +1

I am pro-rare recipes that require a significant effort to acquire. Something like a mark of mastering over crafting, which pretty much require you to find rare materials (all soul bound) around the game world and craft this ultra rare item. So pretty much legendary recipes.

I am not for better stats, because that will just lead to the same problem. Everybody will want to do it for the better stats, but a lot less people want to do things for the cosmetic appearance which will reduce the amount of crafters w/o Arenanet doing the dirty work directly.

Completely agree with your assessment. I hope something can be done to address these problems.

Great ideas…. problem is …. they are so backed up with bugged out content, class balance, exploits, bots, blah blah etc etc… By the time they actually get time to implement or even start looking into this issue/change most people will already be over the general crafting items and onto exotics.

In the long run I think one of the biggest hits to crafting was allowing players to max out every profession. It should have been limited to 2 and maybe added SLIGHT unique bonuses available only to the crafter. Nothing overpowering but …for example… if a cook can only make 30 min foods for other people then he can proc hour long duration foods that are soulbound. Or even on armor or weapon crafting you can proc soulbound higher quality versions of the intended piece.