Guild Wars 2

Do any of you craft and wear your own gear and armor as you level up?

I noticed that I increase in character levels faster that I can obtain the materials for gear and armor. I could be doing something wrong or I just may not understand how the game is designed for crafting. I find materials very hard to get if you want to make your own stuff as you increase in levels.

I am wearing my exotic crafted tailoring armor. I like it the best.

Yes, I craft all the gear I use. It does take a little patience to farm the mat’s, but not a problem for me.

I’ve never seemed to have an issue with this once I got past about level 20.

Normally I don’t have to make a full set, just fill in the holes. I just hit level 70 last night and I’m still wearing my lvl 65 gear (the blue 70 stuff isn’t really an upgrade).

Normally I use the cheapest discovery path (say 4 cheapest items and 2 cheapest insignia) but I’ll go out of my way to discover a pattern I want for myself.

It is important to gather everything you can. Buy filler at the TP, and sell off stuff you don’t need to raise money.

I have this issue mostly when reaching the Masterwork tiers, as those are the ones that require the most of the hard to get materials. Since we level up rather quickly, by the time I have finished getting all materials and crafted everything for a given tier, it’s almost time to begin crafting the next tier…

crafting low level gear is pretty useless.you will level faster than you can gather the mats.if you buy them then you might as well just buy the gear

only gear i craft is lvl80 exotics

I was until I realized it is not worth it. I have yet to have to spend more than 30s for a set of gear at level 60 and yet im making several gold by selling all the materials I gather every 5 levels.

im sitting on over 25 gold already…Anet needs to drop the amount of rare materials needed to level up crafting to make it remotely worth it.

wolonggong.3469:

I was until I realized it is not worth it. I have yet to have to spend more than 30s for a set of gear at level 60 and yet im making several gold by selling all the materials I gather every 5 levels.

im sitting on over 25 gold already…Anet needs to drop the amount of rare materials needed to level up crafting to make it remotely worth it.

So you just want to have your cake and eat it too. While the supply is at current level you get to reap the benefits by selling the material and now that you are done selling you want ANet to increase supply so you can guy them back for a lower price.

Diross Asi.8632:

Do any of you craft and wear your own gear and armor as you level up?

I noticed that I increase in character levels faster that I can obtain the materials for gear and armor. I could be doing something wrong or I just may not understand how the game is designed for crafting. I find materials very hard to get if you want to make your own stuff as you increase in levels.

Crafting in this game is a massive grind and boring as watching your washing machine cycle.

You need 10000000000000000000 rare ingredients which drop from mobs. So to level up crafting you will need to kill 10000 cave bats for tier 1 blood then 1000 wamp bats for tier 2 blood followed by 10000 monster bats for tier 3 blood followed by 10000 supper bats for tier 4 blood followed by 10000 mega bats for tier 5 blood followed by 10000 legendary bats for tier 6 blood etc etc etc….. by the time you collect all this you will have already leveled five atls to level 80 and you will not have equipped any one them with self crafted goods past level 20.

Now as a human, female, medium armor thief I only like the female duelist armor and human female tier 3 cultural armors. I do not like any of the crafted armor models. So, even if I make or buy crafted level 80 armor I need to transmute it to look like non crafted armor.

Or you could just take a little of that silver from the greens that dropped killing a few bats for your story or while digging in a cave for a skill point and buy the blood on the TP, or better you could buy the insignia some other guy is losing money on and use it to skill up.

You were never supposed to farm every rare item yourself.

I do. I’m leveling two characters together, each one has a crafting skill them use for theirself. One is weaponsmith, the other is jeweler, so there’s basicly no overlap between materials used. I can usually craft an item I want to use a few levels before I need it, and I’ve only spent a few silver on mats from the TP.

I love crafting in this game. In other games I’ve played, the only good crafted gear was the pieces you can only make at the highest level. In this game, from the first level to end, all the gear I made to level the craft was an upgrade for my character. I didn’t feel it was a grind at all, or difficult to level at all. I went from 1 to 80 and always had an armor set that was better than the pieces I could find around the world.

Crafted gear is all I wear on my characters. Starting at 20 the first tier of Masterwork, then 35, 50, 65, and at 80. Armor Weapons and Jewelry. I love crafting. Recipes is the only thing I have spent Karma on.

i’ve been wearing some crafted gear while leveling up. i just hit 400 armorsmith last night. so going to be working on some exotic armors (which is what i’ve been wanting to do, and now i have the ability to craft ‘em, i don’t mind farming for the mats : ))) gonna take a while though lol)

Just reached lvl 35 and I am only 120 Small Scales short of my epic armor/weapon combination… 15 Small Scales for 6 armor pieces and 2 weapons each….

I hope diminishing returns wont hit me too hard :-)

And for my lvl 50 set I realize that I will have to start farming a lot sooner – or get the money to buy the Scales.

I’ve crafted my entire current outfit, which is the strongest crafted armor, weapons, and the best jewelry and upgrades I could make or buy. (I made the armor and jewelry, bought the weapons.) I don’t have any trouble getting materials, and I farm maybe a tenth of what I use.

Probably this is because I collect as much arbitrage off the trading post as I am able to do. Also, I did nothing but collect arbitrage all week, since with my work schedule all I had time to do was log in, collect my purchases and profits, put my new stuff on the market, search around the market for a few more opportunities, post a few buy orders, log out. Crafting is easy if you’re willing to use the market the way it wants to be used, and not the way you expect it should be used.

Between my husband and me we have jewelry, tailoring, leatherworking and weaponsmithing at 400.
As we lvled we outfitted each-other in full gear, that we crafted. It is not hard, it is not a grind and it is very rewarding.
All we did was play the game, gather what you come across, salvage whites and vendor blues and greens. At 80 salvage yellows and any exotics you don’t want yourself.
We sold mats we didn’t need, supplied eachother and we have the satisfaction of wearing our own gear made to our specs. Working on our exotics now.
We love crafting in this game.
I recently started crafting on my alts as they level as well- I can’t imagine not crafting.

Chaorx.2178:

Just reached lvl 35 and I am only 120 Small Scales short of my epic armor/weapon combination… 15 Small Scales for 6 armor pieces and 2 weapons each….

I hope diminishing returns wont hit me too hard :-)

And for my lvl 50 set I realize that I will have to start farming a lot sooner – or get the money to buy the Scales.

Buy the insignias they are a LOT cheaper than the scales.

Sell the extra stuff you don’t need to afford what you do need.

BTW getting anything higher than greens at 35 is a waste of $$.

I was just going to make a similar post to to the op. To me crafting (leatherworking) feels like a Catch 22.

To craft level 50 gear by the time I got the mats I’m level 60 !

I want to make and wear my crafted gear but to do so I go out salvage everything to collect materials but in doing so I’ve out levelled what I can craft. Its really off putting I’m enjoying crafting but am always about 5 to 10 levels behind my actual character level.

Morrigan.2809:

Between my husband and me we have jewelry, tailoring, leatherworking and weaponsmithing at 400.
As we lvled we outfitted each-other in full gear, that we crafted. It is not hard, it is not a grind and it is very rewarding.
All we did was play the game, gather what you come across, salvage whites and vendor blues and greens. At 80 salvage yellows and any exotics you don’t want yourself.
We sold mats we didn’t need, supplied eachother and we have the satisfaction of wearing our own gear made to our specs. Working on our exotics now.
We love crafting in this game.
I recently started crafting on my alts as they level as well- I can’t imagine not crafting.

The incredible disparity in experiences between what this player encountered & my own (& that of some of the others posting here) really leads me to wonder what the kitten is going on.

I can NOT keep up my crafting. I ‘just play the game’, save everything I need, break down ALL whites, use money from selling blues & greens to buy more mats – nope, still not enough mats or silver to craft what I need & OH LOOK now I’m 5 levels higher & into another tier of stuff that I still can’t make anyway! GAH!

I can understand those who make a ton of silver playing the market & fund their crafting this way – I wish I had that skill (& yup, I’ve read & watched plenty of guides, but there is a good reason I’m not working in the financial sector IRL – I SUCK at this stuff!). But that some people can just wander around & have sufficient mats & silver just rain down upon them – I simply cannot comprehend how this is possible. Is there a secret ANet RNG code attached to every account, & I just got stuck w/ one of the cruddy ones? /tinfoilhat :p

Example: This weekend I went farming in a zone just below my level (50 at the time, was the 40-50 zone just east of Ascalonian Plains, I forget the name). Harvest, harvest, harvest, do the hearts & stuff while I’m there (for silver & cloth/leather scraps drops & white item salvages). By the end I had… not enough wood, not enough leather, not enough gold ore, not enough iron ore, not enough of the inscription mats, BARELY enough silver to buy what I needed to get 2 of the 4 crafts up that I needed to equip myself (& seriously cut into my level 60 training manual savings fund at that – & this is even after selling the cooking mats that I don’t use), & OH YEAH now I’m level 55 & need MORE mats to level up the skills for a whole new tier!

So – kitten it. The only game I’ve seen that really got low level crafting right was EQ2 (after one major revamp & a few retunings) – you could get your mats w/o outleveling yourself, craft w/o outleveling yourself, & (w/ enough gathering time invested to get rare mats) get some really good leveling gear out of it. Every other game seems to run into the same problem I’m encountering here, where it’s just insanely difficult to keep up for many players (& I really want to get that secret ANet RNG code the lucky ones have! ;p )

Leather/Cloth I’ve had to buy sometimes (I actually bought all my rugged since it was so dirt cheep and I wasn’t in those zones yet) but metal and wood, never.

Perhaps I level slower than you guys. I do know that I aggressively go after nodes. I salvaged nearly everything at lower levels, but from about lvl 50 on I only salvage whites. Blues I vendor, and greens I TP/vendor.

Other than the ones from 375+ I haven’t really made an insignia in a while. They are normally 1/3 to 1/2 the price of the mats to make them, and most people’s biggest complaint seems to be the rare materials.

Seriously sell the rare materials on the TP and buy the 3-4 cheaper insignia or inscription.

Buying inscriptions or at least dowels cuts down on the wood you need. Midrange wood right now is selling for about 1s per tree you chop.

I don’t really play the TP. I do look for stuff I can craft at a profit. (I found some buy orders on leg parts that were enough above the mat prices to make about 20s profit, but that wasn’t make it or break it for me.).

Generally I’ve been able to farm the metal/wood, buy insignias, sell extra mats and level each tier for 20-30s time you take off the cost of the stuff I sold/vendored. That’s basically max 2g to level a craft to 400.

Would I be richer if I sold all the mats? Sure, but I have a 400/400 crafter that has basically only bought jewelry and upgrades from the TP.

Most crafts have alternatives to the standard armor/weapon/etc items that you can level up on. For example, everything other than Chef can make sigils on the cheap (at the moment) at certain points.

I haven’t had any issues getting the materials I need for my crafting, BUT… the reason this is the case is because I’m playing 5 different characters, all of whom I’m progressing at the same rate through the game. (I have 3 Scholars, 1 Adventurer and 1 Soldier.) Thus, by the time I’ve cleared Queensdale, Plains of Ashford, Wayfarer Hills, Metrica Province and Caledon Province, consolidated all my accumulated drops and salvaged materials, I had enough to craft 3 sets of Light Armor and way more than enough to craft 1 set of Medium and Heavy Armor, along with sufficient materials to craft weapons for all my characters. Whatever excess I didn’t need I sold on the TP, and bought the runes/sigils I needed for my weapons and armor (since most runes and sigils are dirt cheap on the TP).

Zaxares.5419:

I haven’t had any issues getting the materials I need for my crafting, BUT… the reason this is the case is because I’m playing 5 different characters, all of whom I’m progressing at the same rate through the game. (I have 3 Scholars, 1 Adventurer and 1 Soldier.) Thus, by the time I’ve cleared Queensdale, Plains of Ashford, Wayfarer Hills, Metrica Province and Caledon Province, consolidated all my accumulated drops and salvaged materials, I had enough to craft 3 sets of Light Armor and way more than enough to craft 1 set of Medium and Heavy Armor, along with sufficient materials to craft weapons for all my characters. Whatever excess I didn’t need I sold on the TP, and bought the runes/sigils I needed for my weapons and armor (since most runes and sigils are dirt cheap on the TP).

I am leveling 3 characters in the same way, and I ran into a few spots where I had to buy materials to keep their crafting skills (1 each) up, and that’s with materials I gathered already on my way to 80 with another character (where I did not craft much).

I craft for and equip all of my own characters. I keep all their equipment updated with the exception of drops which may be better than my crafted version.

To be fair though, I have dropped a healthy amount of RLM (via the Game, not 3rd party) on Gems, converting them to gold and buying mats off the trading post. So, those who aren’t spending any RLM, my situation may be different.

Gearing in this game is much different from many MMO’s I’ve played in the past. It appears that gear requirement is determined more by the zones you are playing than your actual character level due to the downranking system. To get the mats for the crafting levels, the game seems designed to encourage exploring multiple appropriate level zones before moving on (also the personal stories take you across the map).

For example if you decide to get all the skill points in the starting areas your actual level may be 25 by the time you are done but you only need gear to level 15 and you will still get some drops that are within a few levels of your actual levels, have access to karma gear and the TP and have accumulated mats to craft zone appropriate gear.

I’ve given up on crafting both leather armor and being a huntsman. The game advertised that it was not implementing grinding, however after buying it I find this not the case at all. This game wasn’t supposed to be a grind-fest like WoW which is what interested me at the beginning.

I spend an entire day farming for mats and the drop rate was so poor in multiple zones that I was only able to advance a couple of levels in crafting. I don’t want to mats off the trade company.

I hear so many people say just buy mats. Mats cost money and a lot of it which will drive me into bankruptcy and utter poverty ingame. For now the only recourse I can think of is to just give up crafting altogehter until I reach level 80. I don’t see any reason to continue when the drop rate is so horrible. I can’t even recommend crafting in this game to a couple of co-workers who are thinking of buying it just to craft in as they are old crafters from Star Wars Galaxies. I didn’t have this problem in WoW or even EverQuest 2, but at least I could make and use things at my current level and keep up with it as I progressed.

Does anyone have comments on my approach to crafting until I get to level 80?
Thanks

Diross Asi.8632:

I spend an entire day farming for mats and the drop rate was so poor in multiple zones that I was only able to advance a couple of levels in crafting. I don’t want to mats off the trade company.

Does anyone have comments on my approach to crafting until I get to level 80?
Thanks

Everyone is right. The secret to not grinding is to sell what you don’t need and buy what you do so you don’t have to grind.

You should actually finish a zone, have 200+ leather 200+ cloth, 300+ wood and 300+ metal and THEN do a 75 skill block of crafting.

You won’t have enough fine mats, but you know what, tons of people are skilling on those same inscriptions, so sell the fine mats you farmed and if it makes sense (it usually will till level 75ish items) and buy the inscriptions everyone else is losing money on.

You will have to do maybe 2-3 more discoveries per block of 75, but the truth is you wanted those discoveries anyway because you wanted to make your armor right?

If you really get hard up for money go farm wood (and everything else) in a Tier 3 or Tier 4 zone. The trees are about 1s each, you can farm 20-30s in 15 min.

(skill on gloves, helms, boots, shoulders, horns, torches, pistols)

No. Absolutely not.

In all cases except tier 6 (400-level) crafting, it is a huge waste of gold to make your own equipment. You will do much better financially to sell the mats you would have used on the TP and then purchase the equipment you want on the TP instead. This is doubly true since the TP-purchased crafting items are listed for a few copper above vendor price. So at the end of the day, you can always wear crafted armor (that you did not make yourself) for a few copper each tier. Take the mats you would have used and sell them if you’d like to make gold.