Guild Wars 2

Seriously is there anything we can craft that anyone actually wants? I spend a lot of time crafting, and have no time nor patience to farm or grind content, and thus had planned to use crafting as my primary source of income in this game. Thus I am perpetually broke. Why is it that working as a rank 400 jeweler costs several times as much money as you can make with it? Why is it that the best quality goods sell for half the value of the mats used to make them? Honestly is crafting only good as a form of power-leveling or to make one account bound item for a legendary? Can’t a craftsman, of any profession, make something good for even a few copper profit?

Define “good”? Level 80 Exotic? Rare?

Well jeweler is difficult simply because of the rise of ascended accessories, rings and amulets. That’ll kill demand right there.

As for cost of materials, well ectos has become the “gold” to hedge against inflation in this game. Players make them from salvage, people hoard them and when they do sell them it’s for nearly as much and sometimes more as the rares players salvage to get them.

Then the rest of T6 basic materials are expensive, due to their rareness in drops.

Also it’s quite often that “subassemblies” are cheaper to buy than to craft from scratch. It costs 27.86s to craft from scratch a T6 Chrysocola Orb. It costs 2.11s to simply buy one. Why? Cost of the T1-T5 dust mats is almost 20s and the T1 gems cost the other 8s that’s why. Even crafting one just from T5 mats will still cost more than 5×.

But why are mats so expensive? Supply and demand. Because of the drop rate, the number of players harvesting them versus the number of players crafting. Players following crafting guides to level up that skill all make the same thing and then all dump them on the TP and accept the loss. Which is good if you are smart enough to buy subassemblies, not so good if you are looking to craft everything from scratch.

And if you do make a shinny that you could make a profit on someone will come along and undercut you with the one they got as a drop. To them the whole thing is profit, they don’t care if they wipe out your margin.

Yea, it’s tough to “make a living” crafting.

Behellagh.1468:

Define “good”?

Anything that sells for more than it cost to make.

Arkham Creed.7358:

Behellagh.1468:

Define “good”?

Anything that sells for more than it cost to make.

Because everyone can craft, and everyone can see the costs of the items involved, so whenever profit margins show up they’re exploited until they close again.
The reason you can’t make money crafting is because everyone wants to get the nearly effortless money of TP flipping/crafting.

There was a point in time when crafting rares was profitable after salvage, but the material costs have went to the dogs.

Arkham Creed.7358:

Behellagh.1468:

Define “good”?

Anything that sells for more than it cost to make.

Every minute of every day, something sells on the TP for more than it costs to make. The trouble is, its not the same thing every minute. Thus if you want to make money crafting, you will also need to study the TP and learn which things you can make and sell for money at any one time. I made, and continue to make, most of my money by crafting, but it took tens of hours researching things, and a spreadsheet I use to track price points of what I work with each day. I could probably do as well running dungeons on a per hour basis except that my play time tends to come in 5 minute chunks, and I am very patient. I am also willing to settle for a gold or two per day.

More fundamentally, for crafting to be profitable you would need three conditions to be true;
1. Crafting didn’t earn XPs, so nobody would be competing with you just because they wanted the free 10 levels.
2. Fewer drops of useful items, forcing people to buy them as they level rather than use drops.
3. Easy earning of money through regular play, coupled with not much to spend it on, so people would happily toss money at buying your crafted goods and go back to doing what they enjoy. Then, of course, you wouldn’t need to earn money as much, and could make it by farming, but if you preferred crafting you could make some money that way.

Notice that all these barriers to making money crafting are baked into the game’s design. If you want the devs to change them, you may have an uphill battle.

The more you all speak of is the hit you take on fees. If you’re crafting an item and not gathering the mats you’re going to lose. It’s up to you to decide if your time is better spent doing something more lucrative. How many hours will it take to gather up a couple stacks of powerful blood so you can craft rares, turn them into ectos and sell those?

You’re losing money as a rank 400 jeweler because you have no business sense, do not understand your market, and are making junk no one wants.

There are tons of profitable jeweler recipes. T6 jewelry floats around a 5% sell/sell margin, and you can do a bit better with buy orders on your materials; the introduction of ascended jewelry hasn’t stunted the margins, only the speed of sales. You can do better than that with a bit of research as well.

A lot of the profit from crafts comes from up-selling your drops. I convert all of my T5 fine materials into finished goods before selling to pocket an additional 20% margin over the price of the raw materials.

There’s a lot of money to be made off of crafts, it just requires a bit of market savvy and research that wasn’t required in other games to be profitable.

Crafting is financially useless because if it were any other way, enough people would jump onto it and drive prices down/up to the point that it becomes financially useless.

Any method that is profitable won’t stay profitable for long. Simple supply/demand.

Mada.5319:

Any method that is profitable won’t stay profitable for long. Simple supply/demand.

It’s simple supply and demand served with a rather large heaping of impatience.

Mada.5319:

Any method that is profitable won’t stay profitable for long. Simple supply/demand.

Not true at all. Lots of methods have remained profitable for a long time. The main reason for this is that serious trading post players demand a real rate of return on their time and investments over and above risk premiums; for example, I don’t touch any flip opportunity that nets me less than 5%, due to the risk premium of needing to re-list it at a loss after a couple days. Low volume items like masterwork dyes can net you 20% or more off of a flip, because they are such low volume that no one wants to bother spending the time to maintain the orders.

As I said, you can make a variety of orichalcum jewelry and list it on the TP at a 5% margin. I’m personally hesitant to do that, because it could take several days for your jewel to sell and you’ll have your money locked up in the meantime – but the 5% margin is there, if you’re willing to wait.

I haven’t put much time into researching them, but T3/T4 rare jewelry has very attractive margins on it. No one bothers with those while leveling up, but the demand is there, and if you want to manufacture T3 rare rings a spot check showed a 25% margin on the high demand recipes. Maybe the volume is low and there isn’t a lot of raw money in it; I don’t know. But it’s worth checking out. The margins are definitely there.

When it comes to crafting, the money losers are the junk that everyone makes while leveling up their professions; random blues and greens are worthless, because they’re being dumped at a loss by someone who just wanted the XP. Outside of that, there are a bunch of profitable opportunities. You just have to do the work to understand what the margins are, what the volumes are, how many people are playing in the space, how the risks line up with your own tolerances, and whether or not you should take a stab.

You can makes loads of money, crafting but you have to know the TP, as well as crafting…

I am not going to spoil it for myself by telling you the secrets…

You can absolutely make money crafting, but as mentioned it isn’t as simple as doing “buy instantly” on something and dumping it into your crafting window. Anything like this would quickly get swamped by increased supply.

What I do is find items either on demand or that have kept a decently high price on the TP, place low buy orders on whatever it takes to make it, craft, and place a sell order on the items. The gw2spidy.com crafting windows can show you where to get started.

As a side note, there’s also opportunities to make money off impatient and inefficient crafters! Every weekend I place buy orders lower than the highest offer on crafting components, then flip those components every time a bunch of people leveling crafting happen to cause over supply. You can start all the way down at <1s items – last month I did copper chains, settings, hooks, and filigrees. I also made some coin flipping level 35-65 masterwork rings, but stopped that because it caused my inventory to get full each time I visited the Black Lion Trader NPC.

(I apologize in advance for getting those jeweler items overmanipulated by posting this.)

Crafting would be worth it if every single piece (or at least 99% of it) of gear had to be made by players. On top of things, there should be no, or very few NPC bought mats needed for crafting. Everything you need should be gather able.

Granted, am mounts of mats used would most likely need to be increased, but that’s not all that bad

PS. This idea comes from playing EVE online.

Because farming mats and selling them to the crafters is what makes profit.

It’s not profitable because it’s based on nearly-free mats and free labor. People power-level it and then sell the crafted stuff at or below cost to get most of their money back. They can’t and don’t produce anything of value.

Maybe if there was a time cost associated with crafting things…

Like in another MMO where your workshops have to store labor before you can produce anything. Since mats are generated out of thin air, the value of labor/hour is the primary factor that determines the price people ask for their items.