Guild Wars 2

So after leveling 2 crafts to lvl 400 I found that the cost to make high end weapons / jewelry was the exact same price give or take, as buying them off the tp. In others words I could farm all the mats then sell them on the tp and make enough to buy the item I farmed the mats for. So what is the point in having my crafting. Nothing apart from legendary req.

I was wondering this, myself.

Well..actually nothing. Or this is what you already think.

Actually, you can even farm dungeons and get your favourite set, and you’ll have the same strong exotic item you will craft with 400.

The point in GW2 is that there isn’t a specific road to get the most powerfull item in the game (apart from legendary of course). There are many, but you choose your own.

I don’t like this. I think it takes away from the dynamic of trade enterprises as a form of entertainment.

I wish the trade skills were more interdependent. It would have made a lot more sense to build these interdependencies to foster player trade for skill tiers. The process of refining materials for other combines and consumables is a fundamental component for viable trade.

Everything is too straightforward. Too many shortcuts in the supply chain exist, abundant raw materials with no need refine into tiers which can be bought and sold are flooding the market.

I was hoping for a more complex system where tailors would make inserts for armorsmiths and smiths would make blunt or sharp heads for arrows made by Huntsmen. These sub-markets would have given crafters a reason to use their skills after hitting 400.

As it stands now, crafting needs some serious work to appease those of us who have loved this element in various MMO’s for over a decade now.

Exactly! you could make ingots for example soulbound so only you can refine them for use of your own gear making the item you create with them higher value than the raw materials, it makes little sense that people can obtain anything they need/want without the need for any crafting. it offers no incentive for people to actually start crafting.

Zaganna.6034:

Well..actually nothing. Or this is what you already think.

Actually, you can even farm dungeons and get your favourite set, and you’ll have the same strong exotic item you will craft with 400.

The point in GW2 is that there isn’t a specific road to get the most powerfull item in the game (apart from legendary of course). There are many, but you choose your own.

doing dungeons will give you rewards, thus you have income whilst getting your armor set. with crafting you loose (in some cases upwards of 10g) then have to gather the mats for your set(the same value as buying them off the tp) so at a guess your down 10g ++. and doing dungeons by the time you achieve your set your up alot lets say 5g. so why in their right mind would anyone choose to do crafting and loose that amount ? vs dungeon farming.

I realized this yesterday after I’ve spent more than 13G on tailoring. The items that were crafted finally were sold to the NPC since the TP prices were lower than vendor prices. All dungeon farmers are at a huge advantage against crafters. Not only do they obtain the armor or weapons they desire, they also obtain rewards and loot which will generate income at the same time. {Minus a few silver for the repairing of course}

I am really disappointed with the high price of crafting, and to make matters worse, my level 80 character tries to craft armor and weapons, and can only craft low level stuff (level 4 or 5) Why? . I also tried to buy raw material from trading post to get up my experience, I spent almost 1 gold and barely got my crafting experience to come up. It just does not seem worth the trouble to craft, I don’t see why people bother, it is cheaper to just buy what you need from trading post.

It depends what you want to learn crafting for. If you want to learn crafting to make yourself a single weapon set than its probably not worth it. If its something you enjoy doing though you can do whatever weapon / armor you want for cheap (no need to buy materials really!) and you can continue doing it and sell those on the TP for an extra income.

Agreed…very dissapointed after spending $150 on the game and leveling Jeweler and Armorer to “400”….as stated, there is at best a 5-10% profit margin in crafting high end items…some you sell at a loss….about the only benifit i felt i gained thru crafting was the extra levels…i actually like the system, but the profit in crafting is just not there…LotRO had the best crafting system i have seen…..worth grinding thru because the high end items were money makers…

There are multiple levels to the issue here. Take for example as a weaponsmith every weapon I try to sell on the TP already has the lowest seller selling at the price of the vendor purchase price. Those who put the items up at this price are foolish, when you account for the listing fee they are actually losing more money then simply vendoring the item.

Right now there are far too many item’s on the TP. One solution could be similar to what they did with the mats at the mystic forge. Make it so four items at the same level could reward you with a vendor gem, which you could sell for double or triple what you would make off of vendoring the items in the first place. This would raise the value on crafted items.

Secondly, all gear (including blues) should be soulbound and/or account-bound on equip. This would also deplete items from the economy.

Honestly, I just use crafting for the XP. Sometimes I can make useful items, sometimes not. Because I’m not max level yet, and I get rewards towards that ultimate goal, I don’t see crafting as a waste of time. You’re going to encounter items that are used for crafting in the world, so you might as well use ’em.

1: while you play you gather materials and if you have a maxed crafting skill you can craft your own items with no cost.
2: the price of rough materials will decrease probably faster than the number of crafters will increase (everyone can gather but not everyone will approach crafting) so the profit margin will be higher
3: learn a discipline gives you tons of xp = skill points = mystic forge
4: for an exotic amulet: rough materials 2.25g – amulet 2.65g it’s almost 20% profit

13g spent for crafting ? you did something wrong. To me for 400jc it took more or less 50s

And not a single care was given today. Or due BWEs.

I agree with pretty much everything said. Especially the part about LOTRO crafting. I spent a lot of time/money being max chef and made a killing profit off food. I see two issues right now

1) The game just came out so a lot of people are still leveling through crafting. That means the items are in high demand (raw mats) and the product are in high supply (finished goods).

2) This issue is more with the TP. The quickest way to match the highest buyer (which is stupid in my opinion) or to match the lowest seller. Now if somebody wanted to mess with the market, they could easily put 1 piece of jute for the vendor price, say 7c, while there are 1000s of jute at 20c (just guessing). Now this will be quickly bought, but if somebody else goes to sell they will see the 7c price, and probably not realize it’s only 1 person selling, so they match 7c. If the timing works out that enough people match/sell before people buy them off the market, the price will drop down to 7c and most likely stay there.

One suggestion is to give a random chance of a rare item when crafting. So everytime you craft an item you would have a 1% of getting say… ectoplasm (for high tiers) or maybe 4/5 weakbloods for lower tiers. Obviously you would have to change the reward and percentage based on the level of crafting and which item (so that people don’t just refine items to exploit the percentage)

Daendur.2357:

4: for an exotic amulet: rough materials 2.25g – amulet 2.65g it’s almost 20% profit

Which, after the 15% cut from the TP leaves you with a slight profit, or most likely a slight loss because you had to repost! Why? because someone else, frustrated by having those hard-earned exotics on the TP for almost a week, decided to undercut you at their own loss.
So yeah, high level crafting is (maybe)fun, but certainly not profitable nor worth it as it is.

the TP cut is there even for rough materials. you cannot compare sell and buy prices.

Daendur.2357:

the TP cut is there even for rough materials. you cannot compare sell and buy prices.

Yes, but as the buyer you don’t care about the profit of the seller. Only what it cost to buy it.

yup, crafting (as a whole) need some fixing here and there to make it a fun and worthy part of the game

1: while you play you gather materials and if you have a maxed crafting skill you can craft your own items with no cost.
2: the price of rough materials will decrease probably faster than the number of crafters will increase (everyone can gather but not everyone will approach crafting) so the profit margin will be higher
3: learn a discipline gives you tons of xp = skill points = mystic forge
4: for an exotic amulet: rough materials 2.25g – amulet 2.65g it’s almost 20% profit

13g spent for crafting ? you did something wrong. To me for 400jc it took more or less 50s

1. Collecting your own materials as you play, and using them to craft is a good way to play, sure, but it is not free/“no cost”.

Opportunity costs exist, and basically demolish any benefit of making your own item. If you turn 10 copper into ingots, you didn’t just get “free ingots”. If you sold those copper on the trade post (I’ve seen copper go for ~18-20cp each) you’d have MADE money off gathering. Those ingots technically just cost you 1.8-2silver.

Anything you make with copper won’t be worth that much. The copper itself is worth more than the output good you can craft with it.

I leveled a crafting skill to 400. I wanted to make my own exotics. I priced things out, if I collected the materials and sold them on the TP, then bought what I was going to make, I’d come out ahead. Funky, and it doesn’t feel like it is working as intended.

2. Prices have stabilized for some items but I do not foresee prices on raw goods decreasing. Raw goods have an XP gain value attached to them.

Think about it … a big pile of raw materials can be used to gain 10-15 character levels via crafting. You can basically turn money into XP. That is a huge thing.

Now lets talk liquidity. A bunch of raw materials can be used by more than 1 trade profession, exchanged freely, stack to 250, etc etc. Demand is high. Alts can and will be made, and skipping content you ‘did already’ by throwing some cash down and skilling for an hour will be a huge draw for people.

That green item you can make with the materials? Well it is useful to ONE person, then it is Soulbound to them.

Outgrow copper? Sell the rest, recoup what you paid for it.
Outgrow that green item? Either blow it up for a scrap of what it was made out of, or sell to merchant for hardly any money.

3. Agreed. XP = time spent. Time = Money. (… and right now, the XP-per-hour from crafting >>>>>> XP-per-hour questing. You can’t get 10-15 levels in an hour unless you are crafting.)

Thing is … read what you wrote. You didn’t say “learning a discipline lets you make cool stuff you can use, and/or sell” … its “learning a discipline has a side-benefit … you gain XP … the stuff you can make is largely junk, but oh teh XP .. om nom nom”.

If the tertiary benefit you get from doing something winds up being the benefit people are most excited about, somethin’ seems a smidge imbalanced. Hell that is what ANet seems to label as exploits. lol

Hey I’m gunna’ take up Weaponcrafting! … Why? To make myself some exotics? Nah … to get XP to buy a book to turn into a Mystic Weapon instead! lol

4. As addressed prior; after the 15% cut from the TP you’ll be lucky to come away with a 5% profit. That is if you get lucky and no one undercuts you. Someone could easily drop 50+ of that same item at 1cp less than you. If more people follow suit, suddenly the price on the item falls to 0 profit, and your piddly 5% profit item will sit there for eternity, never selling.

… and lastly … JC is a pretty cheap craft to level. It doesn’t require mob-farmed materials. So if the poster didn’t do JC, then your comparison isn’t apt.

I think that crafting is pretty fun and very rewarding but not profitable since everybody can get every profession and there is no chaining and dependencies between professions (lets say to make a leather armor set you need tailor to make you cloths and armorsmith to make you some metal scraps and huntsmen to make some camouflage… so you have to buy it from other people to craft an item and there will appear invisible hand) and there should be hundreds of combos but its probably too much time consuming to invent something like this.
Another bad thing is that I get at least 20 or 30 lvls only done by crafting on my main and first char and … thats just too much for no effort since material gathering is way too easy by playing (well tailor mats are prolly the hardest to obtain but still easy and chep) so a lot of people do crafting because of LVL gain and thats why the market is flooded with garbage items for funny prices.

if you max a profession then you can craft for tips (i did some jewels for 10s each but you can charge more) it will not take so long to regain what you didn’t by not had put rough mats on tp…

people selling for 1c over vendor price is indeed an issue but can the game really do anything about it?

Its a player issue in the end, greedy people trying to undercut so hard they dont realise they’re actually loosing money. I mean seriously seeing something like 4000+ people selling the same weapon for 1c over vendor price not realising that with the TP fee they’re actually loosing ~5c then if they were to walk to a vendor and sell it to him/her! is a bit dishearting Do so many people not read / research anything?

The developers have specifically stated that crafting is not meant to be profitable, so there is no reason to craft unless you want a different way to level your character. They only put crafting into the game to trick those who enjoy crafting in MMOs to buy the game.

Heres the link stating that crafting is not meant to be profitable:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Why-The-Economy-is-Borked/first#post215956

I read the post and saw where it says crafting isn’t meant to be profitable. So what is it meant to do? Craft legendary? My legendary shoots rainbows and has a flippin pony on it, no thanks. Give me xp? Cool trick till I’m 80, then i don’t care.

I enjoy gathering my stuff and building my own gear to make money. I don’t like to do it to lose money.

Daendur.2357:

1: while you play you gather materials and if you have a maxed crafting skill you can craft your own items with no cost.
2: the price of rough materials will decrease probably faster than the number of crafters will increase (everyone can gather but not everyone will approach crafting) so the profit margin will be higher
3: learn a discipline gives you tons of xp = skill points = mystic forge
4: for an exotic amulet: rough materials 2.25g – amulet 2.65g it’s almost 20% profit

13g spent for crafting ? you did something wrong. To me for 400jc it took more or less 50s

I’m Jc aswell and it was by far the cheapest , try leveling weaponsmith and see how much it costs you.Keep in mind that if you already have the mats to level it everyone one you put into it is money you’re not getting from selling them at the tp(cost). And i dont think your understanding what im saying , yes you can farm your own mats to make your own gear, selling those mats will give you the same amount as being able to buy them off the tp. You state 20% profit , no! tp tax will kill that. less materials doesn.t alter the price orichalcum went down from more people farming it , in turn so did the ingots , and thus so did the weapons / items being used to craft with it , still keeping the same value for the raw materials as the end product.. back to my original point. only take up crafting if you want to loose gold or make a legendary because everything else you can buy off the tp for selling your mats 1:1

There is absolutely zero point to crafting unless you want to level from the comfort of your crafting station and/or build a legendary weapon.

You’ll make more money in the long run by selling your raw materials (especially cloth, ore and fine crafting materials).

If I were to take up a crafting discipline for experience gains, it’d be jewelcrafting as all of the materials can be farmed from nodes. Additionally, leather and wood are dirt cheap (just over vendor price in many cases) and I’d be tempted to utilize them as well for leveling.

Last time I checked gossamer scraps were around 4 silver a piece, orichalcum ore was around 2.5 silver a piece, ancient logs were about 1 silver a piece and hardened leather scraps were around 10-20 copper each. I think that speaks for itself.