Guild Wars 2

The crafting system (with the exception of Chef) has been in poor shape since launch, and aside from forcing people through it for ascended gear, nothing has fundamentally changed to address how unrewarding and unfun it is to get through it. In particular, the way that progression is structured with respect to a limited selection of recipes.

The basic progression pattern for most crafts goes like this:

Sub-tier 1 – new materials and blue gear
Sub-tier 2 – still blue gear, additional prefixes
Sub-tier 3 – green and yellow gear
(repeat for next tier)

Blue and green gear is usually worthless, making sub-tiers 1 and 2 nothing more than a gold dump (1 is somewhat mitigated by being able to refine your way through some of it). Meanwhile, there are more than enough rare recipes available in sub-tier 3 that most of them aren’t needed for progression. As a simple solution, why not redistribute the rare items into the other sub-tiers? Example:

Sub-tier 1 – new materials and prefixes, hand and leg armor of all rarities
Sub-tier 2 – chest and foot armor
Sub-tier 3 – head and shoulder armor

Similarly for weapon crafters, the selection of weapon types would vary at each tier (ensuring a balanced mix of main-hand, off-hand, two-handed and aquatic types), rather than the selection of rarity or prefixes. This allows for viable crafting at each sub-tier. Another thing that could be done (along with redistribution of recipes) is the removal of blue item recipes, which currently enable people to unlock skins and then put the item back on the TP, which devalues the green items as well since they share the skin. The green items could be viable, but not with the blue items around.

Well, that’s for a simple fix. I’m sure the system could be more robust if Anet were willing to put the work into it, but if that isn’t on the table then at least give us some improvements that are easy to implement.