Is crafting broken?
Crafting doesn’t really become useful for keeping up with the gear curve until you hit level 80, unfortunately, and it can be a good way for a new player to attain their first set of exotic gear.
Crafting is also a good way to level, and offers a decent amount of utility in the form of consumables, inventory management, and in some cases profit. You can also do it to complete the related achievements, and eventually get ascended gear.
Crafting, however is in no way necessary to gameplay.
Oh, you can also make rare gear at the upper ends of the tier of crafting you are on that will remain usable for a number of levels to come. However, it’s usually just easier to use the drops you get along the way and not worry about gear until you hit 80.
There are certain points during leveling that you get the best results by tossing a few silver at the tp. Level 62 is a prime example. Masterwork gear with 3 stats and pre slotted runes for dirt cheap. Best you can craft is level 60 magic gear with no runes. I honestly feel like crafting is garbage currently. There is no real incentive to do it when you can make more money selling mats and buying things you need from the tp.
Short answer: yes.
Even lower tier materials are used to craft the “end-game” gear like ascended and legenderies which drives up the cost to craft anything across the spectrum.
When you need new gear buy it of TP, except maybe if you’re a light armor user. Leather and Metal armor is usually at vendor price so selling it later is without a loss. Because of the higher prices on cloth scraps salvaged from it, the cost will mirror that and might be to expensive for a new player. But when you outgrow the gear and salvage the light armor the gold return is around the same as the expense. Above is for green masterwork gear, blue gear can be used and resold on tp if you’re ok with a bit lesser stats.
Another option is to buy karma gear from the quest heart givers. Karma is a pretty useless currency that you will accumulate in excessive amount over time from doing events, so there’s no need to save it for later. Just try to be in the level range of the zone so the karma gear isn’t already outdated for your level.
When you’re 80 and ready to craft exotics and ascended gear, you can follow a quick leveling guide to save gold costs, like from http://www.gw2crafts.net/
no, not really. But you outlevel your gear so fast in GW2, it is not worth bothering before max-gear. Also, what does “for my party” signify? If you are trying to keep up with leveling gear for various professions instead of one character, it should come as no surprise you cannot keep up (if that´s the case).
My first character wanted to ‘live off the land’ as I went, and I did it. Some thoughts on what it was like.
It took me awhile to get this when I first started, but gaining experience crafting is all about ‘discovering’ new things. You want to grind out raw materials into finished product when you can (logs to lumber, cloth to fabric) when they open for as long as you can get experience, but after that, you will get the most experience discovering a new combination of things to make. Discovery. Yes, there are guides out there for ‘crafting to 400’ and ‘crafting to 500’, but those are targeted more towards rich folks who are already at the end and are looking to catch their crafting up to make ascended. I’ve used the guides to help some of my alts finish up their crafting between 400-500.
As someone that was really interested in ‘living off the land’ with my first character, this game is a bit tricky with respect to that, being able to keep your crafting at your character level, so to speak. I did it, but it ended up dictating my play style a bit, as I’d out level zones. What I ended up doing was matching my armor upgrades with the zones I was doing without regard to my character level (as it ended up getting ahead of where I was questing as crafting provides a fair bit of xp too). If I was finishing a 30-40 zone moving to a 40-50, and my gear was only 30, then I might stop 3 levels before the end of that zone and grind out killing for materials to catch my crafting up to make my next gear.
That’s how I did it, it was fun for me. In hind sight, totally unnecessary. It’s probably more efficient to live off drops, karma rewards (caution: don’t put nice things in items you can’t salvage, lest you have to sell your first born child in the gem store to remove it), and the AH, and save mats until your collection is full, then sell them. You can then just use one of the guides when you are rich and famous at 80 to catch up the crafting and start working on the ascended gear. Even buying your first set of exotic from the AH isn’t all that much at the end.
But I did it on that first character, and no, it was never designed well to be used ‘as you go’ like in other MMOs I’ve played, where you can stop progressing your character at various times to catch up the crafting, make your next items, then continue adventuring.
yes, it is extremely convoluted.
Crafting isnt broken, its just not a profession like in so many other games. You use it to achieve certain goals – crafting ascended, legendar or other unique items. Maybe crafting some yellows to toss in the forge.
Its not really for crafting gear as you level. Well, unless you want the XP. The gear other thab 80 exotic is useless and will be obsolete after 10 minutes.