Little confused about crafting
The crafting isn’t as complicated as it looks, with the discovery of recipes being the same for most of the disciplines. Combine monster part crafting components like blood or bones with raw materials to make insignias or inscriptions, then combine the insignia/inscription with weapon/armour parts to make a finished product. Discover many different types of weapons and armour to earn XP more quickly and reach the next tier of crafting, where you can start to discover new, stronger items or refine new raw materials.
Cooking is the most complex crafting discipline, because it goes all over the place with ingredients, not following the same pattern as the primary six that produce weapons and armour. Jewelry is likewise a bit different, but it at least remains consistent within itself. For Cooking, you sometimes need to produce an item at skill 125 and then use it as a component for a skill 400 item. It just goes all over the map.
It’s possible to not craft at all in this game. But yes, unless you follow a specific guide and make/discover only what it tells you to, it will take a while to level up crafting skill.
At least they added the system where you can click in a recipe on the mats to go in nested panels to where you make those. Cooking was a real nightmare before that because you had to scroll all over to make each piece to make higher pieces to make the final piece. I had to write down what I was doing, or mutter out loud to myself to keep track of just why I had made that bowl of Baker’s Wet Ingredients …
Hey there. I made a video recently showcasing for friends a little overview of crafting in Guild Wars 2. Many of my friends that like crafting have asked about what is better in crafting in Guild Wars 2 as they are considering coming over.
I will probably do another video as I see I could be a lot more concise, I did kind of talk A LOT. Sorry, I was about 4 cups of coffee live when I made the video. Please be kind on the comments and I hope the video may help you understand a little bit more about crafting. Also, this was directed mostly for my friends that are still playing WoW, hence the commentary. Anyway, hope it may help give you some examples.
Best,
-Van
But in a more broad sense, Yes!, its designed to fill time and layer another sense of achievement to something thats not really needed.
Because you can produce items for sale, crafting essentially feeds itself from the economy by being both profit generator and cheap alternative. It originally played a big role in the game due to dungeon and karma armor having a much higher effort cost then they do now. Allowing people to produce long term sets of gear, the rarity of Oric and Ancient wood, and the T6 mats, was considered mostly fair…. after all, at worst you’d want to make a set no more then once every few months.
The remaining high level recipes were considered supremely expensive due to the rarity of T6 Dust (originally drop only, and had the same drop rate as other T6 mats), but used on large amounts in nearly every recipe. We also had an abundance of Ectos due to the consistent rate we could obtain them.
But all of this changed after 2 major changes in crafting. When we could stat salvaging dust from Ectos, that put a lot of forge and unique crafting recipes in reach of the greater population. It also allowed promotion recipes to be cost effect, supplying more T6 mats to fuel crafting. This was huge boon to lodestone linked crafting, since we could cheaply (cheaper anyway) include cores in the production process.
The second was Champ bags, which flooded the economy with T6 mats. This was critical, as a lot of original crafting recipes required 250 of T6 fine mats (like back pieces, weapon skins, legendaries). I have no doubts this was done specifically to help promote crafting collections, as it, along with Ascended crafting, are the only reasons to actively pursue it given how easy dungeons/tokens are now.
The new prefixes are another story. The supplies for those typically come from LS events.
That said…. its become increasingly more cost and time effective to outright buy materials and equipment off TP, unless you expressly need large amounts of them. Its hard to pinpoint why, but I have no doubt the abnormal rarity of certain items, along with mid level materials have few reliable sources farming them (mostly T2/T3 rare mats), has made it enticing enough for certain individuals to work toward supplying them. The increase in price is just normal inflation at work, as our ability to generate gold at level 80 is very high compared to years before.
And for reasons I still don’t understand, promotion gambling is still popular with upgrades.