armor and weapon smiths
I’m assuming you craft armor and weapons?
The NPC/s can come in handy if your between crafting lvls or don’t have enough mats to make the next lvl. You can get some “hold you over” gear. Plus some people are not crafting, so where are they to get gear? As you craft, your gear will be better than the white you buy at vendors, so yes it there would not be any reason to buy it. Same with Karma vendors. I have run across some items better than what I have based on GW saying this green lvl 28 is better than your crafted lvl 25 blue, but in reality, my 2 stat with 1 stat gem added may be worth less, but has better stats.
White gear serves two main purposes, really:
- If you leveled heavily by crafting / exploring / WvWvW, and still want to do at-level things, then your stats can be brought up to par with the area so you won’t have such a hard time.
- Salvaging (although there’s little point in buying white gear to salvage).
Mostly for roleplaying purposes… you know the often-forgotten RPG that comes after the MMO…
In a living city there are people going about their lives and they need to buy things, so there are various merchants sprinkled around the city. All those guards and soldiers need to get their equipment from somewhere and not everyone can hammer a sword out of a block of molten steel.
In practical terms, they’re just window dressing, although they provide some use if you don’t want to craft or if you don’t like the look of the crafted gear you can buy “whites” from them and transmute crafted/found gear to keep the stats and change the look to whatever you bought from the vendor.
grandizer, i dont craft weapons at all. i just get personal story rewards or drops often enough or use the heart karma vendors when they have something the surpasses my gear enough to justify using my karma im trying to save.
SuperMonkey, i could see the idea of needing a weapon/ armor if someone levels up so much just from crafting, and need something to hold them over for a while. but even still, these vendors are all over the world in little outposts everywhere.
If it’s for trying to make it feel more life-like/ rpg-like i still feel like they could’ve done a bit more and made little differences in the armor per the area your in or the home region of the vendor your buying from.