Guild Wars 2

Since the Ascended Weapons update, crafting lets you create ascended weapons. Since these are account bound once you make them, you cannot buy/sell them on TP so crafting is the most reliable way of obtaining Ascended weapons. Ascended weapons do sometimes drop from monsters but those are also account bound and are very rare.

Ascended armor will probably be the same when it is introduced sometime later this year.

Profiting from crafting is actually quite hard since it can be expensive to level up if you buy materials or time consuming to farm materials. In some cases, the raw materials may cost more than what you have crafted.

Theoretically, it is actually possible since all levels will have some given recipes that you can craft over and over.

Of course, it’s not optimal to do it that way since as you level up, you will get less and less exp (until you reach the new level threshold for new given recipes), therefore using more and more mats.

But you will always have something to craft or refine that gives you exp to prevent you from becoming “stuck” in the case where you have discovered every recipe for the tier you are at.