(edited by Vayne.8563)
For example, I really don’t understand people who complain about GW2’s crafting. It gives you a serious XP boost, and keeps you rolling in excellent gear while leveling. You can put any stats you want into your gear. You don’t have to level a “gathering skill” of any kind, and can insert easily-found jewels/crests/runes/sigils into your gear at any time regardless of crafting proficiency. Salvaging unneeded gear even gives you back materials to put toward your crafting. And odds are, the game must have thrown at least one crafting or gathering booster at you by this point. If you use those even remotely intelligently, it will be a huge help. And while it’s not an ideal solution, you can invest some laurels to purchase those crafting material bags for various tiers. And if you want to switch crafting disciplines, you can do so at any time.
Almost all of these points are completely foreign concepts, in any other MMORPG. And while getting the needed materials can cost time/gold in GW2, it is nowhere near the abyssmal level of grind found in any other game. Unless they’re talking about Ascended or Legendary stuff, I just shake my head in disbelief every time somebody complains about “grind” in this game’s crafting or leveling. But even for those, at least they are account-bound and not really needed for anything.
You’re kidding, right? I’m a new GW2 player and so far my primary disappointment is that crafting is utterly useless while leveling. By the time I finished Metrica Province with my warrior, I had accumulated enough mats to level my weaponsmithing and armorsmithing to 11 and 7 respectively. At which point I started Brisban Wildlands and lost access to copper nodes, and what little light armor dropped from mobs tended to salvage to wool scraps instead of jute scraps.
bolam.6294 is absolutely right about crafting; as best I can tell it’s only relevant to max level characters with the wealth to buy truckloads of mats of the TP, and it’s only useful for creating these ascended gear pieces people talk about. In other games, yes, you can craft your own gear while leveling. Not here, not even close. My warrior has spent about half his time running with a hammer, simply because what I had (personal story reward, I think) was greatly superior to any greatsword I’d found, let alone the greatsword one can craft with starting skill level.
Comparison to other MMOs – lack of gathering skills is nice. When/if I make an alt to do cooking, all those onions, carrots, etc. should come in handy.
But other MMOs have something approaching a balance between mat supply while leveling through a zone and the amount of crafting needed to advance to the next tier of mats. GW2 is the one with the abysmal crafting grind. It’s a big market so no doubt there are worse, but not the ones I’ve played (4 years of LOTRO, couple months of Rift – which does have both salvaging and runes to add to existing gear, btw).
On a positive note, I do like how processing a large stack is only marginally more time consuming than making a single such piece. Most of that weaponsmith-11 came from converting logs to planks, which would have required going afk for a while in other MMOs.
Because you don’t have to craft at lower levels in this game, that is you can get everything you need quite cheaply without crafting, it’s not a bad thing.\
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that crafting at level is better somehow, than not having to.
I’m not working under that same guideline. What is inherently superior about crafting stuff, rather than not upgrading or buying what you need?
The world itself isn’t difficult enough to upgrade your gear more than once every ten levels.
Also, the speed of the first 15 levels have increased. As you go further in the game, crafting becomes more viable. It’s only the first zone, which is more or less a tutorial zone that really suffers that problem.