So You Think You Want to be a Crafter?

[Lensor]

This past weekend, thousands of players entered Tyria to experience glorious combat, grand adventures and maybe just a little crafting. Or in my case, a lot of crafting. It seems I was not alone. After the dust settled on the weekend, maybe players took to the Guild Wars 2 Beta Forums to discuss crafting, and [...]

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[Gorani]

I just want to add to the subject, that the XP gain through crafting was broken during the first BWE, when it did not count towards your total character XP. To gain a crafting level of 400 in all eight professions is a huge task and worth the XP gain. Of course those are just plain numbers. To reach your carrots & ores, you will have to fight a few foes.

The GWO team has mor on crafting for you in the pipeline, we hope can share with you soon.
Also take a look and the basic armour crafting & cooking guides in the PvE forum.

[AJ Wolf]

Thanks Gorani! I totally agree, crafting takes a LOT of time and energy...and frustration on occasion. It totally deserves the XP. I took on a swarm of angry griffins just to get some strawberries, which I would have ignored if I wasn't crafting. I think rewarding players with XP is only fair. I'm excited to see all the stuff coming from the team on crafting...I only wish I hadn't been so immersed in my crafting and had taken some screen shots or video. Oh well, there's always next time.

[Alaris]

Wow the XP gain is that high?

I was not planning to craft until release, but this gives me a reason to look into it (at least for release). I don't care for the activity, but at least for the goodies I can get through it. But now that I hear I get good XP, that sounds pretty awesome.

[djacob]

Let me put it this way, I got around 100 silver ore before I got to lvl 75 in jewelry making, and that ore got me to probably 105. I think for jewel crafting it'll be hard to get over lvl 150 as silver items probably stop giving xp around then (I saw the hardest recipes were lvl 125 and generally recipes stopped giving xp after 25 levels or less). There are probably gold ores in WvW which you could use to level past 150 (silver was the only ore for jewelry in Gendarran Fields), but you'd need hundreds of them and the silver equipment I was making already had a requirement of lvl 25-30 so I don't know if it's worth it to try going further during the beta.

Even afterwards, the xp feels low enough to not even make up for the time that it took to craft the items, not that I'm complaining mind you, I'm just saying that it isn't a reason in itself to craft. Do it for fun, do it to figure out how to effectively do it when the game releases... the xp is just there so you don't feel like you're wasting time. Also, having 5 pieces of jewelry with +20 power and (I think) +10 vitality on each is pretty nice.

[Mawgleah]

Yeah, I was just happy that I could craft inventory bags that would hold more than what I had equipped, I didn't really worry over much about the xp I got for doing it.

I know I will craft during the game and I always gather when I'm out exploring, but I'm not sure that I'll spend a lot of time doing it - at least not in the beginning.

[Alaris]

What I'd like, speaking of weapons, is an easy way to keep the best weapon of each category (or two if dual wielding). It's super easy to check how stats compare against equipped weapons, but I have to manually compare against weapons in bags.

[Gorani]

Most XP comes from discovering new recipes, so it is worth to craft each item variant at least once.

[Lady Rhonwyn]

I just want to add to the subject, that the XP gain through crafting was broken during the first BWE, when it did not count towards your total character XP. To gain a crafting level of 400 in all eight professions is a huge task and worth the XP gain. Of course those are just plain numbers. To reach your carrots & ores, you will have to fight a few foes.

I have no idea why you think it was broken in the first BWE. In all BWE's I've done so far, I've gained levels by crafting alone...

Let me put it this way, I got around 100 silver ore before I got to lvl 75 in jewelry making, and that ore got me to probably 105. I think for jewel crafting it'll be hard to get over lvl 150 as silver items probably stop giving xp around then (I saw the hardest recipes were lvl 125 and generally recipes stopped giving xp after 25 levels or less). There are probably gold ores in WvW which you could use to level past 150 (silver was the only ore for jewelry in Gendarran Fields), but you'd need hundreds of them and the silver equipment I was making already had a requirement of lvl 25-30 so I don't know if it's worth it to try going further during the beta.

Even afterwards, the xp feels low enough to not even make up for the time that it took to craft the items, not that I'm complaining mind you, I'm just saying that it isn't a reason in itself to craft. Do it for fun, do it to figure out how to effectively do it when the game releases... the xp is just there so you don't feel like you're wasting time. Also, having 5 pieces of jewelry with +20 power and (I think) +10 vitality on each is pretty nice.

As Gorani said, you should experiment. GW2 is not for those people that want to easily gain levels by simply repeating the same recipe over and over and over again. As armour crafter, I had to craft bronze ingots. Req: 0, it stops giving points after 25. But Iron can only be crafted by 75. So, there's no way I can easily craft my way to 75 without experimenting.

(oh, and according to my list, we have copper, gold, iron, mithril, orichalcum, platinum and silver ore. No idea exactly who uses those ores though...)

[Ora]

I'm a crafting nerd in other MMO's, so I really like the idea of xp gain from crafting. :)
i also liked that i could craft really usefull stuff early on.
E.g. i crafted 8 slot inventory bags after maybe 1 hour on the first BWE alrdy :)

What i have to get used to, is the "finding recipe" part and the "you have to visit the bank to access your materials " part.

The former one: I'm sure it gets fun , the later: thats just frustrating.

I hope there will be a way to easier access one's materials later on, eg like the material storage in the Xunlai box in GW1, which is easily accessible by just visiting one's guild hall...