Before I buy EQ2, I want to know: Is crafting too tedious?Follow

How rewarding is the crafting system for someone whose primary interest is crafting? How tedious is resource gathering? The number of disheartened posts on the official forum for crafters (with subjects like "Crafting system seriously borked", "Frustrated Beyond Comprehension", "Current Problems with the Entire Tradeskill System") isn't encouraging. Is this a deceptive first impression made on some players, or is the system genuinely flawed?

This is all personal opinion about EQ2 crafting here, and is based mostly on beta xp...

If you expect EQ2 crafting to be like EQ1 crafting, you will be in for a serious let down. It is not quick and easy, with cash being the only major roadblock to gaining your points. It's designed so that crafting will take time.

Crafting in EQ2 is based on your toons crafting level. As your levels go up, you choose specialties much like an adventurer chooses specific sub-classes of their basic archtype. Like an adventurer, there are certain skills your crafter will automatically gain points in as they level.. whether they use the skill or not (seems to me like most or all craft skills worked like this). Any combine you successfully perform gives you experience in your lil' tradeskill xp bar, and once it's full you ding to the next level and have a new selection of recipes available to you which you can purchase from a tradeskill vendor or get as drops from mobs. From what I've seen, tradeskill xp is much much quicker than adventure xp. I've done combines that gave me as much as 8% of my level.

So that leads to the largest downside. Cross class tradeskill items and foraging.

From what I've seen, any tradeskiller that goes past 9 (meaning they chose a specific trade profession) will require items crafted by other professions to create any finished products. This means that in order for crafters to be successful they will need to be a very socially organized lot. Unfortunately, EQ2 only allows for the basic bazaar style vending of EQ1(which really sucks for getting what you want unless the market is flooded with them) so it looks to me like crafters will be forced into cooperative guilds aimed at diversity and community support if they want to be successful. I don't actually consider this a horrible thing, but can see how many would dislike it.

Foraging is the one that I think sucks a**. The forage skills atm go up very slowly(this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the random skill point losses that EQ2 suffers from atm), and forages are all over the world. Skills are also made much more important in EQ2 than they were in EQ1, where it simply determined success chance. In EQ2 a forage has a minimum skill required for a chance at it; if you don't have the skill, you can't even try. This means that if you want to forage for tier 3 items, you will need to go out there and work your forage skills all the way up--which will take much longer than it does to level up.

One of the last drawbacks is that there is little to no profit to be made in tradeskilling without adventurers purchasing from you. They implemented some tradeskill quests, but I haven't checked them out yet. Regardless, you can expect to lose money on most combines you make if you don't succeed at a high level. The low money flow makes upgrading your recipes, or purchasing cross-class items rather difficult.

Anyway, in summary I still like the tradeskill system. I think it's much more fun than the drag and drop style of EQ1. In addition, there is a much larger variety of items that can be crafted in EQ2(sometimes this does annoy, because I have a hard time searching thru them all =p ). The only problem with it is that in order to be a successful tradeskiller you will probably need to be an adventurer also until the economy develops more.

I have only started to do crafting (lvl11 craftsmen) but I like the system better then any other craft system I have seen yet. it is more enjoyable to do then just sit around which is how I saw most other games craft system.

Darnit, I forgot another important point. Most of the materials necessary to get started are available from your wholesaler in your crafting guild. They arent as good as what you can make yourself but they will get the job done. Also, you can buy stacks of foraged stuff in bulk from players at a relatively low price for those things you need to craft where quality really matters. Dont think you have to go into the woods chopping up every fallen branch you see to be a success at crafting in EQ2.
Be safe
Be courteous
Have fun

oh, and throw the little orcs back so the rest of us have something to hunt!