I find it fun and satisfying to craft my own sets, but that's just a personal thing. If it's not fun for you then I wouldn't bother.

I personally like to craft. But there are a lot of fine drops. I used to save everything for the traits but I gave that up. If I have the slot open, I'll learn them. If not, I deconstruct everything. It just takes so long to be holding on to so much stuff. Really I think its about 50/50 on being worth it. If you like crafting then you can make good gear. If you don't, you can find good gear. It would be nice if crafting was above drops since you have to invest time and skill points. I suppose you can consider those thrown away points. If you have them, use them. If you need them elsewhere, don't put them in crafting. You'll do much better overall ignoring crafting if skill points are an issue.

gareee wrote: »

We don't even know if we want to play with more than one character. We joined a guild, but they wanted 10,000 gold a week.. we are lucky if we make that much gold in a week as it is... LOL! (So we of course left that guild.)

I figured by now we would meet other players in game to show us the ropes, but without joining a guild that uses discord, in game communication is kind of limited.

If you're on NA/PC, and would be interested, I know a good guild for new players; no one minds questions, lots of helpful people, crafters who help with research and gear, and no dues/payments required. Also seems to get a trader on a regular basis. Send a pm if you want an invitation.

Crafting is definitely worth it if you like it as an aspect of the game to explore and get good at, otherwise marginal.

If you can see yourself playing the game for a year or more, then get into crafting early; otherwise, just focus on getting to at least CP160 as soon as possible, join some big guilds, and ask others to craft stuff for you - there are LOTS of master crafters around in game. It is perfectly possible to play the game without doing any crafting.

The main benefits of levelling up your crafting skills are:
1. you can improve armor and weapons (to blue or purple etc.) with fewer tempers. (The alternative is to ask a guild mate or buddy to do it for you). This can be huge when you want to get your CP160 set items up to legendary (gold) - it can cost 40k or more per item to take metal items up to gold, and much much more than that if you don't have the crafting passives maxed.
2. it is a LOT quicker and easier to craft set items than it is to farm sets that drop ingame. So, as soon as you think your low level gear should be replaced, or when you get to CP160, you can craft yourself a full set of something, and THEN go out and farm any other sets that you want to try out.
3. Being able to craft your own food, potions and enchantments etc. is a lot cheaper in the long run than paying for others to make them for you.
4. You find more top level mats, and get more top level tempers from refining (and crafting writs if you have the time), if you have skill points in the appropriate passives. You can also get a few more mats from daily hirelings (marginal value).

Note that it is REALLY VERY HELPFUL to be subscribed (to get Crafting bags) if you want to do crafting, as yes, the materials take up a huge amount of bag and bank space otherwise. The alternative is to create a bunch of "mule" characters to store your materials, but it is a huge time sink.

Also, go back and rejoin that trading guild as soon as you get up to CP160. You should be able to make around 10k gold per hour from adventuring and selling set motifs and other loot items, so the weekly overhead for the guild trader is relatively cheap. Most other trading guilds cost a lot more to run.

Only Provisioner and Alchemy are of any use at end game anymore, with Enchanting as just a means of making enchantments to change those on found jewelry and occasionally weapons/armor.

Since the larger majority of crafted sets (not all but the majority) are very lackluster, so really you only lose out on a handful of useful sets that ultimately can be replaced with dropped sets. They can be good filler sets until then but that's all they chalk up to, filler.

Honestly, better off farming decent sets than spending the literal year learning to craft your own gear.

If you're a stamina character, go to Bangkorai and farm Spriggen's Thorns and/or go to Stonefalls and farm Red Mountain.

If you're a magic character, Necropotence from Rivenspire for Sorcerer (and NB if you build for that), Silks of the Sun from Stonefalls for DK, or you can even shotgun it and get Burning Spellweave from the City of Ash dungeon and have BiS gear asap.

For Tank, go to Deshaan and get Plague Doctor, or East March for Akaviri Dragonguard. Later, go to Vaults of Madness and farm Ebon.

For Healer, farm Waywest for Combat Physician and later Vaults of Madness for Worm cult.

These are all mostly starter sets but are all easily accessible and acceptable alternatives (with BSW, Ebon and Worm Cult being end game viable as well) to crafted set

We are really just calling wherever we are home. After Skyrim's excellent homes with useful storage space and mannikins, eso seems kind of like a stripped down version of it. There does't seem to be any real purpose for working toward having a home, other than having all your crafting stuff in one room. I know they are using storage as a carrot to get people to subscribe, but IMHO thats a really bad strategy, and really nerfs a huge amount of playability in the game. I'll probably never craft food or potions, because they are plentiful in loot drops, or via theft, and I simply don't have any storage space for food items. I'd say half my storage space is used up by enchantment parts!

Since we have a huge stack of unplayed aaa titles, I think we'lll use eso as a casual more elaborate "gauntlet" experience, enjoying the various quests and dungeons, and not seriously worrying about running multiple characters, or maxing everything out.

We really aren't MMO players, but we've definitely gotten our $20 out of the game with the dlc. I don't see us ever sinking money in it, or a subscription. I'd have thought by now basic things like worthwhile crafting and the campaign stuff would have been sorted out.

I think at this point we are just going to play eso like a big elaborate Gauntlet game. We simply don't want to invent 100s of hours developing characters and skill's for the minimal return we'll get back from crafting.

We have other games we want to play as well, and 5 hours of eso every day just isn't in the cards for us. (I put over 200 hours into skyrum, but it feels like in that you could always craft better than you'd get in loot drops, other than a few specialty items.) We've also run through Diablo 2 and 3 as well, but eso still seems to have also lot of balance issues.