Does crafting get you things you can't get any other way?

Does crafting in Guild Wars 2 offer items that can't be acquired any other way? It's a big time investment and there's precious little info in game. If I can always get a better bow than I can make, I would rather spend my time on exploration and events. (For example, in my early World of Warcraft days, there were crafted items that were immediately soulbound and were worth making, at least for a while, so I was motivated to do that.)

You can craft the highest tier of gear, or you can farm fractals and raids for it. Crafting takes a while, or a lot of gold, but is guaranteed gear. I'm pretty sure fractals and raids offer different skins, but all stats on all ascended/legendary gear are the same.

Yes—these, in addition to what was mentioned by @"Klowdy.3126"https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Back_item

@Corax.7692 said:Does crafting in Guild Wars 2 offer items that can't be acquired any other way?

Yes, tons of things! Latest example, the Banner of the Dauntless Commander (although I am not certain which crafting level this item requires).

Also, crafting the four basic ascended ingredients daily can make you rich if you don't need them and sell them instead.

Ah! Every craft has its own back item. That's interesting. Apart from that, it looks like it all comes down to how you want to spend your time. I haven't experienced fractals & raids in Guild Wars 2 yet, but I have fun/nightmare memories from the vanilla World of Warcraft days. (We had a rogue get the purple dagger drop off Ragnaros and immediately /gquit, amongst other drama. :-)

You need crafting if you want to make legendary items. Also, some of the minis and various achievements require crafting.

@"Corax.7692" said:Does crafting in Guild Wars 2 offer items that can't be acquired any other way?

It is the most consistent way of getting items. What I mean by this is if you're someone who wants to have full berserker gear, you can only acquire it by crafting. Sure you can get lucky from drops, but those are very rare that it's better to craft the gear. Exotic and ascended gear is only accessible from crafting and you can use this site gw2crafts.net in order to craft gear appropriately and not waste the materials you need for crafting.

Another useful tip! Thank you.

The only two things which determine how powerful an item is in this game are it's level requirement and rarity. So all level 80 exotic swords will be equally powerful, no matter if it's crafted or from a drop or a dungeon or raid reward or whatever else.

But the other important consideration is what stat combination it has. None of them are actually more powerful, just different, but some are better for certain characters than others. For example if your skills and traits don't cause any damaging conditions then condition damage is useless and you'll want to avoid it. Not all stat combinations are available from all sources, so if you get attached to a specific one you may have to craft it, especially since some are account bound on creation.

There's also a lot of items which can only be obtained by crafting which are account bound on creation. They're not things you need - if you're just worried about having the best stats you can pick alternatives. But quite a few unique skins, including legendary weapons, are obtained this way.

@Hoodie.1045 said:

@"Corax.7692" said:Does crafting in Guild Wars 2 offer items that can't be acquired any other way?

Exotic gear can be bought on the tp (some of it is very cheap), bought using dungeon tokens, or gotten from drops/map completion. As for ascended, if you have the expansions or do fractals you can buy those, though it might take a while to get.Raids are apparently not really like what they are in WOW, for one thing you do not toss for drops, everyone get's their own drops. They are also apparently not as big as in WOW, with the maximum size being 10 people.

@"Hoodie.1045" said:What I mean by this is if you're someone who wants to have full berserker gear, you can only acquire it by crafting.

You can buy Berserker Exotics from various sources in game. Trading Post included, no crafting neccessary, and the named Berserker level 80 Exotic Armor (Zhed, Nika, Devona) is cheaper to buy, than it would be for you to craft the Berserker Exotic Crafted Sets.

Exotic and ascended gear is only accessible from crafting

Exotic is available is many places outside of crafting. Ascended can drop in open world, fractals, WvW, Raids, PvP/WvW Beast named boxes from reward tracks, Jumping Puzzle Chests, World Bosses. BUT, crafting ascended armor and weapons is the most reliable to get what you want.

Use this site gw2crafts.net in order to craft gear appropriately and not waste the materials you need for crafting.

Gw2crafts is ok to level up your crafting, but it's not made for checking what you need / how much to spend when it comes to crafting anything. It's a discipline leveling guide and nothing more.If you want to know exactly how much you'll need crafting anything, and you cba/don't know how to trawl the gw2 wiki, you're better off using the gw2efficiency crafting calculators.

Yes. As far as I know, most food items (not all) are only available if someone in the game crafts them. Of course, much of it (not all - some best in class is account bound) can then be sold on the TP, but it doesn't change the fact that it had to be crafted by someone.

Thanks to everyone for all this info, it's very helpful!

Legendary items require you to craft - some of their components can't be acquired in any other way (gifts for specific weapon).

@Hoodie.1045 said:Exotic and ascended gear is only accessible from crafting

Exotics drop rarely and unreliably for level 80 characters from killed foes and from a few other sources, and there are some exotics as story rewards, including e.g. a helmet for finishing the 1-80 Personal Story. Exotics are also available once every four weeks from the login reward chests (Chest of Exotic Equipment, day 14 of the cycle), and can be bought from a variety of vendors.

Ascended trinkets and backbacks can be bought from a variety of vendors, especially in the LS3 and LS4 maps. If you have 512 Swim-speed Infusions +10, you can buy an Ascended breather.

One ascended weapon per elite spec per account can be obtained by finishing the spec's Specialization Collection. (Dark Harvest, Bo, Ydalir, etc.)

Outside of a few specific skins or legendaries, no.

@"Corax.7692" said:Ah! Every craft has its own back item. That's interesting. Apart from that, it looks like it all comes down to how you want to spend your time. I haven't experienced fractals & raids in Guild Wars 2 yet, but I have fun/nightmare memories from the vanilla World of Warcraft days. (We had a rogue get the purple dagger drop off Ragnaros and immediately /gquit, amongst other drama. :-)

To get some framing.... Guildwars is a PvP game with a very large PvE component. The classes are largely designed an Balanced around PvP combat, and the Devs had intended PvE and story events to be something to do between major PvP and World vs World seasons. To that end, the game has a very sharp leveling and gear curve designed to get players up to the Max level quickly, so they can participate in World vs World battles without too much hassle. Supporting this, both Levels and Gear stats are capped, and made easy to distribute stats via gear prefixes (each associated with a stat combination).

Because of this setup, PvE is kind of a slog designed to keep more casual players busy, while players who specialize in WvW used to be able to max level and fully gear a character via WvW only. Crafting fit into this scheme as something of an afterthought (to check box a list of things about popular MMO activities), and built an economy that removes trust from direct trades. This is something of a necessity due to issues in GW1, where the trade value of items worth trading for often far exceeded the maximum coin transfer of a direct trade. With trade only really happening in scattered city hubs, there was very little direct competition and next to no market data within the game to determine the fair value of an item. Availability was also a small nightmare since you'd have to be in the town at the same time as a seller in chat, or constantly monitor the cancer that was "trade chat". There was also a risk of scams and "item swapping" that the players had to pay close attention to. Trade post was directly made to address these issues that by being a global system, pitting every listing against each other, and adding a level of trust in a secured trade via the TP rather then between players. It also made taxing trades viable as a gold sink, and thus far has been the major reason the value of gold has been slow to inflate, despite many items seeing swings in prices.

The whole reason I bring this is up is because Crafting is basically a hodgepodge of 7 generations of major changes to the game's reward system; and as a result of this, crafting doesn't follow a liner logic through out. In the original system, crafting primarily existed to fill 2 functions.... the creation of exotic tier gear and associated cosmetics, and in turn, supplement the player gearing process by trading gold for desired gear off the TP. This was supposed to enable players to trade coin to gather a gear set for their build, while other players could make some money processing materials into gear or other rare items (such as rare skins and Legendary weapons), or skins for personal use.

By the 3rd Generation of rewards, crafting became a new target for wealth sinking by the Devs in order to drain surplus materials on the market, and try to counter act the ever expanding Gold Value chasm between very rare items vs everything else. At the time, anything below max tier was effectively worthless, and only used to level crafting up to the then max level of 400 (letting them process exotic items). Thus came the 7th Tier.... Ascended. Made exclusively for use in Fractals (itself basically just a grind dungeon), its only differences from exotic gear was the ability to add infusions (a form of gear check) and requiring about roughly 10 times the amount of materials to create, had to be made by the player for themselves, and acted as progressive gear tread mill for that game mode. The stats were identical to Exotics at first, and the only players who needed it were higher tier fractal farmers. Its one saving grace was the ability to trade processed materials prior to the final crafting steps, in order to supplant the time gates on intermediate materials (which were account bound) at the cost of a mark up on the TP. Players who had no interest in Fractals could make money by supplying Fractal farmers with materials (processed or unprocessed) in exchange for coin off the TP.

With Heart of Thorns there was a major shift to focus the entire gearing process to personal crafting. The expansion exclusive stat combos are all account bound by default, making it almost impossible to export to player (regardless of them having the expansion or not). This also introduced several "combined" high profile cosmetic collections / alternative sources of Ascended gear via this crafting system; expensive to do for the sake of the skin, but still producing a max tier item that could be used. For reference, most previous cosmetic valued items were Exotic, and were part of an old (combine 2 physical items) transmutation system that existed before the Wardrobe stream lined everything. With Living story Season 3 there was another huge shift toward using crafting as the foundation of achievement collections, essentially requiring players to have maxed out personal crafting in order to properly participate. They had done crafting collections in Season 2, but many of the many of the materials were time gated and could be processed by other players and traded once they finished their personal items.

The current iteration is a combination of the above, but has suffered multiple attempts to selectively sink materials at different points in the game's history. As a result, some older items have very oddly skewed "cost to craft" as the value of the requisite materials, and/or their sources, may have changed since their introduction. For instance, Gen 1 legendary items have had their gold value cut roughly in half due to Legendary Crafting creating a stable source of Precursors for trade, and Gen 2 focusing heavily on Tier 5 materials to create (which lowered direct competition for bottle necked materials). If T6 materials doubled in price, Gen 1s would skyrocket in value while Gen 2 would see only 30% of that bump.

But this isn't even the whole story. When Heart of Thorns released, it highlighted a huge problem with how the game handles ascended gear. Core Stats have multiple sources, much of which newer rewards can reach back as legacy option. However, Xpac stats Trinkets could only be obtained via Achievements and collections.... since 2 of those stats were highly desirable, and limited to one time only rewards, you couldn't properly gear up one main character with those stats, much less 8 alts. With the Raids and Especs increasing the viability/interest of many undervalued classes, having a full set of alts were now considered a normal thing for most players who could afford the character slots. With Living Story Season 3, they set the current precedent of filling in gear gaps via collections and alternative sources. At the same time, they also expanded WvW and PvP rewards to include more Ascended gear with the potential for Expansion exclusive stats, as well as exotic versions as prerequisites to unlocking the higher tiers. With the Introduction of Legendary armor to those game modes (which was previously a Raid exclusive collection), they've finally decided to close Acquisition gap across all game modes, and started Standardizing the requirements for the crafting stages so they don't vary heavily in cost.

As it stand right now, there are multiple ways to obtain and/or craft Ascended gear, as well as having the baseline ability to swap stats of those items at a relatively low material cost via the mystic forge (basically the cost of obtaining the stat combo plus 5 ectos). Gearing up each character with Ascended is still a somewhat expensive process.... but once a gear set is made, it can be repurposed for fairly cheap (roughly 5-10% of the total cost of the piece). However, one huge difference now is the greater viability of Exotic gear with Xpac stats by way of "choosy stat" armor boxes. A significant cost deterrent for making versions of exotic Xpac stats is the materials for Insignia/Inscriptions. For Core stats it mostly uses T6 materials, with Living Story Season 1 stats (which are technically part of Core) requiring some material that was available during those events. However, from HOT onward, Xpac stats require either very Rare materials from gathering, or a large number of Tokens to purchase from a Vendor. This made making exotic version of these items extremely cost inefficient, in many cases one piece costing almost as much as a core armor set. With just getting the stat costing you a minimum of 40g, you may as well spring for the 300g cost of an Ascended armor set, and have the ability to share it between classes, or change its start if something better gets introduced.

So for gearing options, its possible to obtain some of the new stats via cheap alternatives as exotics, or stat change your Ascended gear over to it as soon as you have the ability to obtain the insignia/inscription. Unlike WoW, which is fundamentally a game about gear tread milling, GW2 only demands you obtain new gear when you want to change your build. Depending on what type of item it is, and what stats you want, there are multiple methods of obtaining gear with various levels of cost efficiency. For straight "practical" gearing, the process is incredibly simple once learn how to compare acquisition sources, or even just ask established players that are familiar with the various sources in the game. With a little bit of math and some discussion about how tolerant you are to various game modes, you can often find solutions that would take less then a week with proper planning (assuming you have access to any requite resources). With more standards in play, the general rule is you can interchange between effort and gold for anything that isn't an explicit time gate. General PvE sources tend to have a higher cost, but are often very reliable in their output, and can be done solo. End Game PvE modes (Raids and Fractals) is a different story, as are PvP and WvW due to the Group component. These modes also have the most aggressive time gates, to offset the fact that its normal for dedicated players will pour a ton of effort into sustained play, that would otherwise result in rapid reward cycles. The daily and weekly rewards are there to prevent sustained farming of a token/currency, since that HAS happened repeatedly in the past. But in comparison, their gold cost is approx 15-30% lower, and may take less "time" spent in a mode (ie play hours), though they may take "longer" in terms of number of days to achieve your goal.

@Hoodie.1045 said:

@"Corax.7692" said:Does crafting in Guild Wars 2 offer items that can't be acquired any other way?

All 3 stat Exotics can be purchased off the TP,(not sure about Dire). All 4 stat HoT and PoF must be crafted( except for drops) as they become Account Bound on aquire.