Question about making money as crafter - What is most in demand? Raw materials or finished items?

I am wondering, are max level crafting skills so common that there's no point for people to actually buy finished goods on the market? They can just make it themselves, with one of their characters that has that skill. Crafting seems pretty easy to level in this game, and you can easily have access to all craft skills with multiple characters.

I think it would be fun to transform the raw materials I come across into profit by making gear to sell - or to go out of my way to identify gear that isn't on the market and then make that for potential customers to buy. (I have noticed that the variety of exotic medium armor is quite limited compared with the potential options that are suppose to exist.For instance, on the market I can only find recipes for viligant gear, but no actual examples of it available to buy. I could craft some and list it if I had the materials and skill level, marking it up for a profit compared with what the raw materials normally cost.

But I don't know if that would be a waste of time - Maybe most people would rather buy the components and make their own armor because they have the skill to do it.The only reason I buy gear on the market is because I needed decent stuff while leveling up my first character. And most of what I bought was blue. Only when I hit level 63 did I buy exotic gear with the majority of the gold I had saved up to that point.Once I hit level 400 in leathercrafting I don't see why I would ever need to buy another medium armor piece for any of my characters again. So I why would others continue buying?

especially ascended items that have to be crafted are bound to account when created, so raw materials will sell a lot better than crafted items.

@Lanhelin.3480 said:especially ascended items that have to be crafted are bound to account when created, so raw materials will sell a lot better than crafted items.

Things like Deldremor (Deldrimor?) Ingots can be sold though, and are in high demand due to the timegate involved.

That being said, I’ve not personally looked into how profitable selling them is.

@Lanhelin.3480 said:especially ascended items that have to be crafted are bound to account when created, so raw materials will sell a lot better than crafted items.

Wait a second, are you saying if I want a full set of ascended gear that I need to be able to craft it all myself? I can't buy something someone else has crafted? That means I would need to buy more crafting slots on my character?

if you want the crafted ones, yes.

@Lanhelin.3480 said:if you want the crafted ones, yes.

That just seems bizzare to me. It almost doesn't seem like that is how it can really work, because what's the point of crafting if you can't make stuff for others?Why would they do it that way? Isn't that just forcing you to buy extra crafting slots for your characters on top of forcing you to grind massively to level up a minumum of three different crafts on each individual character to max level for those you want ascended gear on?

There are 7 crafting discipliness but every account has at least 5 characters. That is more than enough to cover every crafting discipline with leftover so there is no need to buy anything extra. All ascended gear is account bound.

And as others have said in this thread you can get ascended from drops so no need to craft at all.

@Rise.8259 said:

@Lanhelin.3480 said:especially ascended items that have to be crafted are bound to account when created, so raw materials will sell a lot better than crafted items.

Most people max the crafts on other characters. Then log in to whichever one they need.

@Khisanth.2948 said:There are 7 crafting discipliness but every account has at least 5 characters. That is more than enough to cover every crafting discipline with leftover so there is no need to buy anything extra. All ascended gear is account bound.

Free to play only have 2 character slots.

@Rise.8259 said:

@Lanhelin.3480 said:especially ascended items that have to be crafted are bound to account when created, so raw materials will sell a lot better than crafted items.

If you want the crafted gear, yes, as said above. Ascended trinkets can't be crafted at all, so you have to buy them. But weapons and armour can be crafted, but you don't have to buy more crafting slots. You can switch which crafts are active on a character for a relatively small (in the grand scheme of things) fee, no more than 50 silver if the craft you're switching to is level 500 (10 copper per level). If 50 silver per switch is too much, you probably can't afford to craft Ascendeds anyway.

Side note: under normal circumstances, a character would need probably three crafts for this: one for armour and two for weapons (e.g. weaponsmith and huntsman, weaponsmith and artificer, huntsman and artificer, etc.) While you are preparing the time-gated elements, you take your armour craft and one weapon craft and make the different bits every day, and then you switch around to create the final components. Weapon insignia are the same no matter which craft makes them, so it's only for the handles/hilts/blades/heads thar you need to switch around anyway. Or you have two or more characters and get better coverage of the weapon crafts.

@Taygus.4571 said:

@Khisanth.2948 said:There are 7 crafting discipliness but every account has at least 5 characters. That is more than enough to cover every crafting discipline with leftover so there is no need to buy anything extra. All ascended gear is account bound.

Free to play can't post on the forums either.

@Taygus.4571 said:

@"Khisanth.2948" said:There are 7 crafting discipliness but every account has at least 5 characters. That is more than enough to cover every crafting discipline with leftover so there is no need to buy anything extra. All ascended gear is account bound.

Think of it as a continuous free trial. The game is "buy to play", not "free to play".

As far as crafting goes, yes pretty much everyone will have max level crafting, because it's the ONLY way to get legendary weapons and the most reliable way to get ascended armor. Ascended trinkets, rings, amulets, and back pieces are easy to get by farming map currencies or with laurels (and pvp currency), so no one really needs to craft those. The trading post already has an endless supply of food and many other things too, meaning the price of the final items are often worth less than selling the components directly. I believe this is due to the components being needed to level crafting or to allow people make account bound items.

Also, there are some weird contradictions. Bags for example, they require a massive gold sink item to make them, 10g for the 20 slot bags, which ends up making the PvP equivalents 3g cheaper to buy. I don't pvp, but I will occasionally face roll button mash to get the daily done and that is more than enough to "earn" the pvp currency to get the cheaper bags. Sure, I could make my own bags, but why the heck would I when I save 3g each!?? Of course, some would say that you can upgrade the crafted bags up to 32 spaces, but that costs way more than I would ever have (being a casual player) so I'm better off saving the 3g up front.

Anyway, crafting in this game is kinda dumb. It's basically just a time gate and gold sink to keep people playing and to incentivize purchasing gems with real money to convert them into gold to buy crafting materials. Cynical? Probably, but I'm not wrong. It's too bad too, because the system itself is well built.

@Tatwi.3562 said:

@Taygus.4571 said:

@"Khisanth.2948" said:There are 7 crafting discipliness but every account has at least 5 characters. That is more than enough to cover every crafting discipline with leftover so there is no need to buy anything extra. All ascended gear is account bound.

Also because some people ignore the components' value.

They only see "oh hey if sell this thing I can make X gold" but do not see that if they sold the individual components they could get "X+Y gold".

The most recent example I've ran into is the Composite Wood Board for making marks. The time gated materials are probably a common culprit because people assume that time gated means there will always be a profit.

@Rise.8259 said:

@"Lanhelin.3480" said:if you want the crafted ones, yes.

Firstly...... you've made a false assumption about scope. Asc gear is all account bound, and can be moved between characters as long as they're capable of equipping the type of item in question. So you only need, at bare minimum, 2 crafting disciplines to get a full set of craftable gear for a character. Weapons, and armor. Secondly, because their account bound, each crafting discipline only needs to be learned once to produce gear to cover every class that utilizes that type of gear. With only 8 disciplines (excluding Scribe), and 5 character slots by default, you can level everything using the default offerings with zero gem store augmentation.

As for its purpose:Simply put, crafting was ALWAYS a gold sink. Everything related to crafting is a gold sink.... gear especially, since all of them become either soulbound or account bound on use. The further the game has gone on, the more aggressive the gold sinks are; and in support of that effort, they've also introduced time gating and account bound processing to force the player into the crafting system as a baseline. You can still get gear without crafting, but its vastly less efficient due to the greater ubiquity of gold, the alt methods of buying them requiring large amounts of a difficult/time gated token as substitute to crafting, and limited ability to repurpose this gear since but all but 2 meta stats use crafted/account bound produced item.

The system USED (and sort of still does) work in a way where players could produce crafted items and put them on the market for sale. But the problem with this is that gear system is, by design, meant to cap out quickly, and has identical gear offered through multiple alternate methods. So from a practical stand point, theres never a reason to buy someone else's crafted gear, especially when they're selling at a mark up + TP tax rolled into the price. So all that was left for long term profit motive were special skins that required a crafting process. But eventually everything on the TP that has a reliable (ie crafted) source, hit a price equilibrium with the cost of its mats..... in the case of some items, the items could be worth less then raw materials, due to the materials having higher demand for a different item, and no option to break down existing items into an equal value of raw materials used to make them.

Thus our economy now revolves around a model of popularity, and raw materials having higher value (due to their greater flexibility) over already manufactured items. To get the kind of economy you're thinking of, the entire gear system would have revolve around a model of permanent decay and/or gear destruciton, which forces players to constantly sink money into obtaining fresh gear in replacement of worn out ones. But that model also have a bunch of other problem associated with it; the most prominent being player's view of Wealth accumulation vs Wealth turn over, cost efficiency/opportunity cost, and the possibility of a "deadlock" by having no gear, and thus no means to generate money to get new gear.

You can get money in this game simply by logging on, as most of the login rewards are sellable, especially the mystic coins.