Originally Posted by
Madruk
Crafted gear should never be more powerful than raid gear for one simple reason. Raid gear takes coordination, multiple players to accomplish and (debatable) skill. Some may argue it's not skill it's just time vs. reward once strats are known but the fact still remains the content takes multiple players to accomplish. This is the point of a MMO.
Crafting does not take this type of group effort. It discourages group play especially when the rewards for sitting on your ass in town are better. There's plenty of examples that have been said to make crafting still viable but under no circumstances should it ever be better than multi-group content, with some rare special exceptions like a long epic quest.
I wouldn't necessarily call what we have available now as raid caliber content, so maybe there's something better down the line. I'm hoping that they're balancing it versus real raid content and not the single group stuff we're seeing now.