Is crafing gear worth the effort ?

[Ambacht]

Dear readers,
I've been playing A Realm Reborn again since a few months now and i've been busy with gearing up my Dragoon up for raiding and so far I'm doing pretty god and am at 98 Itlvl (including some 110 items). Some time back I had a disscusion with my guild about the crafted gear and if it's worth crafting them compaired to the 100-110 gear.
From my point of view you can get a good set of 110 gear from soldery + upgrades, with moderate effort. While if you try your hands on the 90 crafted gear (i hope it was 90 I'm not sure) ,to outdo the mentioned gear you would have to get HQ, but before that you also need a decent crafting set to make the gear and you would need to max out your materia melding, not to mention getting the required mats to do so requires some detication.

Now to get to my question:
Considering I play Semi-Hardcore/ Casual due to my working schedule, is it woth the time and effort to craft the gear? Compaired to the 110 gear from Soldery or Coil?

[Lebenoshl]

Crafted gear serves a very specific purpose currently. Right now there is no reason for semi-hardcore/casual players to use crafting gear.

This is all subject to change next week

[Stihllodeing]

If you want to craft for the sole purpose of getting combat gear only, then in my opinion, I'd say no it's not worth it. It takes a lot of time and like you said, you can gear up from raid drops alone.

Crafting has uses, but probably not for anything you would be interested in based on your post.

[StouterTaru]

Some pieces of ilvl90 are comparable to ilvl110 gear, when highly melded.

Body/Pants: ilvl90 are -10 STR/DEX/INT/MND vs ilvl110
Head/Hands/Feet: ilvl90 are -6 STR/DEX/INT/MND vs ilvl110
Belt/Accessories: ilvl90 are -5 STR/DEX/INT/MND vs ilvl110

The VIT drop is slightly higher than the other main attributes.

ilvl90 Accessories only have 1 secondary stat to begin with, so they are only worthwhile for adding a 2nd main attribute in some situations; VIT on dps/healer pieces for heavy AoE fights, STR on tank pieces, etc.

Head/Hands/Feet/Belt are often better pieces if you can take the small hit to VIT. 5-6 main attribute for 20-25 secondary stats is a pretty good trade in many cases, depending on the rest of your gear.

Body and Pants are too big of a main stat drop to make up with secondary attributes. 10 main stats and 12-13 VIT for 25-30 secondary stats is a hard trade, and requires 5 TIV materia.

[aerolol]

Lv90 accessories are good since you can put VIT for DPS/healers and still have MND/INT/DEX/STR on it (or put STR on tank VIT accessories).
In a way, it can be considered to be better than lv110 items since you can have more than 1 primary stat.

You will lose some STR/DEX/INT/MND compared to lv110 but gain a lot of VIT if you have a full set of lv90 accessories. Lv110 accessories for DPS/healers have 0 VIT.
A full set of lv90 hq crafted accessories will give DPS/healers 75 extra VIT at expense of 25 STR you'd have from a full lv110 DPS accessory set. (or extra 65 STR for tanks in exchange for 30 VIT)
And you can still overmeld 3 more materias on each crafted piece to put any other secondary stat (critical/determination/piety/spell or skill speed/accuracy) you want.

Just for comparison if you switch a lv110 DPS ring for a lv110 tank ring, you get 21 VIT but lose 18 STR.