Crafting is dead

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Couldn't you spend 200-250 RGS on Favors and save the rest for gear? The gatherer off hand is far from as large of an upgrade as the main hands, but you can get that in a week easily while still getting a piece of turn in gear the following week. That's my plan at least simply because 11 hours of favor farming is excessive but I'd still like to be able to work on the 2* stuff a bit.

But yea, I can understand that gatherers are kind of left screwed with now crafted alternative. What I'm interested in is when we can expect a new tier of gear. As of now all the stats prerequisites are met without the need for the new gear.

I could .. but ... we don't know exactly when the next major patch is coming.

Everyone knew that 3.05 was going to include new recipes (the rest of the 1 star, at a bare minimum). Everyone expected that there would be 2 star stuff, as well. Very very few expected the 2 star crafting requirements to basically be "max meld everything 3.0 BiS". Scoff if you like, but 718 Craft/695 Control is darn near "max meld everything".

At 9 tokens per week, if you ignore the Fishing gear, you are looking at 18 weeks (with a whopping TWO RGT left over) :
MH : 26
Hat : 12
Body : 18
Hands : 10
Legs : 7
Feet : 7
subtotal : 80
Total for both Mining and Botany : 160

I don't know what patch 3.06 is going to do. It may reduce the number of RGT required to obtain this otherwise-unattainable gear. It may increase the cap from 450 to 900 (effectively halving the time).

But does anyone realistically expect that 3.1, when it comes, won't have recipes requiring materials from nodes requiring this gear's stats? For all we know, and I half expect this, 3.1 is going to have the crafted i170 equivalent that gathering gear is currently missing.

My gathering gear is not melded in the best fashion. As it is right now, though, I am unable to obtain the Folklore RGS collectables with enough of a Collectability rating to be worth the RGS. That suggests to me that a gear improvement is certainly in order, and the MH tools are one heck of a place to start. I don't know that I'm going to get all of the i180 Mining/Botany gear. At this point I'm only planning out to six of those 18 weeks.

But I do know that either they are going to drop the Scrip system entirely, OR they are going to add new kinds of scrips. Green, Yellow, Pink, Purple, all rotating in and out as the Philosophy, Mythology, Soldiery, Poetics, Law, and Esoterics have done. *IF* they follow the same sort of pattern with Scrips as they do with the Tomestones, we are looking at what .. 3.15? 3.2? Before another Scrip is added.

At 3 months between each major patch, we're 11 weeks away from 3.10 ... and 23 weeks away from 3.15. That's only a difference of five weeks in which to gather Favors and still gear up with the bought Gathering gear.

Hopefully by then more people will be gathering and selling Favor node gathers on the MB at lower prices. I tend to doubt it though, unless 3.1 adds recipes that replace the current ones.

[Sibyll]

Scoff if you like, but 718 Craft/695 Control is darn near "max meld everything"..

I didn't mean to come off that way. I had nothing melded when the patch dropped and I thought it was a bit stupid how much melding these required. The meld requirements wouldn't be such an issue if it weren't for Clam Chowder requiring fish, which tend to cost of fortune due to fishing. The Control melds are the real killers here. Clam Chowder combined with budget craftsmanship melds is very easy to hit those requirements.

As for the rest of your post, if they don't release crafted versions of the gathering gear and drop a patch that raises stat caps then it's going to really throttle the supply of materials for crafters, as you alluded to. As of right now the only major piece that you can make is the off hand and maybe the belt.