The End of Specialist Recipes (Patch Notes)

[Silverbane]

It's a pretty cruel joke SE played by getting people to invest 3+ months per class of red scrip into the i180 gear, only to turn around and have it be almost completely unsuitable for 3-star crafting ...

That's not the case at all. It's been understood from the start that the red scrip gear was the "easy" way for casual crafters to gear up, but that serious crafters would want to use the crafted (and overmelded) L170 gear. The latter is a much greater investment, and now we see what the payoff for that investment is.

If nothing else, because the crafted gear can provide more CP --- at least until today, CP was king.

My wife and I used a couple of 180 tools to bootstrap our 2-star crafting, but we have not bought any others red scrip DoH gear.