If you enjoy crafting, making your own gear feels good. That said, leveling up multiple crafting classes will cost you something. When leveling crafting classes you either pay in gil or in time. Paying in gil would involve buying other peoples high quality crafted items to turn in for leve-quests to speed level, paying in time is gathering materials and making your own turn-ins(turning in lower quality items for less exp until you learn to make hq items, etc) along with using other leveling methods. You arent far enough in the story to have started unlocking friendly beast tribes, but a few of them are in need of crafters to help them with projects(and as such, their quests involve crafting and give crafting exp) - something to keep in mind for later. So for upgrades in the meantime, my advice would be to look at how much of an upgrade youre actually getting from an item. Gear goes up slowly in power until you hit 50, then it jumps wildly up(51-59 is a medium build, 60 is a jump, 61-69 is medium, 70 is a jump - obviously theres a pattern). Jewelry in particular gets very little boost before 50. If your armor and weapon are within 10 levels of you(until you get to 50), you should be more or less fine. If you need a boost to get by something, the biggest difference comes from your weapon(then chest/legs, then arms/hat/boots, then belt and jewelry). Check the market board(sometimes things will be really cheap), but keep in mind that the most recent outpost youve been to will probly have an npc selling white gear for a fairly reasonable price(often less then players will list something for - never by normal quality white gear from the board without checking first). Also, if youve made any higher level friends who craft sometimes your upgrades will be ridiculously easy for them to put together if you ask(as a level 70 omni i could gather the materials and craft a full set of gear for a level 40 monk in under 20 mins if i felt like it - it might honestly take longer to make the list of everything i needed then to gather it all and put the items together). And of course, an extra dungeon run or two is always an option too.