I hate crafting and any form of it.

[freonsmurf]

I even loathe the crafting required to make poisons. Horrible, troublesome, tedious, bothersome meddling fat hobbits we hates it yes we hates it......I hate it.

So that said, is crafting required in anyway? I always prefer to buy stuff off other players than make it myself, so will I be ok with that sort of mindset?

[Llabak Tharr]

Required? No, not really, at least through the teens (as far as I've gotten). Can it help? Yeah.

For instance, if you take the first aid tradeskill, you can make bandages with fabric that you get as loot from almost all humaniods. That can help you with your downtime some. Alchemy, well clearly being able to get health potions and such are nice.

Here's the cool thing (at least pre-last-push). The Cosmos UI (and presumably others) can let you run trades in batches. So you're out killing dwarves or something, and you've been accumulating all these strips of cloth. Then you need to go take a bio break. So you pull up the crafting interface, tell it to make a whole ton of bandages, and go pee. When you get back, either you'll be done or you can break the cycle and go back to adventuring. But in your backpack will be nicely stacked a bunch of bandages.

Same deal goes with cooking - you're getting meat as loot anyway, so when you go afk next to a fire somewhere, you can just tell it to churn out cooked food for you while you're gone.

As for buying - well I've seen no one auctioning any post-production tradeskill items (see a lot of materials go on sale), but that may just be my own experience. The problem (as I've said before) with tradeskills is that to get high ranks in trades, you have to go out and hunt, so you're not likely to see a lot of tradeskill mules sitting around crafting and selling items. You'll have to be probably 18th level or higher to be able to buy top tier crafting abilities, so people may not want to sit on their tushes to make swords and stuff.

[ShadowCross]

As he already said, crafting isn't too bad here.

It's basically a DAoC-like interface.. or compares to the new EQ-crafting UI.

You got recipes, see what you need for them -> click combine and it does everything. No moving items into a container to combine or anything like that.

That said, almost all (95%) of the stuff I need to do my tradeskills I get while leveling anyhow - so I just can make usefull stuff out of it instead of selling it to the vendors for petty money.

[Shaymus1]

Down with crafting!

Who ever thought customers would want to do this anyway? it's absurd.

I feel better now...

[berael]

I dunno...given option A of "go to store, buy heal potions" or option B of "notice an herb bush as the mob dies, wander over, pick some leaves, pull a flask out of my backpack, and blend together a healing potion", I think option B is hella cooler.

[Nocte]

I just started Skinning and Leatherwork last night for a change of pace. It's definitely more streamlined than EQs system. Yeah, the two games are apples and oranges in a lot of aspects, but that's my only point of comparison.

[ShadowCross]

berael put it quite nice

[Fricka]

I always prefer to buy stuff off other players than make it myself, so will I be ok with that sort of mindset?

I've bought a fair amount of player made items throughout the various pushes. I've purchased leather pieces, weapons, and enchants from players. It was a pretty painless process even before the new mail system was put in. I would listen into the trade channel when I happened to be in the big cities to see good prices and double check with the rogue channel rogues. Then when I did want to buy I just either saw it auctioned already or just sent out a WTB message of my own. Easily and quickly done, and now you don't even have to go meet the auctioner because they can mail you the item (it costs a small amount of copper to mail something and there is a time delay in receiving it).

Also, since armor and weapons actually have a "made by Telchar" or what not, on them, you can look up who was your last supplier and just send them a tell if you need something else.

All that being said, I love the crafting system :) And if any rogues have some wild steelbloom or other higher end herbs, I can make them some nice potions :)