Thinking of trying the game again but always been curious about something. Does one have to craft in this game to get by and to get equipment? Or is there enough items in stores that one can buy? Or would one not be able to gain enough money to buy everything they need?

No. Crafting is mostly for fun, but  you can also just harvest resources, make a fortune on the AH, and buy everything you want. Frankly, at level 49, all my gear is from quests.

There is a great blance of quest gear, and crafted gear. But, you dont have to make it. Quests and AH will be enough.

Originally posted by Senadina

No. Crafting is mostly for fun, but  you can also just harvest resources, make a fortune on the AH, and buy everything you want. Frankly, at level 49, all my gear is from quests.

I completely agree with Senadina.  Crafting has never really been my thing in MMOs, but in LOTRO you can choose the Explorer profession which gives you the Tailor, Forester, and Prospector, which allows you to gather wood and mine ore.  Anyone in game can harvest hides from fallen foes, so the Explorer is able to harvest all three of these primary components.  This allows you, as stated above by Senadina, to simply gather during the week then make a hefty sum during the weekend at the Auction House.

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

There is a great blance of quest gear, and crafted gear.

This was true in SoA but not anymore. No you dont need to craft and as of right now its a complete waste of time to do so unless you just enjoy crafting and dont care if the items you make are worthless (in most cases). As has already been stated take explorer for money making. The most usefull one for actuall crafting IMO is tinkerer (I think it was) for jewlcrafting. Your best bet though is to take explorer and just buy what you want that your not getting from instances. As it stands right now quested gear is good enough to get you started on getting instance gear or any soloing your going to do. In most cases your quested gear is better than any crafting gear you will get except for maxed crafting crit gear. If you get all your instance gear your better off than max crafted crit gear.

Now if they ever fix crafting to what it was before Moria its worth having. The max crit gear was subpar to raid gear but the dropoff was verry minor.

Edit: Pointing out which part I said was false. The rest of his statment is true.

They broke it in Moria. Besides that, crafting is pretty much pretty pointless after level 30.

But even before that, it simply takes far too much materials to level up your crafting ability to make stuff. By the time you've gotten enough material to churn out the amount of stuff to level up your skill in something, you'll have outleveled  the gear you can make. Unless you are spending a ton of money on the materials (and then it would be  cheaper to buy the equipment rather than craft in most cases).

That said, it can be useful for alts, it's also a time sink in an otherwise very dull game, and it's decent when you start out.

Originally posted by trancejeremy

They broke it in Moria. Besides that, crafting is pretty much pretty pointless after level 30.

No actually crafting is just fine all the way up to 50.   The only way you are going to get better gear than the best crafted gear is by doing raids or other difficult group content, and even that gear is only marginally better than what you can craft. You can't get gear anywhere near that good from soloable quests.  That is as it should be imo. 

However, teir VI crafting (50+) is indeed currently borked.  Very little of it is an upgrade from the best teir V peices.  Even the best teir VI items look pretty stupid next to gear that's relatively easy to get get in 6 man dungeons. 

Crafting is getting an overhaul in book 8, one of the changes is that they are improving the stats on tier VI crafted armor.  That should help things a lot (my tailor and metal smith are certainly psyched), but it does still leave weapon smiths and woodworkers out in the cold.   

In my opinion crafted gear in SoA to gooda dn was to easy to get. At level 47 you could get gear that was better than anything that dropped in group instances and almost as good as raid gear that took months to get.

Now its pretty weak but will get better with book 8.