Can someone explain crafting now.  I left before the NGE and was a chef and armorsmith.  Is there any decay or do items last forever?  What about loot vs. crafted items?  Any point to being a crafter anymore?

How is chef?  Is the food worth it?

Sorry for all teh questions but just curious to see what has changed.

There is no decay now in the game. However a armorsmith does well because of the RE system (crafters make skill mods now instead of looted ones). Because of that most people have quite a few sets of armor with different mods on them. And chef now is great with the change to allow you to switch food/drink you have anytime you want because there is no "filling" anymore. The chef foods and drinks are powerful additions to any combat character and are in big demand. I personaly carry crates of 8 different foods/drinks so I am ready no matter the situation.

The only area currently where loot drops are better than crafted items is weaponsmith (there are a few exceptions even there since you can craft a socket on weapons and a few of them because of that can be better than some loot drops when you take into account adding 3 modifers to the weapon).

Last question, how important are the resources?  I could have sworn I read somewhere that the values of the resources are not as important as they once were and the items no longer vary as much as they used to based on the resource stats. 

Originally posted by PSKmustang

Last question, how important are the resources?  I could have sworn I read somewhere that the values of the resources are not as important as they once were and the items no longer vary as much as they used to based on the resource stats. 

I can only speak about Domestics (Tailor / Chef) as my alt is a domestics trader.

Good resources are just as important as ever, you still need high grade to make decent tissues/additives.   Tailor never really depended on quality so that hasnt changed. 

The thing is that crafting in general has changed, the degree of it has changed, each trader has far more options as to what to focus on than they did before.  Some things havent changed, people expect to buy top quality items, which is somewhat easier with buffs and expertise to attain these days than it was pre-nge.

Focus has changed, the tailor for example is used mostly for creating SEAs and reverse engineering clothing for parts for SEAs.  Chefs still make bio-enhanced foods but they can make all the bio stuff themselves now, which is nice.

Traders are now combined, two professions per trader (3 if you count merchant, 4 if you go into bio-engineering/beastmaster).  Expertise dictates which of those professions you specialize in, you can do both, but something else will suffer for it. 

The biggest thing Ive noticed is that there are very few real crafters around these days.  Most crafters are around only to supply thier guilds or themselves, there are very few well maintained shops/malls.  Those that are around do very well indeed, from what Ive seen.

I just came back to the game too, so Ive been running around gathering resources, just put my first batch of Flameout on my vendors a couple days ago.

-Gooney