I spent most of my time this weekend going about killing things and leveling characters, but a small portion of that was also spent crafting.
To start off you need to gather some materials. Everyone has gathering skills innately, but you must use them to raise up their level and allow access to higher tier materials. Simple enough — just find something to harvest and use it. A small window will pop up displaying two status bars — a pass and a fail. From here the chances are played out and you will either succeed or fail. Naturally, the higher your skill level the better the chance for success, and the faster it will happen. Also, there’s rarer materials you can sometimes harvest.
Once you’ve got your materials harvested it’s time to visit a crafting trainer in the major city — Sanctum for Elyos. There’s a few different types of production crafting (six, I think) and I went with Armorsmithing. It’s pretty simple, you ask to be trained in the skill and pay the fee (it was around 1,000-3,000), then you can start refining usually from there. But, if you want to get the most out of your harvested materials, it’s best to level up your production craft a bit first. This is done through work orders — similar to Everquest 2. Work orders are free to get and the first will not require any additional materials; however, once you start moving up in the work orders they will require you to purchase and use more additional materials — you can get these from the seller near your trainer, they’re typically cheap but when used en mass will drain your wallet. When you complete a work order you hand it in and receive a random crafting material of use to your profession, or even a recipe.
Keep leveling up your tradeskill and you can purchase new items to make from the same material merchant. They’re basically like blueprints/schematics/recipes/whateveryouwanttocallthem. I’ve heard that you also have the chance to craft a rare version of the items you make, not sure on how high that chance is or if you can influence it. Oh, also — the tradeskill crafting uses the same pass/fail window as harvesting, the reason you’ll want to use work orders to buff your skills before using the real stuff.
As far as how good the equipment is… It’s at least better than the stuff being merchanted at armor vendors. And it should be better than none-green drops — or at least close. I haven’t seen crafted green armor so I can’t tell if it’d be better than the dropped kind, but it’s either possible or close. So, I’d place crafting as currently useful, but if the item market gets flooded with dropped equipment of green or better quality — might not be.
