Guide to Crafting in Guild Wars 2

Crafting is a very important concept in most MMO games out there, and by now you should have tried your hammer on an anvil at least once or twice in your gaming career. Some players love the crafting part in MMOs and spend extensive amounts of time, painstakingly sorting out crafting materials, creating spreadsheets and trying to make a profit on the auction houses.

The gold profit is the only reward when it comes to crafting, but, as we all know by now: character experience can’t be bought with gold. So in terms of leveling you character, you will fall way behind your friends that don’t take that much interest in crafting and just want to level up their characters and get to those awesome end-game dungeons.

Meanwhile, if you are lucky, you are filthy rich and you can afford so much better items than your max leveled friends, but now you will have to eagerly play through those levels, days on end, with your items waiting for you in the bank. And it isn’t fun at all. You can’t play with your friends, you waste tons of time farming for materials and only if you are lucky you can get some extra gold by selling the crafted items.

Guild Wars 2 overhauled the crafting experience and added to it what it has been missing for such a long time, among other things: character experience. This means that along with gaining the crafting profession experience while you are hammering away, with every crafted item you also gain character experience that counts towards your leveling.

This has a huge impact on the gameplay experience in Guild Wars 2 and offers the crafting enthusiasts the possibility to be even more elitist than before. Finally, crafting is rewarding the player for the time and effort poured in this activity that it’s like a game in the game, burning away hours on farming and discovering those important recipes.

This means that you can choose to be an all-time crafter of the guild for example, without the fear that you will fall behind in leveling and you won’t be able to play with your friends in that awesome dungeon. Your guild members bring you the needed materials found in their journeys and you hammer away, in the comfort zone of the crafting workshop in town, creating valuable items for your adventurous friends that don’t have to wait for that miraculous drop anymore or that just don’t like crafting.

Because of the way that crafting is so different in Guild Wars 2, it is a game that stands miles above most of the crappy MMO games out there.

With simple additions like instant crafting when you have too many items of one kind to create, the ability to automatically send the crafting materials directly in your bank no matter where you are on the map to clear your inventory or the so important addition of character experience when crafting, they totally changed the way crafting is viewed in a MMO and encourages players to try it, with the guarantee that they aren’t wasting time butinstead exploring another dimension of the game that rewards even the most casual crafter on the server.