I am slowly heading towards 50 at the moment and have noticed that with synthweaving by the time I have reversed to purple on a few suitable items I am several levels higher than them and thus its feeling pretty pointless as a crafting skill.

 

What is its viability at lv50? do the items stand up to available drops, is there any point in it if I am raiding etc?

Presently, to get schematics comensurate with lower end raid gear, you need to raid to get both said schematics, and run hardmodes or raids for the exotic components to craft them.

 

Meanwhile, while you're farming hardmodes and raiding repeatedly to do this, you'll be rolling on gear that will, at worst, rival, and more typically grossly outclass whatever you're looking at crafting.

 

Best case scenerio: you get the schematic and exotic to craft it before you get a gear drop for a given slot and so could have an ok gear piece in that slot...at least until you eventually win a superior HM or raid drop.

 

For the hassle and costs involved, you're far better off going Biochem for the reusable medpacks, stims and adrenals to help you in raiding. They'll help you before you get raid drops and they'll help you after. Even after the nerf, their benefit is the same no matter what you're doing, and it's a good, solid benefit at all levels of play.

 

Crafting, synthweaving or otherwise, can give you a slight edge with an easily unreasonable degree of investment while leveling. It can enable you to more conveniently make gear for various slots for yourself and companions, though at a hugely variable cost of time and investment that largely hinges on luck with reverse engineering.

 

If you're very lucky very consistently with REing, you can make some great leveling gear with crafting. Nothing you'll need or should work very hard, or spend very much, to get...but, if you're lucky a lot and RE a lot of green schematics to even blues to outfit yourself and companions with, you can generally break even.

 

At best. But not at endgame.

 

Endgame...if you're not taking biochem, you're almost a hindrance to your raid healers in particular, and you're contributing a definitively lesser quality of activity to everything.

 

Same for running hardmodes.

 

In fact, just run hardmodes and you'll be all set up in great gear in no time, and will be completely set up to transition smoothly into raiding, at least as far as being prepared gear-wise goes.

 

Crafting cannot and will not take you there anytime soon. You'd be better off PVPing for gear when you can't run hardmodes, running hardmodes when you can and spending intervening time doing dailies for daily commendations that can -also- get you great mods and gear perfectly suited for raiding than wasting one second of your time on any craft that isn't biochem.

 

Just the state of things as they are right now, right there. Maybe they'll change that in the future. I -CERTAINLY- hope they do, but I'd be lying to you if I told you anything else as of this time.

 

Best of luck to you whatever you decide to do!

Edited January 19, 2012 by Uruare

really great reply thank you very much..

 

I have been enjoying crafting but it just seems to achieve very little, the orange schematics I craft are bound to me so I cant sell them, little point in wearing them either as I can simply find a better one each time whilst levelling.

 

I have done some biochem on my agent and think that I will ditch my current skills and get on with biochem again now

 

thanks agan

 

Merkin

Essentially, crafting is utterly useless if you're not a biochemist. In themepark games like this, WoW, etc, crafting has always been back-ended by raiding and PvP gear. This will always be the case. If you want viable crafting options, go find a good sandbox mmo.