Thread: Level 50+ crafting is worse than I could have possibly imagined

Aside from the obvious fact that the LI system consigned most weapon crafting categories to oblivion, I have been amazed at the many and various ways crafting was destroyed for the Moria levels. Let's see:

We have two tiers of logs, hides and ores instead of one.

None of the recipes are multiple output.

They don't matter much anyway, because the gear I get from doing level 51-54 quests is equal to or better than anything I can craft for level 54-56.

The Moria instance bartered items are some of the best in the game, if you can get a group together to run them.

I was warned by other forum posters that crafting was useless after mid levels, but I didn't expect all this. Why have this grindy system, then basically tell us we have been fools for wasting our time with it?

Supreme crafting is really two tiers, one for Moria and one for Mirkwood. If you notice, the lower level Supreme recipes require one (or two) resource, while the higher level Supreme recipes require different resources.

Not all of it is outstripped by quest or barter gear. Jewelery and offhand weapons for two. Also, barter (instance/raid) is supposed to be better than crafted gear.

Tier 7 is also mostly, but not completely useless. Tier 8 will be better. And at level cap, weaponsmiths do a good business crafting LIs.

The higher level recipies of the supreme master tier are also gated by reputation with the two elven factions beyond Moria (Galadhrim/Lothlorien and Malledrim/Mirkwood). Once you get through Moria, you will find reputation vendors in the vineyards of Lothlorien (and later in different camps in Mirkwood) that are pretty nice at least for some of the crafting professions.

Keep in mind too that they just revamped the first part of Moria, and I think they adjusted some of the itemization for the way stats are now. I don't remember the quest rewards having 50+ of a stat on it before, and my level 57 LM has 688 Will with no buffs and no Moria instance armor, so something has changed since my previous characters went through, but the crafted stuff hasn't changed. I know some of it is the 'all stats available on all jewelry' that changed with the stat cap, so maybe that's all it really is.