I guess most of the professions now have bind-on-pickup crafts, so none of them are entirely worthless. But I still feel like gathering professions are the only ones that make much sense economically.

1. The stuff you can make is good. Better than anything that’s likely to drop from a quest unless you run a lot of group only content.

2. The recipes are well organized. If you want to level from 5 to 60 using only one handed axes, new crafted ones come along often enough that you need never use any other weapon. Entire new sets of armor come along fairly frequently.

3. If you are anal, you can crit items and end up with superior products. Not just items that require rare ingredients, any recipe.

It’s not perfect. There are some level ranges where a melee character will have a tough time coming up with decent jewelry upgrades. Scholar can be a foaming bitch to level. Farming is about the most insanely boring crafting profession I’ve encountered in any game. I also think the recent revamp of crafted armor actually hurt the crafting a lot more than it helped, by making it more complex than it really needed to be and by raising the level requirements on a lot of the better items. And finally, the guild recipes are a bit too powerful for the relative ease with which you can obtain them.

All those caveats in place, I’d say LoTRO has one of my favorite overall crafting systems among MMOs. Of the games I’ve seriously played, I’d say only EQ II had a better system to may tastes.

Compare this with Tailoring, where I would have had to kill those beasts to get the leather I needed. Only beasts drop leather, too. This is one of the things I hated so much about leatherworking in WoW, that you had to go kill things to gather your materials.

Tailoring also has more recipes than other professions (light and medium armor, 6 pieces, 2-3 racial variations per tier), requires multiple components in addition to vendor-bought components, and seems to have very little reasoning for the stats a given piece of armor gives (although that’s not unique to Tailoring). In all, it can be really tedious to try to work up Tailoring.

What’s interesting is that players were clamoring for a more interactive crafting system when EQ2 came out. The cry was that crafting should be as exciting as combat is. The EQ2 devs listened and provided a crafting system that is about as engaging as a simple combat is.

The big problem is that this ignored the reality of what players do during crafting. They’ll often be in guild chat, or be doing crafting as a low-impact way to pass the time. Making crafting much more interactive took away from these social elements. It also required player attention, so it wasn’t just something you could do to wind down.

I use this as an example of players not really knowing what they want. Feedback is useful, but if players dictate design then you get flawed (though still interesting and, in some ways, fun) systems like EQ2′s crafting.

Each of the crafts seems to have its bottleneck tier, and I don’t know if that is caused by leveling speeds, relative scarcity, what you fight at each level, etc. (I mean for the final mastery: just getting through a tier is usually easy.) Tailoring probably has it the easiest, because there are always things you need for deeds that drop hides. Hunt wargs of the appropriate level until you get the deed, and you will probably be about there. For jewelers, it is tier 2 (silver). For making weapons and armor, tier 4.

I can’t get into crafting seriously because of the voice in my head always telling me that I’m wasting my time/effort/energy in making items that will become obsolete either by easily finding something similar or better, or simply by item inflation when (x) expansion hits. Crafting always felt to me like the Dilbertesque sweet smell of unnecessary work.

I did however have a stint as a Jeweller in my LOTRO main back when I was playing. Can’t say I enjoyed it 100% (not even 75% probably) but I stuck with it for some reason. That reason most likely being that I could be more or less self-sufficient as a miner/jeweler, didn’t have to put my progress much in the hands of other, probably despicable humans, and it didn’t seem as cumbersome (materials-wise) as other professions.

But when it came to crafting… it was the same old story. Hit create, and watch a bar fill. For hours. And hours. And hours.