crafting - the grind to end all grinds but it doesn't have to be!

[VirieSquichie]

Kudos on implementing crafting, I know many people have been clamoring for it for a very long time.

Too bad it's targetted at the highest level of characters, and requires large amounts of farming. (ultra-high-level RAID quest farming at that) I mean, seriously...you have to collect the stuff to make an item enchantable in the first place. Then you have to collect more to make it have baseline abilities. Then you have to collect more and more and more to slowly work those abilities up to where you want...assuming you can figure out the recipes or someone else is kind enough to figure them out for you and post them. And assuming you can get the particular things you need to drop, instead of a bunch of other clutter you may never want to use in a recipe.

Casual gaming simply doesn't come into play here.

What happened to the good old crafting of:
get a masterwork item of the type you wish to have crafted
get a few medium-rarity collectible things (the third tier of market/house collectibles would work great for this) that have sympathetic attributes to those you wish your item to possess (i.e. elemental ingots would work great for adding that 1d6 of fire damage to a weapon, etc.)
get a pile of gold to pay the vendor/craftsperson who puts it together for you

It's a good use for gems, too, since a standard gem of a particular value could be part of each recipe...no more ignoring the skittles in the chests because their haul-off value is too low, when they're also of use in recipes.

Masterwork items of other types could be implemented so crafted bracers, boots, gloves etc. could be made - not just weapons and armor.

I propose Turbine keeps on with the crafting they've implemented, for the cutting-edge uberplayers, but also implements the lower-end crafting with the more common collectibles and gems for the low-middle level ranges. If you're level 10 or below, shouldn't your eyes light up when you find rare collectibles, rather than pass them by as a worthless feature of the game? I have only seen a few players detour over to bookshelves, mushroom patches and even flowering plants lately, it seems like most everyone has realized the original sets of collectibles aren't worth collecting even at the lower levels.

I've got a couple casters that practically lived on lily extract for their first 8 levels or so, and before Gianthold was added in I was still turning in the stuff that produced cure wands...now it's not worth it since I can pull a 50k item from some random chests and sell it for a stack of cure wands...and let's not get into the worthlessness of SCROLLS as collectible rewards.