Crafting: a complete waste?

[donfilibuster]

You also need to figure out which recipes give you the most xp for your essences.
Tipically you'll only craft 2-3 of a chosen shard before refreshing the window and moving on the next best shard.

As for amounts, the way the shards are tiered you can have a goal of advancing 10 levels at a time or something alike.
Otherwise you won't see the gain, e.g. going from +2 to +3 enhancement bonus.
For this you'll need a fairly large stack of each essence to be worth your time in the devices.

The body essence is the most common, so if you have a stack of like 1000 lesser body essences chances are you have a varied bunch of all the other essences.
The first time i did this went from 0 to 20, and the second time from 20 to 30, and expect a steep curve to go further.

A good goal for a lowbie would be reaching lv 40 to be able to make lv 50 recipes at 60% and make +4 items.
So you won't have enough craft for a greater bane but maybe can make a holy of pg or regular bane.
The prefix-suffix combos make decent mid lv gear (e.g. +6 modifier would be min lv 11).
At this point you move onto the mid levels and can begin to use named loot, gs, or buy the +5 gear from the AH.

[dkyle]

Not neccessarily. 50% with a 6 Greaters is worth less than two 65% chance with 3 Greaters, both in initial XP and considering that you can then apply the shard(s) to a club to get some of the essences back for another go around.

Naturally. I should've specified my assumption of "for shards of equal cost".

I guess a better way to put is, try to craft the good, cheap leveling shards as close to 50% as possible. Don't wait for them to improve odds.

[stille_nacht]

yeaaah... level first, then worry about other things.

As a capped wizard, my income/ week is ~ 1mil in large shroud ingredients and scrolls if i bothered selling them (i dont get a nice scroll every week, but every few weeks, so it averages :]), money is totally not the issue. It is quite boring crafting a billion shards though...