Seems like this was just a discussion on another thread in which I replied - crafting does seem to fade out for a awhile. I remember I got to a point where I stopped crafting as there was not anything worth crafting. But it picks up. The best thing to do is figure out gifts you will need in the future and just start collecting them now. Like there are two crafts in Victoria that I am crafting now and they require 2 gifts per craft..... and I think there was a good one in Antarctica that I am still using quite a lot of. Moon was terrible for crafting. There is no denying that crafting could have been made a lot better. If they had just increased the stats on some of the crafts a little it might have put more emphasis on gifts and given players more of an incentive to reach more cities for the job drops as well as the crafts. But I think most people are content with just getting into bosses for those drops and not worried about the rewards of leveling as the rewards often times do not outweigh the cons.
Well maybe you and I just play two different ways or are at two different levels. My lowest weapon used was already higher than the boss drops in Victoria when Victoria opened. So I never needed any of the boss drops from Victoria from day one and since they haven't even come out with crafts for the Lunar Boss drops, I imagine it will be forever before we see Victoria boss drop crafts. Plus needing 20 of each boss drop to make 1 elite can require a lot of time and stamina to do 1500 or 1600. And then to make Optimals is like 60 drops per item. The crafts I can get from Victoria add +15 to attack on my lowest vehicle used and a +2 on the defense. So crafting in Victoria improves my lowest vehicle used by a total of +17. So not sure what boss drops you are getting but I can do better with crafting. And as far as weapons, the craft in Victoria improves my lowest item used by +11 on defense. Of course, with the job drop needed for the craft, the job drop alone would raise my defense on weapon by +7. So the craft does only increase the defense by +4. But if I am going to have all the job drops anyways, why not collect gifts to get the extra +4 per item. When talking about 1500 items, that does add up to like a 6000 increase to defense.
I wish I had this much time to figure all this out. The whole crafting process is so bad, I haven't done it in years, and it's only getting worse as more items keep being added. Kudos to those to actually spend the time to figure this out, I deserve to get my butt kicked by those players.
The nice thing with the "PROFILE" tab and then the "FIGHT STRENGTH" selection is you can click on the Mob Weapon, Mob Armor, and/or Mob Vehicle and it will show you in order the list of items you use and how many. Then if you move the mouse over an item it will give you the stats of that item. So all I do is see what the lowest item I am using and with the stats from items I can craft, get from a job drop, boss drop, or even from a RAID reward and I do the math. As I replace each lower item the lowest used stats of course change and the increase for the crafts or new job drops etc are not as good. Like since I last posted, my lowest used vehicle attack was 103. Now it is already 105. With 89 more crafts it will change to 106. All I do to make it quick and easy is I wrote down a short list of items to craft and the stats that I can use as a reference. I think crafting might be more complex for lower levels as once you get to the top, there really is not a huge list of items to look at anymore as most are worse than what you have and job drops and boss drops have replaced most of the items on the crafting side. Also, when crafting from a lower level perspective, you have to decide which items will be around for a while and which ones will you just be replacing with the next job drop you reach or bosses that are shared with you. Like Attack Armor - if you can get into enough Berlins early on, you can use shoes as they are better than anything you are going to craft for attack. And if you are really lucky to get in on enough Seouls for the shields or even Moon for the Space Ghosts Armors..... then anything you do with job drops or crafts will be worthless. At the top we don't have better items that are coming any time soon to quickly replace something we might be working on stocking up with now. I found crafting earlier in the game much more time consuming trying to determine what was going to be good for long term vs what will just be replaced the next city I reached. As a result, I did very little crafting.
that's the problem. all of these manual comparisons to find out the stats of what are needed to craft something, then looking at the workshop to get the stats of the item being crafted, times however many different items there are to craft. i have heard complaints from players that assume that crafting will make them stronger but it actually makes them weaker, and then they can't reverse the crafts. the whole process (including gifts) need to be made MUCH more user friendly for those of us that don't want to have to spend the time figuring all this out.
If you play for a longer time chat is the spice that keeps the game interesting. For some odd reason I enjoy watching "word wars".
