Guild Wars 2

[Xyngynkynyn]

...

GW2's crafting is: You manufacture dozens of obsolete pieces of equipment to gain a handful of skillups, and to do so you pretty much have to exhaust your entire stock of materials that you have amassed. Now go repeat the process a few dozen times, and try not to lose interest when you hit the point that's about ten/fifteen points before the next tier in which case it'll take a dozen manufactured items to yield a single skill point.

...

O....M....Frakkin G!!!!!

With my experience with crafting in GW2, I can honestly say with a confident degree of certainty that you're doing it wrong; very...horribly...so.

The fastest way to level crafting (ergo the proper way) is through the discovery panel.; NOT by mass producing stuff that you probably won't use or sell (sell those 14 rifles to the merchant or salvage them for materials is what I recommend).

I take it you've never used discovery before; otherwise you wouldn't paint such a dismal picture of leveling crafting. Since you're doing Huntsman and assuming you're at least level 25 there, go to your recipes and craft: 1 Precision Green Inscription, 1 Green Longbow Stave, and 1 Rawhide String. After crafting all those, go to the discovery panel and plug in those 3 items and click the button that appears (Craft or Discover; I forget). You should now have discovered how to make Precise Crude Longbows. Care to guess how to make Precise Crude Shortbows/Harpoon Guns/Torches/Warhorns or Precise Bronze Rifles/Pistols? It's pretty elementary once you know one to figure out the others. If your between 25 and 35, I think you should gain 1 or 2 levels from that one discovery alone.

As soon as you hit the next 25 level mark (i.e. 25, 50, 75...) stop and look at your recipes to see if you have new inscription, refinements and better grade weapon components available. If so then start new discoveries with those new items. Example if you hit 50 before discovering the recipe for a Precise Crude Torch, forget about it because at that point, you'll receive less XP since you're already in a new tier so you get less bang for your (limited) materials. Always work with your top level insignias and weapon component grade to get the most XP from discoveries.

Note the text colors of the recipe names. Red means you'll learn those at the imminent next 25 level mark. Gold (I think means) you get full XP crafting that recipe. The others indicate diminishing XP every time you create them and grey means you get no XP from creating that item/component/insignia.

There is a "craft all" button in the recipe panel; don't blindly use that. You may for example be able to create 10 Precise Green Inscriptions with your existing hoard but remember that you can only craft (hence discover) 7 weapon types that use that particular inscription. You might think that you should only craft 7 then but you may be near the next 25 level mark already and if you hit that with say only 2 discoveries, then the remaining 5 become wasteful. You'll still get XP but it'll be diminished so not a good use of your resources.

Don't worry that you practically shouldn't discover all the recipes of your current tier. The only ones that matter are the top tier ones anyway so no loss. The only exception is if you really like the skin of a particular crafted item. I believe all crafted item skins don't drop from mobs and you get different skins for different tiers to boot.

Leveling crafting isn't as abysmal as you think. I too gather while exploring (also aiming for 100% world exploration) and at one point, I stopped by at Lion's Arch and worked with my spoils and gained over 100 levels in one sitting.

That's about all I have to say about that.

Hey Foxbat, you in AB? Are you doing WvW?