For our crafting skill, we took up Tailoring and leveled up to about 215. We crafted the level 28 Worth Durable Twisp (Worthy Durable Fess for Elyos) gear set minus the chest piece since you receive a piece of Daevination gear at 30. The set is great for Spiritmasters since they have +HP and 2 sockets per piece which you could manastone for more HP. The general consensus we came across was to stack HP especially since Magic Boost does not scale with our pet and energy balls. So our SM is sitting at a comfortable ~3300 HP at level 30. Being able to craft your own gear is nice, but be prepared to spend lots of Kinah and time on it. It seems that as you level your character higher and higher, the more Kinah you will obtain. So in our experience it is better to do a lot of leveling just for the Kinah and collecting the different crafting materials before taking on a profession. While crafting our level 28 set at skill level 160-199, we noticed that the materials used also require Aether/Gathering at similar levels. Unless you want to spend the cash at the trade broker buying materials, it may be wise to level gathering to a similar level as your crafting skill. All this is assuming that you want to craft items for profit rather than skill ups, which are usually done with Work Orders. The advantages for work orders are that they reward crafting materials and recipes after each turn in. Some of these green recipes can proc/crit blue quality items. This is how you make all that Kinah spent on leveling a crafting skill back. Procced blues can sell for a good amount especially while the majority of the population are still leveling.

One thing to mention is that you should consider crafting gear that you simply have the materials for. Even though we were focused on crafting cloth gear, Tailoring also has the ability to make leather gear. Since not all the materials overlap between the two, you can burn through all those leather materials sitting in your bank for gear. Over the course of crafting recipes that can proc blues, we only made it happen about 4-5 times. Attempts probably totalled about 40-50 times. We chose to buy some of the rare materials like Worthy Greater Armor Flux, High-Grade Gold Ore, and High-Grade Aether Crystal on the trade broker for the purpose of trying to proc the blues. This was in addition with all the materials we picked up while leveling and gathering. The good news is that we recouped all crafting expenses this way when the blue items sold. Just remember that trying to proc a blue takes a lot of attempts, so you have to do it on a large scale if you want results. We believe that the failure rates are under 2% once you are 10 skill points above your current recipe level. Just make sure to minimize your failure rates in general by crafting recipes that are about 20-30 skill levels lower than what you are at, also known as a light yellow colored recipe in your crafting interface.