Crafting

[Vohl]

Crafting is certainly an acquired taste. The skills frequently make you dependent on an enchanter for mana vials and enchanted metals. Throughout EQ's existence, crafted items were balanced from a cost and utility perspective such that dropped items are largely better.

Having said that, there are certainly exceptions to this rule. Wu's armor and jewelcraft are both quite desirable. Handmade backpacks and medicine bags are in demand as well. Carrying around a tailoring kit and a stack or two of patterns at low levels allows you to create tattered armor that sells to merchants at a reasonable profit compared to the ruined pelt you started with. Even if you'd otherwise sell spider and spiderling silks to PC tailors, you could create swatches or threads fairly.

A word of warning about these - unlike the live servers, the swatch and thread combines are not "no fail". You'll run through some of these working your skill up to the minimum failure rate.

@Darian: I'm liking that sig image. That's a HoMM4 hero, isn't it?