The joys of crafting

I can't really explain why, but crafting has always been one of the most fun things for me to do in most MMORPGs. So now my multi-boxing couple of characters has reached level 50, I've spent a big amount of gold and time to level up my druids enchanting from 300 to 375, and I'll do the same with his engineering next.

Well, at least the enchanting I can justify with the easier access to enchants for my other characters, now that you can cast enchantments on scrolls and send them to your alts. But engineering isn't really all that useful. I mostly took that one because I never had a character with maxed out engineering. Once I reach that, the only other craft I never had at 450 is leatherworking, and that one I'm currently leveling up on the rogue, the other character of the multiboxing pair.

Now crafting in World of Warcraft isn't exactly challenging. The only difficulty lies in getting the materials, and often you can just buy those. But I'm having fun optimizing that, especially in interaction of several characters. So instead of buying expensive enchanting dust on the auction house, I check which of my other crafters can make items that would disenchant into that dust the cheapest. That usually turns out to be the tailor. But what works changes with patches and the market, some players got rich by a combination of prospecting, jewelcrafting, and enchanting. And then of course many players sell green items for less than the value of the dusts they disenchant to, so buying stuff to disenchant is also a possible future source of income.

Funnily enough I enjoy "playing the markets" only when there is a crafting step involved. Buying underpriced things and simply reselling them for more isn't as much fun as profitable transformations. Not that I would need the gold for anything, I still have over 70k of it, it is really the *playing* aspect of playing the markets I enjoy.

I'd love if crafting was a bit more involved than just clicking one button in World of Warcraft, but even as it is I'm having quite a lot of fun with it.