Crafting endgame items in general has been very limiting since currently no recipe items can be crafted due to a lack of legendary mat drops. However, when crafting arcana weapons, max gear score simply isn’t reachable unlike the other types of weapons from other professions. The issue is caused specifically by Life Quintessence not increasing the max gear score.
It is an issue which highly affects the gameplay of a lot of players in part because of lack of information from the development team addressing this issue. Crafting is a relatively important mechanic of the game, yet players reaching Arcana level 200 have nothing to work towards, even less so than the already limited loot pool due to lack of legendary mat drops. This is not a new issue. The earliest post regarding this dates back to two weeks ago, and players have no received updates from the dev team regarding this.
Next, the range of gear score for all crafting has a very significant display bug. If a player swap their regular gears with crafting gears, swap back to regular gears, and swap to crafting again, the range of gear score displayed can go up to 612 in my personal play, with a lowest range of high 590s. In reality, the crafting range is way lower than that. I’ve tried crafting with that display bug active, and unsurprisingly getting low 580s and 570s gears.
All of these bugs added together is causing a huge sense of frustration among players who have worked towards a specific crafting profession, especially in Arcana. The current state of crafting limits the number of items players can craft, and the display bug will trick unknowing players to waste their precious mats on falsely-displayed gears. Instead of feeling rewarding after solely leveling up crafting, it feels punishing. The time spent could have been invested elsewhere, instead of a buggy system that is not addressed in multiple updates.
Personally, with level 200 in armoring, weaponsmithing, arcana, and engineering, I am only capable of crafting a little less than 20 things total. This is simply not correct. When nearly a third of the weapons cannot be crafted at the highest level due to a bug that was discovered almost two weeks ago, crafting as a mechanic simply isn’t at a polished state. At this time, average players are probably reaching level 200 in one or more professions, and the feeling of frustration will only grow in the player base.
The bugs are also gameplay affecting. With a lack of endgame magic weapons, players may less likely to choose these weapon types. In addition, due to a majority of recipes being uncraftable, crafting as a whole is halted. Players might see no point in leveling crafting pass 150 since apparently at that level, all craftable recipes are unlocked.
If a member of the dev team is reading this, I personally think it is just as much of an issue as wars, outpost rushes, and corrupted portals. Please provide a quick fix to a crucial system of the game, or at the very least, a comprehensive explanation to all this.