Jumping in before Erika has a chance and answering purely based on my assumptions - oh my.

My best guess is to check out how legendary items will be crafted next week to see how veteran players benefit by hoarding stuff.

Because from my point of view, crafting mostly benefits those players who don't have their crusaders on all rare or better which I think you are not and have not been for a bit. So, I am assuming again, that crafting non-legendary items and collecting crafting materials for those by disenchanting gear, won't actually help you. And neither would any talents supporting the drop chances or rates of any materials.

Now, the recipes might be a different story, but again I question their usefulness for you. Quote from the blog post:

> All players will start with the recipes for the Common and Uncommon gear for the initial 20 Crusaders

> [..] New missions will appear en-masse to help you learn new recipes. Each successful mission will unlock one or more rare or epic recipes.

> Event crusader recipe missions will unlock all the common and uncommon recipes for specific crusaders once that crusader is unlocked.

So, by means of crafting, you only get to get uncommon items for event crusaders. In short and maybe provocative: While this might make crusader missions worthwhile to some extend, this still leads to a lot of time and luck spent to get event crusaders from all uncommon to all epic after you have crafted him there. Based on my assumption you probably have just a few crusaders with gear less than rare at hand.

I do see potential for talents here. Especially on reducing the need for crafting materials or maybe a big talent to let you get more than one recipe at a time (might seem unlikely, though) but either Justin or Erika have made clear, that new talents are looked at once crafting is out and is working properly. Most likely needing time to tune minor stuff here or there. With this, new talents might be months away.

Long Story short: It's not crafting as far as we know which might concern you personally since you most likely won't need it or not to that extend that any future talent might have a real impact.

Legendary items might be something else, since no player has any of them. So, based on an assumption that it might work in similar ways - getting materials through disenchantments or missions and recipes through missions - there's potential for talents again. However, the question might be if you are patient to wait for those or ok to being an early adopter.

All Erika might be able to communicate right now is that new Talents are going to be looked at and most likely will come.

Great, Erika, thanks, I'm looking forward to opening 15k chests :D

@Andreas: you begin the game with the recipes for common and uncommon, but using missions you can unlock the recipes for rare and epic gear as well. This makes crafting usful to every player that doesn't have full epics everywhere, even if we don't consider the legendary crafting. And I miss exactly 4 epic items, one of which would be REALLY helpful (epic that increases BW's Swordplay). Plus, there's event gear too...

The blog, and the Q&A on reddit this week, also mention that we will be buffing the rewards from EP missions, since they will be the only source of EP.

Yeah, I'd rather have a massive amount of crafting materials than a bunch of EPs.