What Is The Purpose Of Crafting If Identifying Is Much, Much Better?

Title explains

 

Crafted items can have better stats than some existing items in the game and crafting items also gives people the freedom to craft items with any stats that they want on that particular item without being restricted to only the set of stats on identified items.

 

Crafting really comes online in endgame where certain crafted items are just OP or have crazy uses (such as loot quality gear, or attack speed tier accessories)

 

Identifying isn't really better. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Crafting allows you to select individual attributes you want an item to have, which lets you get more particular id's for builds. Crafting also produces much stronger items; more comparable to mythics than to normal identified items. Crafted items can get absurdly strong and give massive bonuses in select stats, rather than smaller bonuses in a several, some of which may not be as useful. It's especially useful for crafting specific items to fit a build when no identifiable item exists.

Identifying however doesn't have durability and still does have more options of id's in many cases. It also gives skill points that work towards using gear rather than just providing bonuses, though they typically are smaller boosts. It also doesn't require a lot of grinding, which is a huge consideration. In addition it can have major ids or unique gimmicks that crafted items just can't get. And it lets you get a specific item that's common and easy to find, as opposed to a totally unique item that has to be made specifically for a purpose using expensive ingredients, so if you don't have a high level skill and/or a lot of money, it's much easier to get.

 

Alright, another question is what are the stats in certain ingredients that say stuff like "-290s duration"?

 

Consumable crafted items (like scrolls and potions and food) have durations to them, a -seconds duration ID would remove the maxiumum duration from the consumable you were crafting (in this case by 290 seconds)

i.e it would last a shorter time than if it did not have that ID

 

On thing not really mentioned here is that identified items have some unique IDs such as spell costs which can’t be gained on crafted items no matter what. Also, crafted consumables can get you buffs that sp pots can’t and generally provide a crazy range of utility that crafted vs IDed gear doesn’t even reach.

 

Identifying usually gives you a range of stats, some that are more of a "bonus" than anything, which can be useful for certain builds. Plus, some will have Major IDs: affects that are unique to one or two items, usually somewhat rare. Crafting, on the other hand, allows you to often get a stat higher than what you'd get from identifying, but at the cost of having durability and (usually) having to focus on a few stats.

Plus, crafting does have some stuff unique to it: scrolls, which affect everyone in a range, and several identifications, such as loot quality (pretty sure ided items have unique ones as well but not sure which ones).