Sending your companions to craft instead of having to sit your character at a crafting table was definitely one of the things I liked about SWTOR's gameplay. My first serious foray into crafting was in Aion, which requires you to sit at a crafting table both to craft finished items and to process your gathered materials, which could get extremely time-consuming as you crafted better items - when patch 2.0 came out and added new high-end recipes, those items took so much raw material my armorsmith had to spend 7 hours turning a giant stack of raw ore into one helm. They later slashed the material requirements for those recipes by 2/3, but still - crafting was always one of the areas of Aion that made it really clear the game was designed for a market where most people buy game-time by the hour. I mastered armorsmithing and alchemy, because I liked making my own armor and consumables, but selling consumables made me far more money than armor ever did - Aion's system of having maybe 1 in 5 crafts critically succeed* and have better stats, combined with the expense of certain rare drops that were required to craft gear, made gear crafting un-remunerative. (*SWTOR does this too, I think? But Aion takes it a step farther and makes it an integral part of weapon and jewelry crafting - you have to craft a white and crit, then use that in the green recipe and crit, then use that in the blue recipe. Luckily they realized this was far too cumbersome to use for armor when you've got 5 different armor slots to fill.)
So when I first tried crafting in Rift, I was delighted to see that even the high-end recipes rarely needed more than half a dozen gatherables, and there was no such thing as a crafting crit. So now I've got 4/6 professions mastered - alchemy, weapons, jewelry, and light armor - and heavy armor in the works on an alt. Sadly, the crafted armor in Rift suffers from the same problem you found in SWTOR - far too many ugly armor designs. It's so bad I've sometimes wondered if someone in the art department is just trolling us all. My favorite offenders are the sets that make you look like you forgot your top - males are barechested and females are in bras, but both have huge bulky skirt-things that start just under the ribcage and go to mid-thigh or lower. There are multiple armor sets that do this. And don't get me started on the ugliness of virtually all helmets, and the way shoulder armor looks like it was added in at the last minute so most shoulder pieces just sort of hover over your shoulders with no real relation to the chest pieces they supposedly match.
Anyway...
I'm really looking forward to trying the crafting in The Secret World. Supposedly it's as simple as "if you disassemble a shotgun, you can then make shotguns out of any suitable material you can get your hands on" but the getting of materials will probably have some complications.
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So when I first tried crafting in Rift, I was delighted to see that even the high-end recipes rarely needed more than half a dozen gatherables, and there was no such thing as a crafting crit. So now I've got 4/6 professions mastered - alchemy, weapons, jewelry, and light armor - and heavy armor in the works on an alt. Sadly, the crafted armor in Rift suffers from the same problem you found in SWTOR - far too many ugly armor designs. It's so bad I've sometimes wondered if someone in the art department is just trolling us all. My favorite offenders are the sets that make you look like you forgot your top - males are barechested and females are in bras, but both have huge bulky skirt-things that start just under the ribcage and go to mid-thigh or lower. There are multiple armor sets that do this. And don't get me started on the ugliness of virtually all helmets, and the way shoulder armor looks like it was added in at the last minute so most shoulder pieces just sort of hover over your shoulders with no real relation to the chest pieces they supposedly match.
Anyway...
I'm really looking forward to trying the crafting in The Secret World. Supposedly it's as simple as "if you disassemble a shotgun, you can then make shotguns out of any suitable material you can get your hands on" but the getting of materials will probably have some complications.