Friday Update - Crafting For Hero's

BioWare has shown us the crafting they revealed earlier in the week, and have given us some clarification on the subject.
As always they have left a lot of the info out, but we have ample to be going on with. Companions will have all crafting skills, in the video we see the BH only engaging in savaging, though you can command your companion to do this as you continue to fight.

This follows the theme of you being the hero, and continues on the fun aspect of the combat over the grind.

Each companion gets 3 skills, that you can decide to spread out over the 3 skill sets.

• Gathering
  
• Crafting
  
• Missions

Skills can be added and and you will need to level them. All common things we find in other MMO's. You also can remove skills and retrain a different type.
Although you can have 3 skills per companion only 1 of those can be Crafting. So 1 crafting and 2 gathering or 1 of each, or indeed 3 of 1 skill. Though you can not gain 3 crafting skills on 1 companion.
Crafting skills are split into 6 parts :-

• Armormech – the ability to work with hard metals and electronic shielding to construct all types of personal armor
• Artifice – the delicate work of constructing Jedi and Sith artifacts
• Biochem –the engineering of performance-enhancing chemical serums and biological implants

With 3 yet undisclosed crafting skills. This would in all likelihood let you be able to master all crafting skills on each of your classes. As the pic below show the crafting station with a total of 5 slots, leaving you 1 more space for another companion to follow you and fight by your side.

No info of yet on how much more benefit you will gain if you add 3 skills of the same type to 1 companion. But it should work on a multiplier system. The more same type skills the greater the rewards. This will allow you to steam line your crafting needs.
In the early stages of the game this will push the player driven economics, buy sell and trade. Also its would make it difficult to follow a fully fledged crafter, as you would be forced to buy and sell. Which in its self is not a bad thing.
But there are a few out there that would like to be that crafter, be it in a guild or on a world setting. Building rep as a good crafter has its own rewards above and beyond credits.

For players like myself who pride themselves on being known as a very good crafter, no matter the MMO I tend to play. I would have to re-roll, 2-3 times to gain all the skills I need to make everything. For me I don't see this as a downside, as I tend to re-roll a few chars at least.

It would make a difference if you intend to adopt raids and PvP as your endgame. As these in there selves require a great deal of time. This would limit the number of times you could re-roll. So you really could be a good crafter or endgame raided/PvP. But if you try to do both your going to be lacking some what over others that will go with only 1.
We also do not know how Raid v PvP v Crafted items compare, will crafted items become obsolete over time ?

I do like it though, I have never seen this type of crafting outside a single player game. The only other that would come close is that of Diablo3. Where you get the crafters round world to make your items for you, you lvl those as you go, and this leaves you to fight. All you need is gold and salvaged items that you get from around the world.

I would give BW 9/10 for the innovation factor on crafting. Though there is still a lot we still need to know about how skills stack and how effective they are.

All in all its a good start, time will tell how good this will lend to those that want to be a crafter as there long time goal.