I will give an example:
Item: Horned Owlite Shield
Recipe: 4.000
Craft : 1.000
Materials: 2.500 (the owlite shield prize and materials)
Energy cost: 18.000 (it cost 200 CE to craft, and 100 ce is currently worth 9.000 crowns)
Total cost: 25.500 crowns
price on AH: 20.500
as you can see, its WAY cheaper to buy on the AH. this lead to the following questions:
1)As a buyer, is there any reason I should Craft the item myself? (instead of buying it on the AH)
2)As a seller, I don't understand why ppl sell this items for a lower amount than it takes them to craft. Acording to my calcs, they are losing around 5k crown selling at that prize. If i wanted to sell this item i would sell it at LEAST for 25.000 wich barely cover my expenses for crafting. So can you explain me why the lower price? is there any way to craft this item spending less crowns?
thanks
1) When you craft, you have the chance of getting a UV.That would be the only reason to craft over buy, and even it would likely be more cost effective to use Punch to get an uv.
2) If you use your mist energy to craft, that changes the math. From your example above, assuming 100 mist energy and 100 CE, so only 9000 crowns. Total: 16500. Selling for 20500 nets 4k profits. Of course you should't always count mist as "free" either, as you can generally turn 100 mist energy into more than 9k crown by running the arcade, mission, ect. But lets say you only have 5 minutes to play today, meaning you can't really use up your mist anyways. Might as well craft something with it. There are also a number of people with crafting alts that use only ME to craft things for UV hunting, and then sell the extras on the AH.
So summary, if you plan to use all CE to craft, it is almost always better to buy 2* and 3* from the AH. If you can use mist, then it may be cheaper to craft it.