The crafting is DDO is a real mess: every new area had it's own crafting system added along with it! Most of those systems are pre-endgame, however, and quite simple, just hit the wiki for a named item so see if it can be upgraded in some way pre-epic. Alchemical crafting is the first endgame-level area-specific crafting, but I don't know much about that one yet. There's also the Stone of Change, which you can use to bind an item to a character (which orevents it form taking permanent damage). The main systems are:
Green Steel Crafting
Once the most important in the game, and still darned useful. Making a Green Steel item involves 4 "tiers", each done at a differen crafting altar.
- Make the base item - this takes a Shavarath Stone from the bits you get from running the Shroud flagging quests, plus the ingredients you get from those quests (Chipmunk Funk, etc). These BTC on equip, so you can auction/buy them.
- Shard of power plus "small" Shroud ingredients to add first effect.
- Shard of greater power plus "medium" Shroud ingredients to add second effect.
- Shard of supreme power plus "large" Shroud ingredients to add third effect.
- Best items combine 2 "large" shards, so double the "large" ingredients are needed.
These are by far the best twink items in the game, but are bound to character, so only for next life. The weapons used to be the most desirable, but those weapon effects are now available from normal drops in the endgame (with high min level, though). Important non-weapon items are bonuses to HP, Spell Points, and Skills that stack with most non-GS gear. Some of the effects on the non-weapons are nice too, such as perma-blur and some nice "on being hit" effects.
Epic Crafting
A lot of named items can be "upgraded" to epic. To get an epic item, you first need the base item, which will drop at low level in the non-epic version of the quest (always a named item). Very often the normal version of the item isn't that great, so it's good to check before vendoring it. To upgrade to epic, you need the Shard, Seal, and Scroll for the item, which will take a lot of farming to find. Check the wiki for which quests drop the particular items you need.
Epic items have epic slots, to which you can add stuff to the base item stats. Generally this isn't that impressive, adding Feather Fall or suchlike, but is hugely useful for freeing up slots elsewhere.
Cannith Crafting
This is the "normal" crafting system that lets you make most gear, using the Lesser and Greater Essences. You can't make endgame gear, and it's
really expensive to skill up, because you'll need to buy essences on the AH tp get very far, so it's not all that appealing unless you're a crafting addict like me.
If you have a few million plat to skill up (or just want to twink low level toons), and can get the House Cannith favor to buy their Mark from the house favor vendor (which lowers the minimum level of crafted stuff), you can make some twink gear that's pretty good, and get rid of all that bank-clogging lowbie gear you've been hoarding since you can just make what you need. The on exception is that the Pure Good suffix is too expensive, and is a great weapon suffix, so an "Acid X of Pure Good" random drop is still worth saving. Also, you simply can't make Smiting, Disruption, Vorpal, or the other "slaying" suffixes, so even at level 10 random drops can be better than what you can craft - but not by much.
Dragontouched Armor
This is a special case of an update-specific crafting system. You can put 3 runes on your DT armor. The runes drop at random for completing the Reavers Reach quests, which has made this unpopular. The 2 weaker ones match normal dropped items for the most part, so with just those two it's just a really time-consuming way to get 2 custom effects. The Sovereign Runes have some good stuff, however. For example, you can add the Smiting effect to all weapon damage, which AFAIK there's no other way to get.
Check the wiki for endgame armor for your character before spending the time to farm DT armor. DT can still be great for some classes if you can get the Sov Rune you want, but for others there's better armor (often that you can buy on the AH).
