All of the Twark gear is worse than the quested gear. Honestly, that is fine. No complaint. But the helmet you get from beginning your adventures in OF is a side grade from the Bloody Tooth helmet. That basically says there is no market for the crafted versions! Looking down the recipe list vs the rewards from quests its difficult to argue that the Bloody Tooth gear is better than any of it. It certainly isn't worth the investment of the extremely gated KA rare materials.
I've usually found this to be the case with the last few expacs. Grab the quested gear and hit up the solo's/adv solos and use that gear straight up rather than pay for crafted gear. Mastercrafted gear needs to sit between adv solo and heroic gear for it to even be considered. Realistically it should be on par with heroic legendary gear to make it useful and for people to want to pay plat for and craft it.
Mastercrafted gear was actually very close to harder heroic gear in AoM, if made Refined, and experimented on. Twark gear from Kunark Ascending is not Mastercrafted btw., it's actually handcrafted as the recipes don't use a rare, though the Mastercrafted Legendary tag is misleading - thus the gear would be understandably weaker than quested / Advanced Solo gear. The true Mastercrafted gear which is made with a rare, is barely even present on broker yet as everybody is gearing up - have a look for "bloody" level 100 recipe books on the broker or the faction vendor, and you'll see the stats on true Mastercrafted items.
Is there really even a market for the non-accolade merc gear, period? Over on Maj'dul, people are asking 1k to 2k plat for a single piece of Merc gear. Or I can spend 50p or less and slap on a piece of player-equippable gear that does the exact same thing. Or I can give them quest rewards, or adv. solo gear, etc. Is there some additional bonus that I'm missing on Merc-only gear? Because I took a moment last night to compare a merc-only helmet vs a player helmet with the same stat spread and they were identical.
I had forgotten you could use player gear as well. Makes getting multiple myth armour interesting then.
