I'm ok with crafty janky and less good version and finding better versions via loot. A Quality 2 looted bow is likely on par or close to a Quality 4 crafted bow that takes 12 parts to craft. The very stuff you have to scrap is prolly better than the stuff you will craft with the parts lol. By the time you can craft the weapons you have found much better weapons. But as someone who went pure agility to day 40, crafting is pointless. I don't think their intent was to make the crafting aspect pointless, it was to make looting better. IMO crafting weapon parts drastically changes balance away from what devs intended. Intellect should be able to craft parts for both of it's weapon at 3/5 skill since the junk turret requires you to be Intellect 8 to reach 3/5. *Edit: Specifically you should be able to craft parts for the hunting rifle, the double barrel shotgun, the pistol, the wooden bow, the iron crossbow, and the AK at 3/5 in their respective skills. Cost for crafting parts could be forged iron + more rare stuff like glue/springs/mechanical parts based on weapon type crafted at a workbench. Looted weapons are usually equal to 1-2 quality level higher crafted weapons. I'm ok with the schematic only weapons being a hunt for parts for them, but T2 is the baseline experience and your crafted weapons are 100% going to get replaced by far superior looted version anyways. My suggestion for weapon crafting: At 3/5 skill in a weapon perk, let us craft weapon parts for our chosen T2 weapons. This leads crafting weapons in A18 to feel pretty underwhelming. My crafted bow/crossbow, when they happened, were much worse than the looted ones I had found.

By that point I had already found quality 4 of numerous weapons including both a bow and crossbow. My parts requirement kept rising faster than the number of parts I could obtain.

I did a pure agility build where I could not craft a bow, at all, until day 24. Even worse if you skill into your weapon perk for the damage bonuses constantly the part cost keeps increasing, making it hard to even craft a weapon at all if you invest heavily and early. On top of that the loot you find is almost always better than what you can craft, usually better than the next quality up of what you can craft. The problem with the new crafting is that it takes too long to get the parts you need and it requires the very thing you're looking for. Overall I like A18 but I'm torn on the new crafting.

7 days to die crafting gun parts