Crafting: Why Master?

[Arhooolie]

Now that i can craft crit recipes before filling up the gold anvil, what is the point of mastering? I think I like the change (man it's hard to master some of those), but I'm curious why there's a gold anvil at all at this point.

[tessathecat]

Yes, you can crit now without achieving mastery of a tier. But the requirement that you master all lower level tiers before you can work on mastering a higher level tier is still in place. So, for example, if you don't master the apprentice level, you can't work on mastering journeyman (or above) and therefore you won't be able to get crits on journeyman (and above) recipes.