I'm a level 8 character. Over the course of my adventure I've noticed that you can find armour here and there while doing side quests or even main quests, and as I keep doing quests, the armour that I find keeps getting better in quality. I realise that that may be due to the increasing difficulty of the quests that I'm tackling, but I am getting 'free' and better armour, at the end of the day.
Considering that not all the components required for creating good quality armor can be found/looted easily, and that some are otherwise very expensive to buy (plus the amount of money you'll need to invest in diagrams perhaps), is it really worth crafting armour early or mid game? And even in the late game, once you (hopefully) get rich?
Best Answer
It is absolutely worth it to craft one of the Witcher sets of armor, either the feline, griffin or ursine armor. Those are pretty much the best armor for their level and can be upgraded three times. You can buy maps that will lead you to plans for witcher armor at various merchants.
Other armor pieces are probably not worth it unless they're a significant upgrade and you have the materials available. Buying materials can get extremely expensive very quickly, but you can find almost everything lying around somewhere.
The Griffin armor is a medium armor set that requires level 8, if you want to craft something now I'd suggest you try to find it. The feline/cat armor is level 14, and the bear/ursine is level 17.