Originally Posted by
I Push Buttons
The thing about PvP in ESO is that to be decent you need a lot more than just crafting.
Everything scales, so the skills themselves aren't better or worse depending on the skill level. What matters is your access to skills and their morphs (and passives). A lot of skills you can't get until much later in the game. Some of the strongest skills require A LOT of work and grinding. Undaunted skills, for example, you basically have to get every single dungeon achievement in the game, on every difficulty, and do a bunch of undaunted mission to unlock them. That is a ton of work. Fighter's guild, mage's guild, etc... Very strong, incredibly grindy. Mage's guild isn't so bad, you just need to pick up all the lore books. But fighter's guild, you need to close dozens of anchors, kill thousands of daedra and undead, to max it out.
With regard to crafting though, if you want to personalize your gear and build it a certain way (ie min/max) you need to craft. Or have someone craft for you. PvP gear rewards are few and far between, as are PvE rewards. And there are a lot of random ass dropped sets out there, which means aiming for one in particular is difficult, not to mention dropped sets outside of trials and the hardest veteran dungeons are meh at best.
TL;DR: Unless you go hard as fuck at everything in the game, you can't compete in PvP. You can participate, you can get some kills here and there, but when you run into anyone who has gone hard at the game they will bend you over, you won't even be able to touch them.