Making crafting relevant to end game content and gear?

[genedefect]

TIER 3
Next is basically a 4 star item, but with more challenge.

586 Progress
7000 Quality
No comfort zone
Must 100% quality to HQ
3 chances to craft per 90 minutes. A chance ends when you fail or succeed. Successfully reclaim does not use up a chance.

Not even sure if this is possible right now without a crap ton of luck or a BB on an excellent, so not sure this is even a good challenge. But the idea for tier 3 is just make something really hard to craft that is built around the main crafting skills you already use.

TIER 4
Ok, I am going off the deep end here a bit. I am sure others might have better ideas, but it is really hard to create challenges like this for one person. Hence the next section below.

[genedefect]

- Presented with a cycle of 20 items that need crafting (items are fixed and in fixed order)
- All items must be completed HQ
- There is a time limit for making each item, thereby requiring the crafter to really know their rotations, where their skills are, what order to do them in, and everything
- NO Macros allowed
- Some items limit your CP allowed
- Some items limit craftsmanship
- Some items limit control
- Some limit more than 1 or all 3 stats.
10 Chances per run with 3 hour reset. Reclaim skill is not available.

The core concept here is similar to a hard raid fight. You are presented with an unknown risk and you have to dive in and do it. Don't respond fast enough, fail. Don't use the right skills at the right time, fail. Over commit, fail.

Due to the 10 chances per run with 3 hour reset, I imagine lots of people would not clear this for weeks or months. That is ok though. It is about learning and going.

[genedefect]

ONE LAST THING
In the ideal world, they would take this even further. They would make the crafting tier challenges require groups of crafters working together, cycling through a couple of challenges, each in their own class, and all having to be successful to complete. Once complete, an item would drop and people would roll on it like Coil.

This would have a few of awesome potential results

1) Encourage crafters to work with other crafter and to share skills and knowledge

2) Make crafting more social

3) Add more potential for variety in content for crafters and unique experiences

4) Enable some post-max crafting level story potential as these group crafting quests could have plot around them like Coil does.

[FJerome]

PSA: You can edit your original post to add text and get around the 1000 character limit.

[axemtitanium]

This is needlessly complicated. Just make crafting mats purchasable with the "high-end" tomestone (currently poetics, limited to 450 per week). These mats are untradeable. Add a "request to craft" feature so you can request other people to craft the gear for you (using your mats) and offer a reward, just like melding. The gear produced is i120, untradeable, has materia slots. If you don't HQ it, it'll be worse than the poetics Ironworks gear. Can't be upgraded to i130 ever, the only option is melding.

This is how to make crafting relevant to end-game.

[Yonko]

So there are lots of problems with your ideas

To start with you seem to be assuming that people either craft or do dungeons. Some people do both so they would have an edge with your system. You do address this in your weekly item concept but not in tomes.

CRAFTING PROPOSAL
1 - Weekly Crafting Tomes
The low tomes per craft helps to offset the time spent in actual crafting so that people can't easily cap tomes within an hour each week. In other words, like raiding, if you want to cap tomes each week you have to plan for at least 10 - 20 hours of content.

You can cap tomes with a max of 6 hours of play time (ex roulette x 6 = 480 tome if my math is correct it might be 7 runs still under 6 hours) not 10-20 hours like you seem to think.

But the biggest issue is that this still doesn't make crafting relevant to end game. It makes it so crafters can get more gear but doesn't make them more wanted since you can't trade the gear. All this would do is create more crafters so that the hardcore raiders can get gear faster.

[Syanis]

From everything I've seen and heard comes down to SE's excuse being RMT's being the reason crafting is pretty irrelevant. Of course its not true but simply their laziness to create a system that doesn't really benefit RMT such as making raid craft drops untradeable and a *Request a craft* like the melding thing. But then it comes down to if the crafter fails then what? Lost your mats for your could of been awesome item? The truth is that SE is all about adventurers and the rest are just *meh* as far as they are concerned. They only want gathering and crafting to be a side thing to pass time and a money sink for most who aren't hardcore in that. I'd personally though love it if they made adventurers dependent and needing crafters to an extent. After all, crafters now already have some dependencies on adventurers.

[NationOfZealots]

The current crafting system is good, as an isolated part of the game, however there are mechanics that are not used very wisely by the production team.

e.g.
GC craft turn ins: these (still) give yu a (poor) amount of GC seals. Why are we still left handing in L48 crap? This could have easily been expanded i.e crafted i55 hand ins from the other page and raise the GC seals/your tome idea
Ixali craft turn ins: NO OAKKNOTS?

Personally, my FC do Coil runs only to MB the crafting materials for a Larger house, if I want these materials to craft I will have to do a DF run with a random party and hope I get lucky when I roll. Saying that, MB mechanics tradeable/untradeable seem to ALWAYS dictate where crafting goes: EHCATL SEALANT (even though it technically still is not going anywhere and is a huge question mark for the production team who after a year of being live, still HAVE NO IDEA how to truly bring DoH into the rest of the game)

[kaworutabris]

I liked how in ffxi during 75 cap to uncurse high end (crafted) raid gear you needed raid drops. Later on during salvage era you needed a combination of items, including crafted items to unlock the top gear. There was also a lot more for situational gear, where as this game has none. So, situational gear included crafted, raid, and other gear sets.