Good lord, where to begin.
It seems the SE has intentionally run DoL/DoH into the ground via a combination of a lack of rewards and the single most convoluted grind I have ever seen in a video game.
Let's recap: 1) Crafters have almost nothing to offer combat classes anymore. If you're not a culinarian, the best you can do is i180 gear that is EXORBITANTLY expensive. MAYBE pentamelded with rank V materia (which are several million a piece) it might be relevant, but even then the crafting of these items is gated behind an obscene timesink.
2)Speaking of the grind, everything is now gated behind this weekly scrip turn-in system wherein you will spend millions of gil for the privilege of spending MORE millions of gil to EITHER craft something this week or use your scrips to buy mats to sell on the AH to other crafters. I don't think non-crafters really have been exposed to how bad this is, so let's look at an example recipe:
Forgemaster's Hammer
3x Adamantite Ingot
Each Adamantite Ingot requires the following:
* Two items crafted from high-level mining mats
* Two items from high-level mining nodes
gated behind a grind that requires you to farm 198x tokens from blue scrips that can only come from every-30-minute rare-spawn unspoiled nodes.
* FIVE items which require the following:
1) Limited weekly currency which can either be spend on these crafting mats or on progressing your crafter's gear, and is expensive to acquire due to mats required for red scrip turn-ins.
2) 20x items which can only be gathered by miners and botanists by spending THEIR limited weekly currency to acquire limited-use buff scrolls that give them a CHANCE to find a small number of these items while grinding on lesser nodes for 15 minutes.
1x Astral Birch Lumber
* Just as crazy as the above, except it also requires high-level alchemist-created mats because **** you, carpenters.
1x Adamantite Rivets
1x Hardsilver Ingot
* These two are easy to get.
3x Leafborne Aethersand
* Gatherer-only rare drop from reducing mats you can only get from irritating timed Ephemeral nodes.
1x Mastercraft Demimateria
* Everybody's favorite awful grind is back, where you get to spend hours levelling up Desynthesis for the privilege of getting to grind for items just so you can destroy them for a chance at getting one of these things.
And this is for a single item. Oh, and it's just a version of the Blacksmith MH that you could have saved up 3 weeks of scrip turn-ins to acquire yourself without crafting, except lower ilevel and with materia slots so you can have the privilege of blowing millions of gil on expensive materia to get slightly higher crafting mats. Oh, and if you want to just gear up each DoH class by doing the scrip turn-ins instead of bothering with these obscene recipes, you're looking at
more than a year of grinding turn-ins every week. 66 weeks, to be exact. I'm sure this content won't be obsolete by then!
I had every craft at 50 when Heavensward shipped. I loved crafting in this game. I was levelling them all to 60 when this absurd bullsh*t dropped in 3.05. Now I don't know if I'm even interested in playing the game anymore. Does anybody else feel this is just way, way too excessive? Am I just raging for no reason? I just don't f***ing get it. I don't know how anybody could possibly look at the current situation and think "Yeah, this is fun and rewarding." There isn't even anything to do with high-level crafting except make shit for other high-level crafters... and food.
Ugh.