Master Crafts - A higher skill ceiling

[Kazzoey]

I made a post a long while back about a new DoH system to help increase the skill ceiling for those of us who want harder, less formulaic crafts. Originally I had the idea that you could open materia slots to help cheapen/ease the cost of fully slotting out equipment, but many people found that to be controversial, some loving it some hating it. But now I came up with a newer, less intrusive design for it. I know the chances of this are slim to none, but if you guys like it enough perhaps we could push for this, or some other "master craft" system to be implemented instead of it just being a forum post? Up to you guys, really.
Anyways, let's begin!

The goal:
To create a higher, but purely optional, skill ceiling that helps to defeat the fixed, guaranteed formulaic rotations for players who wish to have higher difficulty. Basically an "Ultimate" mode for crafters that doesn't break statistical balances and disclude standard/HQ crafts from selling well.

The idea:
Master Crafted items won't statistically be better than anything else, but they can be personalized to look completely original and unique depending on the materia you put into it. The item icon may go from the current Green (Unique) to Yellow (Master Crafted), as well as having your own unique elemental effects or even patterns/decals.

The method:
Toggling a "Master Craft" passive before finishing a craft, just like the Collectible toggle, will open a new Progress and Quality bar that you start fresh in. The quality bar must be at 100% as requirement for master craft to take place and player stats may be iLvl synced to maintain difficulty for returning in the future so as to not be over geared and defeat the main point. Note: CP/buffs will persist and not reset upon the new Master bars opening up, so you will go in with partially depleted resources, nor will any overkill points (e.g., extra Great Strides quality points) do NOT carry over to the new Master quality bar and will be blocked by the 100% HQ bar. Completing these bars with the proper skills, luck, and personal design choice will effect how to build it after completion by opening new kinds of materia slots that are used for cosmetic augmentations to change the way your item looks.
The progress bar will be dependent on elemental affinities, such as the elemental Branding skills, to increase the guage and finish the Master Craft. The quality bar will work the same as before, except it opens up a new cosmetic materia slot for each quality threshold.

Progress bar
-The Master progress bar will be elemental branding dependent and can be filled to max w/o completing the craft. A separate button can complete the craft for you.
-Each different elemental branding will increase the guage by 'x' points of that element. Multiple elemental brandings can be used on a single item to allow for different elemental cosmetic materia to be put on (e.g., Fire branding ONLY only allows for fire aspected cosmetic materia to be put on. Fire + Ice branding allows for Fire and Ice materia to be put on, and so on...)
-The ratio/degree of elemental affinity points on the bar will decide how high of a grade of any given elemental cosmetic materia to be put on. (e.g., higher focus of Fire branding means access to higher grades of fire-themed materia. Mixed focus of Fire and Ice on the same item results in limited access to different grade materia, but gives access to BOTH fire and ice types for hybridization)

Quality bar
-The Master quality bar works almost identical to standard quality bar, except for what it does for you. Standard quality gives you your HQ rate, but Master quality unlocks materia slots for cosmetics through various thresholds as you push for higher quality.
-Perhaps up to 4-5 cosmetic slots can be obtained?
-Each materia slot will allow for certain grades/effects. The player may want to use slots 2 & 4, but leave slots 1 & 3 open due to disliking certain effects. Or perhaps the player only wants the prettiest/flashiest effects on final slot (Highest grade) and not go overboard on the other effects for personal artistic choices, although the final slot is by far the hardest to achieve and unlock.

Materia
-Will comprise of different grades(Grades 1-5) and elements.
-Each grade has access to different effects to pick from when being slotted. (e.g., A grade 2 lightning materia will go into Slot 2, and give you access to your choice of a lightning themed pattern of choice. Or a grade 4 Lightning materia can give a spark/static effect of your choice.)
-The higher the grade, the flashier the effect. Perhaps a grade 3 can give you a simple color hue of the element color, grade 4 can give amplified effects (small amounts of Fire or whatever coming off), and grade 5 can be heavy (Magma dripping off the edges).
-Materia can be obtained by DoL and refined via DoH and large quantities of crystals of it's element. Higher grade materia requires more crystals to refine.


So what do you guys think about it this time? Sure it would be a lot of work to implement, but more customization sounds like a win for everyone. And making a personal set totally unique to you (unless someone recreates it, materia for materia). This also puts more attention and value on crafted sets without breaking meta balances and devaluing basic HQ items. And most importantly, this gives those of us who want to have a high difficulty mode for crafting.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

There are some pretty neat ideas here. But I'd like to raise a number of issues to be discussed here, and hopefully get them resolved, so that we can have a neat new mini game to be implemented in the future.

(1) I would like to talk about the rewards. With your current suggestions above, the rewards will be whole sets of crafting tools and gear which are customizable in colors and glow. As we all know, Yoshi made it very clear before that DoW/DoM will be the main focus of this game. It is unlikely that DoH/DoL will get a whole set of customizable glowing gear unless DoW/DoM get them too. If you say, "Hey, why not make implement this for DoW/DoM weapons/gear as well then?" Then, that would be a terrible idea. This was supposed to be a mini game for challenging crafts, with rewards for the crafters. If DoW/DoM gear are to be made this way, then they become items for sale. The rewards here have to be untradeable.

(2) With (1) in mind, it seems more feasible to implement the rewards ONLY on mainhand tools. Now a second problem arises. If ONLY mainhand tools get this customization, then we just need BSM, ARM, GSM and pretty much all other DoH classes are dispensable and excluded from this mini game. This seems problematic.

To counter these problems, I think (a) this mini game should only applies to untradeable mainhand tools, and (b) this mini game should be accessible by each DoH class, i.e. each class should have access to this mini game to craft an untradeable item, which can be exchanged for that class's own mainhand tool from an NPC. This way, all 8 classes will participate in this new mini game for the acquisition of this "relic" of DoH.

Personally, I believe shiny tools for DoH/DoL are long overdue. DoM/DoW have had them since ARR times. The current Blessed tools are OK, but they don't glow until you're crafting or gathering something. This was a terrible design. We should see glowing tools glow when we unsheath them, regardless whether we're crafting or not.

A new mini game for challenging crafts may present new opportunities for the implementation of new "relic" tools for crafters/gatherers. I truly hope that they will make these tools (i) SHINE, not just glow, (ii) shine when unsheathed, not just during crafting/gathering.

[Kaurhz]

How about they just do with the master quality idea for an incentive to test crafting ability to the absolute limit. This would need to be a careful implementation on what the reward would be. Bearing in mind trade-able and market enabled items would just make the other recipes seem worthless. E.g. everyone would want that extra meld slot, vs the standard gear, particularly earlier in the patch cycle. Relic-like items would be a nice incentive though, especially something that you can't simply buy but there for a vanity sake. Something like blessed tools, except you'd be crafting them. Would definitely like something that gives a nice mini-game feel, or just adds more thought provoking means of crafting items.

All in all, nice post with some good incentives. Though the elemental idea, as awesome as it is would just add major complexities to the craft, that would just inherently result in people using more cheese-inducing methods of crafting. Especially with multiple and sequential elements to be required in a single craft.

All this in mind and on the topic of crafting, specifically minigames, a higher integration of possibly using gatherers and crafters in dungeons to lead to additional progression in said dungeon would be nice.. Crafting just isn't a nice PR advertisement.

On a sadder note, how about we just remove macros from certain master recipes, particularly those that turn out to be gear, and just increase the CP cost of Prudent Touch, and increase CP cost for Observe back to 15. The entire skill ceiling has just been erased bearing in mind every single recipe we have been able to guarantee 100% HQ on it. Whether that's from basics, to Maker's Mark cheese. The entire meaning of master has just been erased from the stuff we've been able to do. Don't see why it needs to be so accessible and open to the absolute brainless extent of being able to guarantee everything by clicking no more than 3 buttons.

[Alien_Gamer]

I would suggest something a bit closer to what is currently in the game. While I'm not opposed to your concept you are effectively asking for an overhaul to how crafting works.

Instead there could be additional recipes with much higher crafting requirements to pull off; those recipes would use an existing item as one of the ingredients, materia, and maybe some end game mat or something. There could be 3 different recipes for each particle effect such as Minor Effect using T2 materia, Moderate Effect using T4 materia, Heavy Effect using T6 materia so you'd have your choice on how flashy you wanted to be.

[chidarake]

the problem would be rng, if this is a challenge type thing it couldnt have to much rng as that would make it aweful and you may aswell just hit quicksynth a bunch of times til it gave you one with minimal effort.

i like the idea of unique rewards for crafters that arent just part of the normal crafting recipe list. esecially glowing weapons like caimie suggested as the lack of glow other than crafting or gathering was very disapointing. and personally bigger tools on our backs doesnt mean anything and it takes away from the specialness of earning lucis way back when.

personally with the custom deliveries system i thought we would be unlocking unique recipes with those npcs. this of course hasnt happened as of yet but adding your system or atleast a modified version of it to those npcs could make for some interesting side quests for crafters with opportunity to earn something.

they did do something alittle along these lines of unique crafts with ixal beast tribe where we had certain conditions imposed upon us to meet the requirements to get the items we needed to complete the quest so its not like they havnt dabbled in the past.

personally i would like some challenge recipes added to the game, but they could make getting all the mats a challenge onto itself and then finally crafting it.

the problem with all this is development time and since they focus more on battle content the liklihood of getting anything like this seems remote, also given SE's past of twisting things in unexpected ways we could end up with something like the red scrip system and awkward gates, or worse still requiring extremely hard to require gathered mats.

[Shadygrove]

I like your ideas but you have NO concept how much coding this would entail.

We are talking as about as much coding as a raid but with about 2% of the graphics.

[RojGardoth]

I would like if they just made the top crafts difficult again