A summary of my impression on the new skills and tips for 5.2 crafting

[Alien_Gamer]

Historically it seems the difficulty from crafting was from the RNG of skill usage; ie did the skill fail because it wasn't a 100% success rate skill. To me, that is a horrible system. If you use a skill it should succeed; someone should never have to wonder if their craft will fail because of a skill success rate.

Difficulty should be expanded with RNG in different areas such as quality RNG procs (Excellent, Good, Normal, Poor).
First it should expand quality procs to have a 5th one so there is a balance of good and bad procs.
Second there should be an equivalent spectrum for progress.
Third there should be elemental procs.

Then we need skills that will take advantage of each proc in different ways. Either harness the power of an excellent to brute force a huge chunk of progress/quality or exchange it to alter the procs on a different area such as exchanging an Excellent Quality proc for a Good Progress proc or exchange an Excellent Progress proc to prevent the next Poor Quality proc. Give us the skills to make trade offs between Quality and Progress.

Elemental procs would be a similar to the Whistle system or IQ stacks. As you work a craft you're imbuing it with aether and as aether reaches a certain amount of saturation you can spend it on altering a proc or enabling a proc based skill when it wouldn't normally be usable or let the aether sit there for a minor persistent buff on certain skills.

At its heart crafting becomes only slightly harder or more complex; if you want to ignore it you can still craft something just like macro crafters do now but you'll be unlikely to HQ something (maybe 20% quality upon completion) but if you try to master how the procs play against each other then you'll have an easier time making HQ. The difficulty comes in learning to play the trade offs than a rotation.

The difficulty in crafts could be changed by altering how often a proc might appear for that craft and not just increasing the numbers at the end. Maybe for Expert crafts the excellents proc half as much but poors proc twice as much. The difficulty will be in managing your procs to best effect, not just getting bigger numbers.

For easier crafts, maybe elemental procs don't appear so you have less to manage or maybe excellents appear more often so its more forgiving of mistakes.

[Cleanse]

Expert recipes will be here in 2 weeks, seems like a reasonable amount of time to wait.

Ideas:
- Reaching certain points in progress and or quality awards bonus CP that's necessary to complete an overly high requirement.
- Certain actions are disabled.
- New statuses that enable a priority system focused method of crafting the recipe(s).

[Nandrolone]

Expert recipes will be here in 2 weeks, seems like a reasonable amount of time to wait.

Pretty sure they said 5.21 is 3 weeks after 5.2. So that should be March 10. In other words, 3 weeks, no 2. Also, there really is no point in waiting. You might as well be praying to Buddha or something.

[NanaWiloh]

Pretty sure they said 5.21 is 3 weeks after 5.2. So that should be March 10. In other words, 3 weeks, no 2. Also, there really is no point in waiting. You might as well be praying to Buddha or something.

I only pray to Buddha's with man buns and spare tires.

[tdb]

I'm honestly somewhat surprised you were able to reach the stat requirements without full facet gear. I had to use HQ facet and switch my crafting food from Blood Bouillabasse to Mejillones al Ajillo in order to reach the required craftsmanship rating. Then again my gear only has materia VIII in the normal meld slots and overmelds are along the lines of 6+4+2 for i460 gear and 4+3+1 for i430 gear. I didn't want to spend tons of money getting 8's or 7's to meld at minuscule chances. So your better materia likely makes up the difference.

Other than that, my experience with 5.2 crafting is largely the same as yours: if you meet the requirements, you can 100% HQ craft using all NQ raw materials. The intermediate components become HQ with a mostly deterministic rotation (I make use of good/excellent status if it appears, but I've crafted at least one item with only normal status), and then the final item is trivial to craft from the HQ components.

I'm sort of disappointed that crafting has become so easy, but also sort of grateful that I'm able to get it out of the way quickly and move on to other things. As it is I had to spend about half a day preparing because I had been lazy in 5.1 and didn't craft facet offhands. Sure crafting could be more exciting but I'll accept this without too many complaints.

[Dragonkat]

WARNING: DO NOT bother with any of those shared i470 "Professional" left gear set pieces. They are quite useless, and are very inferior to even lightly-melded Facet gear, and are almost without improvement comparing to strongly-melded white gear!)

Would have been great to know this yesterday, before I spent an entire day making gathering and making enough collectables to white scrip out my crafters, then realizing today those POS pieces lack the stats to make tier 8 items.

the circular non-logic of having to use a gear piece with lesser stats, needing one materia to just even out to 470 gear, then having to sacrifice a few chickens on the RNG altar for god only knows how long to get the overmelds is not a grind i'm looking forward too, feeling a bit burned by wasted effort at the moment, and don't even want to touch crafting again for now.

[Liam_Harper]

Okay, so I think what Caimie was able to do was reasonable. It required overmelding. It doesn't allow for automation (macro crafting), and can be replaced by non-overmelded facet gear for the same results. This is no different than crafting back in Heavenward when I got bored and quit.

The big difference now is the ease of getting scrips to unlock recipes. The ease of unlocking the gathering nodes, and the ease of getting materia.

I can see where you get that impression, but it's not quite like HW. In HW and early SB you could not 1-100% on NQ mats with a macro no matter how high you overmelded. Even with the best gear. There was months of theorycraft, as you know yourself. Rath's rotation is quite complex, where the ShB rotations are figured out in a day or two because there isn't room for variance. Certain abilities and combinations of abilities are just flat out better.
Day 1 I found I could macro 3 star gear 1-100% no food, no tea, no specialist, no HQ mats. That's bonkers.

You are right on ease of scrips and materia. I'm happy they toned down a little from HW and removed the caps, but 324 yellow scrips every 20 seconds for a cheap Alc recipe is just silly. Materia rains from the sky thanks to that. Timed nodes are a joke, since you don't need HQ anymore you can gather from them with basic lv80 gear, no overmelds. Just Kings Yield II, Pick Clean and there's 24-32 mats and nearly 2 free materia on average.
They also seem stubborn that no mat must be rare or difficult to get. Everything is made of Timed Node mats, scrip mats, tome mats and basic junk.
Overall this means any player has access to everything needed on day 1 and it's just a case of finding the key (rotation) to put it all together.

[NanaWiloh]

Some points I would like to quickly put out there.

-SE said they didn't want master recipes being only for the niche few. Which correlates to easier to obtain mats.
- 3 star crafted battle gear would not be as difficult to craft as 3 star crafting gear or expert recipes.
-Expert recipes are going to be more challenging then master recipes.

Now none of this takes away from What Caimie did. And she is addressing it in a letter to SE among other things. All we can do for now is hope they take note and make some more adjustments.

[Cleanse]

Pretty sure they said 5.21 is 3 weeks after 5.2. So that should be March 10. In other words, 3 weeks, no 2. Also, there really is no point in waiting. You might as well be praying to Buddha or something.

Full context is important in life.

If we had more communication from the devs regarding game play changes upcoming, it would stem the speculation, but SE runs things differently for the "surprise" factor. Patience is a virtue, etc.

[NanaWiloh]

Kinds of regretting my last post as it got me thinking. I have no interest in expert recipes unless 3 star gets more then just crafting gear. Then I have no need to go past facet gear