Craft Skill Limitations

[Camate]

Hello!

In an effort to enhance future development, we would like to gather some feedback from all of the crafters in Vana’diel in regards to the below. We encourage you to discuss this with your fellow players and provide feedback on the direction we’re contemplating.

As you are aware, there is a limit for craft skills where once you reach skill level 60, you are limited to 40 more levels to distribute amongst the other eight crafts (excluding fishing). As such, the system only allows you to be able to reach 100 if you gain all 40 skill levels in one craft, or you can raise two crafts to 80 if you gain 20 levels in two different crafts.

For the future expansion of synthesis and synergy, we’re looking into raising the skill level limitation from 40 to 80 during the next version update. Once this change takes place, you will then be able to have two crafts leveled to 100.

Since this change would alter the core of the crafting system, before serious development discussions begin we would like to hear feedback from all of our hardcore crafters.

The main points of adjustments beginning from the next version update and on are listed below:


Raise the 40 skills levels that can be distributed when a skill reaches 60 to 80. (Makes possible the ability to level two skills to 100)
For the next version update “Revoking Craftsmanship Status” will remain the same as original (Bringing your skill down to 60). For future version updates we plan on making adjustments so that the system allows you to decide which craft skill you would like craftsmanship revoked.
Additionally for future adjustments we are thinking about increasing the levels further beyond 80.


This will be extremely advantageous for synergy, however, due to the fact that these changes would likely cause the number of players with skills at level 100 to increase significantly, there might be some concerns in regards to how the balance of supply and demand are affected.

After collecting your feedback for about a week, we’ll examine it closely with the development and operations teams after which we plan on working on this after the next version update. In order for us to improve the synthesis and synergy systems of FFXI please leave as much feedback as possible!

[nitsuj]

Do it. People will complain, but it will breathe some life back into crafting for the people who still take the time to do it.

[Tazz]

OMG that sounds amazing especially since crafting is almost a lost art these days. This is a geat idea and should be done!!! definitely !!!

[Tazz]

No point really in complaining because all the hardcore crafters have level 100 mules with different crafts lol. Now that can level another on their main!

[Diwulfroc]

I'd say take a baby step. see how the economy changes. Don't give us the ability to max out two craft skills yet with 80 points, but, instead, take it to 60 points so you can choose.

(Though, this might be problematic, because some people will be mad that you can put 30 into two skills, and be almost perfect, which some people might feel to be better than 100 and 80).

[Sephyder]

if the market doesnt really call for the crafted items (as like it is now) then will this really make that big of an impact?

[Earwig]

Everyone seems to be gaga over abyssea and everything abyssea related one my server. Crafting just doesn't seem to matter to very many people on my server, except for the purpose of gil-making. I like the idea of adding additional levels to the total crafting skill available, but I wish that each individual craft would be able to make more super-awesome items.

[Daniel]

I doubt it would affect much of anything, anyone who really wanted to go through the trouble of leveling a second profession would have done it on another character previously. Additionally, the current profit in crafting is quite low in many cases, and rarely yields more than initial costs without excessive use.

That being said, I welcome the change. I won't take advantage of it myself, seeing as it's rare I use the one I already have, but its nice to know I have options.

[xbobx]

The problem is with synergy. Remove it from the game. Two ways to craft is a waste, go back to regular crafting. synergy only recipes screw up demand. Eg, bolts and arrows should never ever be synergy only. Whoever thought of that has no clue what so ever about this game. Every synergy recipe besides upgrading armor and weapon should be able to be crafted using old means.

[KigenAngelios]

While this will be a welcome change as the player base gets smaller and smaller it still does not fix the central problems around crafting and the fact that no one is really buying anything. Increasing the cap may push the economy a little bit for those who just want 2 crafts at 100 but it won't do much beside raise the price of synth mats for a while - so in that regard you may have nothing to worry about.

If you want to revive crafting add some worthwhile non-synergy gear, even cursed/abj that will be applicable to the eventual 99 cap.

[KigenAngelios]

The problem is with synergy. Remove it from the game. Two ways to craft is a waste, go back to regular crafting. synergy only recipes screw up demand. Eg, bolts and arrows should never ever be synergy only. Whoever thought of that has no clue what so ever about this game. Every synergy recipe besides upgrading armor and weapon should be able to be crafted using old means.

I am very much inclined to agree. Synergy is not what it was intended (by that I mean bringing crafters together) - its really only there for people and their mules. I'm shocked that any readily consumable (meds, food, bolts, etc.) are made via synergy - seems like a waste as alot of people just glance over synergy.

[Yarly]

Great idea. Sucks to be me with multiple 100 craft mules but whatever!

[Lukikii]

I'm a craftaholic and I think this is a great idea.

[Patrik]

This sounds like a good idea to me. As far as thinking this would harm supply and demand well... how would it when people craft less and less since the level increase? This is a good step forward put it should serve more than just helping synergy. Instead of making synergy the new all around craft, the old crafts themselves need to be revived and given a use with new gear crafts and such. Until then, why craft when you can get gear from abyssea?

[Duzell]

Some crafts have a lot that link them, being able to do it all on your main job would not only cut down on muling but also increase the rate of HQs. Off the top of my head, bullets are fusions of alchemy smithing and gold-smithing, a spread of 100 80 80 to a bullet maker might be advantageous.

[Kirschy]

I think it's a good idea. Crafting itself has kind have been lame lately with all the new stuffs coming from Synergy. And it's a hassle trying to find other people who have the right crafts every time I want to do Synergy. (It's hard enough to find other people who have synergy leveled to make some of the harder items!) I don't think allowing each character to have two crafts @ 100 will cause many problems, since a lot of us have alternate characters that have crafts at 100. (I personally have goldsmithing and leather on top of Kirschy's Alchemy.)

The only major change I can see, is that certain items will change their HQ tiers... but with items like Dusk Gloves+1 already being T1 due to crafting changes, I can't see this being a problem.

[Malacite]

I agree, go for it. Crafting has really just gone down the drain for the longest time, this will help breath new life into it.

[Mrdeath]

It's a nice Idea, but as few people said players these days are focused on Abyss gears and items.

I think the most 2 crafts that will be benefiting from this are Woodworking and Cooking since they craft consumable items (food and ammos). However, if you want other crafts to benefit from it to I suggest adding new cursed gears (or similar to it). Adj could be from Abyss or current HNMs, row materials from both Abyss and mainland. Like this people will have a reason to level 2 crafts to 100 and you will get players to visit old areas.

Peace,

[Mrdeath]

Oops I would like to add Alchemy to the consumable crafts (meds)

[Misi]

This would be nice. I'm a little sad that I've de-leveled some crafts that were 60+ in the past though, that and the slow skill ups/farming materials or spending gil ratio is pretty bad. If people want to put time and gil into leveling multiple crafts, they should not be penalized for that. Regardless, still happy to see some changes with the system in the future.

[Claquesous]

With over 800 crafting levels under my belt, I think I'm qualified to give an honest opinion on the subject.

I personally don't think raising the crafting caps will make much difference at all. As one or two people mentioned, there will probably be increased demand for some items temporarily for capped crafters to reach their new crafts. This would annoy me, but I assume the effect won't be that bad and won't be too long term. (Crystals on the other hand may get completely out of hand. More on this below.) Also some items will be able to reach new HQ tiers, but there are currently only a handful of these and none that are currently worthwhile.

The change has a whiff of populism and desperation to me while failing to fix the true problems as I see them. Here are changes I'd much prefer to see:

1. Get rid of material losses for synths where I'm above the cap. These are just incredibly frustrating. I think this is why breaks were (thankfully) completely removed from Synergy. (I understand that part of the game is luck, but bad luck is a lot more frustrating than a lack of good luck.)
2. Give HQ results for more crafts. What I mean by this is that there are a lot of low level crafts like Sheep Leather or Cotton Cloths where you get HQ animations, but don't get any extra materials. These always seemed like a slap to the face especially when followed by a critical break of a synth where I'm 100+ over the cap. I think adding some extra HQs might give high level crafters an incentive to keep the materials on the AH stocked. Conversely, it could hurt the profits on NQ synths so it may not be win/win all around.
3. Show me the crystals! The other day I sat down with a nice cup of tea to do some synthing, but I found out there wasn't a single earth crystal available on an auction house anywhere on my server so I was out of luck. Crystal prices today are even higher than they were in the midst of the great inflation period. This change would only put more pressure on the already minuscule supply.
4. Show me the synths! I can't think of a single worthwhile non-Synergy synthesis that has been added since Abyssea was released.
5. Fix synergy. I love the concept of synergy-- team up to accomplish greater synths. The problem is that the menu-based design is miserable, and also seems to be unfair. Since the system is server based instead of client based, I've heard that some people can thwack four or five times before an overload, but I've never been able to get off more than two or three. That's unfair, and incredibly frustrating! The proposed change seems to be an admission of the failure of utilizing teamwork for synthesis by making everything soloable. I'd much rather the design be fixed than completely giving up on the teamwork aspect.

In summary, I am intrigued by this change and agree that it could bring some benefits, but I hope you will consider some of my suggestions instead. Thanks for your time.

[Crawlerbasher]

I have cooking at 100 purely for my self and my friends.
If I could take a 2nd craft to 100 I would take up alchemy or woodworking for the same resion.

While I do craft to make gil some times.
Most of my income are from farming rather than crafting.

I use my crafting skills for my linkshell, friends and my self.
So in this since I craft to become self sustaining.

[Kavik]

I think it would be great to be able to have more then one craft lvled to their 100 max because a lot of the decent lower lvl items require a great deal of skill (above 60) and there are next to no low lvl items on the AH on Titan. So if you could have bonecraft and clothcraft both 100 you could make all your own items and not have to worry about shouting to find a crafter for something that should be be on the AH anyway.

[Johnichu_CAN]

I support the raising of the limit on the skill caps.

Johnichu "Paparazzi" Valefor of Kujata

[PerditionOfFenrir]

Everyone seems to be gaga over abyssea and everything abyssea related one my server.

I think that Earwig has hit the nail on the head. Abyssea has thrown the game out-of-balance, more than anything else.

There are far fewer people playing and, if your not in Abyssea, you hardly even see another player. The entire world is a ghost town. You can''t find a non-Aby party. Nobody is crafting. The AH is bare. Linkshells are dying.

Abyssea was(is) a HUGE mistake IMO, especially from a game-balance perspective.

I don't think raising the crafting limit will hurt anything. We need more items to buy!

[Limecat]

Oh man, full speed ahead. Like others I also have mules with crafts leveled, but it would be wonderful to have some more levels for personal utility(100 cooking, but I'd love to be able to do Lu Shang repairs on the fly instead of having to send the rod to my wood mule). Might even help newer players, since mat prices are bound to jump and that'd give them a leg up on getting some better gear.

[Sparthos]

Get rid of Synergy? Surely the words of someone who is either a masochist or has never done it.

If anything, SE should completely scrap the old system with all its breaks when you are far above the cap and give every current synthesis recipe a corresponding synergy recipe. This way, the HQ rates are improved when above the cap, you cant fail or lose items and your friends can help out need be if you aren't at the cap.

Oh and for those who would say "but Synergy means I have to level it" - Synergy is one of the easiest crafts to level. You could reach the cap in a matter of days with minimal gil loss. Hell, they could make it where doing synergy on craft that is above your synthesis level could give synthesis and synergy skillups.

As it stands, crafts are dead. Demand is on vendored items or NM drops and anything short of a craft-oriented endgame means that only consumables will benefit. Durable crafts are out of luck so 2 100 crafts on a character wont matter.

[Byrth]

Break those caps! I was tired of having blue numbers!

[Karbuncle]

I think this would be a good idea!

Got my vote for yes.

[Octaviane]

I love to craft on my mule, Alchemy being my main craft (72). I started Gold also (18). Lately though, I have no desire to continue when I have to spend in excess of 100k to get a .01 skill-up in Alchemy, even with imaging support. I farm a lot of materials for the lower level synths on my main, send to my mule and get increasingly frustrated that a synth fails when I am 50 levels above it's cap. HQ's are rare, and some synths give you the HQ animation, but you get nothing extra. Then, so you get a great HQ (3 flasks of echo drops) and the next synth is a fail. Also, a lot of skill-up synth materials are almost impossible to get (example: chocobo digging - item rare). I can make money easily enough making lower level meds, but my goal is to get to Alchemy 100. There are less and less crafters now thanks to Abyssea, Synergy is fail imo. Please revive good old crafting, items on the ah that we can buy, items that we can actually get from farming and better skill-ups/hq's. Basically the only things that sell are reraise earrings, silent oils, invisible, echo drops, remedies (slow) and food sells pretty well except that a couple of weeks can go by with no Rolanberry Pies or Yellow Curry buns up on the ah because of regional control issues. There are no Furnishings on the AH anymore, no-one does woodworking. One more example, I have been checking the AH for a Gold Chain for a fellow BLU to get a piece of her AF, there have been none up for several days, there used to be plenty. I believe this to be directly related to Abyssea since you don't need to have regular AF. You can go straight to AF3 on any job. Sad. Please give me a reason/incentive to reach my goal. Thanks.

[Hashmalum]

Yes, please remove the cap. I know for a fact it would get me, for one, to do more crafting. However, by itself it will not fix crafting; what is needed for that is to (1) stop annihilating the market for crafted goods by giving them out like candy, especially alchemy products and (2) add some new staple craft products; for example, what about a a wyvern raise item (that is, a usable item that resets the Call Wyvern job ability timer)? Or Phoenix Down?

[Bubeeky]

I would love to see synergy removed from the game period...it's unfair to those of us that took time to invest in one of the older crafts...also, it wouldn't be a bad idea to revamp the guildpoint system cuz it's overly difficult to get gp in my opinion...

[Rorald]

I like the idea but think you should go even further with the idea and remove the caps all together.

[Bhujerba]

if your not in Abyssea, you hardly even see another player. The entire world is a ghost town. You can''t find a non-Aby party. Nobody is crafting. The AH is bare. Linkshells are dying.

Abyssea was(is) a HUGE mistake IMO, especially from a game-balance perspective.


you seems to know much about game design...
Its "mostly" the level cap increase that affected the game, Abyssea is merely a place to level and obtain the new items, specially the latter, they cant put all the new items on old monsters/areas (they need new outlet for items, to avoid cluttering/etc), plus any level increase will ALWAYS throw any game off-balance, whether its drastic(Abyssea) or not, what was at level cap before will never be the same after, welcome to change.
----------------------------------

As for crafting (~750), I don't mind the the extra skills at all, (finally I would be able to make the dreadful darksteel cap by myself :mad:), anything to crafting these days would be good, one suggestion tho, could you look into guild point items? a way to increase the daily cap per item or something would be very nice.

[Crocker]

I like the idea of 2 100's but how about making Cooking Like Fishing no cap there is no point in Fishing without cooking.

I'm 100 Alchemy and for a 2nd craft to 100 maybe Woodworking, but the issue is I have 57 Fishing and use to make all my own food and jug pets with another account with 93 Cooking but you fools Banned it for "RMT related activities" which I have never done and would never do!

Uncapping cooking would open up a better reason for more people to fish and that alone would lower the food cost and that would be great! For Synergy not many at all do it (Synergy 70) and I don't want to bother with it ever again.

[Cream_Soda]

I think it would personally upset most who have mules that craft as well to have multiple 100+ crafts since that let's say you make new recepies w/ higher subcrafts required since they'd have to level crafts again that they already have 100+ on a mule.

[Gotterdammerung]

I agree with Cream_Soda. People have already bypassed this restriction by creating alternate characters to cover each craft.

If your going to change anything with the crafting system how about raising the cap past 100.

Either way its a drop in the bucket. You killed crafting when you released Magian trials and empyreon armor.

A few years ago if you examined a leet gear set, usually at least half the items were HQ crafted items.

Now your lucky to see 1 item in a gear set that even came off the AH.

If you want to breathe life into crafting then start making it supply useful gear again.

And another thing, when you came out with evoliths it seemd like you were trying to add some customization into crafting. But you were skittish and all the evolith bonuses were paltry and random. Then a very short time later u introduce a system that is completely customizable with strong bonuses and requires NO crafting background or even questing, just a kill fest. Refering to Trial of the magian. Why is that? it just seems wierd to be all scared of one system and supply crappy bonuses and then a few months later completely throw caution to the wind and deliver a powergamers wet dream.

P.S. I love Trial of the Magians, its like choclate. I know its bad but i still love to eat it.

[Cljader1]

I have 3 crafts at lvl 100 with two of those being lvl 80 synergy characters, I would welcome the change smithing and goldsmithing just seems to go hand in hand. I agree with the others and would like to have the ability to max out two crafts, full steam ahead on this.

Furthermore I would like for crafting and especially synergy receive a boost in the power of gear we can make, in my opinion the most powerful gear in the game should NOT be rare/ex nm drops only, crafters should be able to create gear to match that power. Crafters and Synergist should be able to make powerful rare/ex gear for themselves. My whole goal in crafting is to make the best gear seen in the game, but my work is almost always outshined by new gear nms drops implemented in the game. Oh and for God sake's please give goldsmithing synergist better rings and earrings to complete with ALL of those rare/ex rings and earrings dropped by abyssea nms. Maybe add specialized crafted rings or earrings that add bonuses to job traits or job abilities of specific jobs would be nice and it would add some respectability to goldsmithing again.

I been crafting for 9 years and many people in this thread have been crafting for years, we deserve to have the ability to make Jaw-Dropping gear, please give synergy and crafting more Power! We need to be able to complete with abyssea drops.

[Alhanelem]

This is great because it will make certain dual craft items able to be HQed more easily, and gives people who didn't want to undo a lot of work the chance to try another craft. On top of this, it can potentially reduce the number of people required to perform more advanced synergy (It could also [ugh] mean that more subcrafts would be possible, though).

Given how stagnant crafting is right now, I don't really see this doing much harm to anyone. It will also give die-hard crafters something to do.

[Runespider]

Crafting is DEAD, really it is, there are no profitiable or worthwhile synths, gil is now worthless anyway so whats the point crafting gear that is really weak compared to the current top tier? Crafting is dead so worrying about upseting 100 crafters at this point is silly, most high level crafters don't even craft anymore.

Square increased the level cap, this is what needs to be done with crafting. Increase the crafting cap to 150 and add really good new synthswith really difficult HQ synths that are very good compared to the current top gear. 100 craft is garbage cause all the synths are not desirable, whats the point of having 2 such crafts?

The whole point of this update is to work on synergy which is fine but the base crafts are destroyed atm, nobody does it...the AH is bare. HQ staves are now defunct, HQ armors are worthless etc some serious works needs to be done on crafting itself and not just synergy.

The upcoming update that will allow players to add RANDOM weak stats won't go down well either, random long winded additions to armors will instill feelings of FoV NM armor increases which were horrible. The amount of people that bother with minimal upgrades to things like Byakkos Haidate in a really long winded random system will be tiny, it's better to just get your AF3 than deal with that.

[Vold]

As a veteran crafter who has multiple mules edging ever so closer to 100 crafts, I personally see no reason not to lift the cap. As a matter of fact I welcome it because it would turn many synths into 11 31 51 tier HQs, specifically synths that are held back by their subs from attaining certain HQ tiers. That's exactly what I would do with my character, and not go with 2 100 mains.

I really can't see any down sides to it. Crafting is alive and well where I'm standing. People are just bitter their gold mines have been cleaned out. Mines that were the only reason they bothered crafting. I wasn't happy either but I moved on. We all know how that junk went. You did wood for staves. Bone for Scorpion harness. Leather for sniper rings. Gold smithing for.. well, pretty much to be filthy rich. Cloth for verms. Cooking for sushi. Smithing for haubs. Everything else was a side bonus to the big synths. And I can't say I blame them, but it was headed that way anyway after the inflation period thanks to gil sellers. People bought a ton of gil and got those 100 crafts.

Whatever you guys choose to do though, I think I speak for everyone when I say let the crafts do their job and not so much synergy doing it for them. Don't give up on Synergy. Don't get me wrong here. I'm just saying, the crafts deserves some of that fancy new gear that rakes in some serious gil to replace the ruined money makers of old. And I say that as a 80 synergy atm. I'm not wanting the synths out of self need. I just think the crafts deserve better and I see no reason a 100 craft can't produce level 90+ gear and with HQs to go with it instead of not at all. Wood in particular is in dire need for something worthwhile as magian has destroyed it's HQ market. Nin tools are not an acceptable replacement, nor is warp clubs, nor is HQing lumber...

I'm tired of seeing new synergy gear being a monopoly by a handful of players for several months after it's released. Hey they did the work, they deserve the payout, but still. Even if I were one of those making a ton of gil thanks to synergy, I still would feel that crafting deserves better and the players that have taken the time to raise a 100 craft darn sure deserve better than a handful of people on an entire server making out like bandits after every update for months. You shouldn't be forced to level synergy to compete. It needs to be a side bonus to crafting, not a necessity, no matter how easy it is to level. In other words, mix it up. Don't play favorites. Give crafting some big synths and synergy some big synths.

One worthy note to make about all of this, Ebon gear was sorta in the right direction. It used the crafts to form the base gear and used synergy to enhance it. I would like to see more of that in the future and less of the 'let's give synergy everything worthwhile' approach.

[Cljader1]

By the way lets bring back Aern Weapons (for ex: like the galatyn, machismo etc.) I would love to see a second tier for these types of weapons and would like too see a Aern scythe and shield added in too. I always considered these to be crafted relics, it would be my crafting dream for you guys to add a second tier of these that could complete with emyphean weapons. The Aern weapons set should have there own unique WS, maybe that could be installed in the form of powerful evoliths. I have no problem with the second tier of these weapons being very expensive or hard to make, but Aern weapons and maybe even Aern type armor can be the shining beacon on what crafting can do.

Btw I have around 100 mil gil on my character, the reason why is because all the gear on the AH sucks and cant be compared to the rare/ex stuff you can get in abyssea. I would love too sink this money back into crafting to create or purchase new POWERFUL crafted armor and weapons. Gil has become unimportant, the only thing i can use it for is bribing people to help me gather seals and coins for af3. Put the gil back into the AH, I would like to use my finances too purchase top tiers gear on the AH, by doing this that would recirculate my gil into other crafter's hands and the economy would be overall improved.

[Flunklesnarkin]

I'm convinced that all the people who hate synergy.. have never actually tried it...

they were so use to the old system they instantly hated it because it was new...

I really don't see what's to hate about it..

you can cap it from 0 skill in a few hours....

you don't lose mat's if you botch a synth up...

you actually have a degree of control over HQ instead of mindlessly doing the same synth over and over waiting for your lucky day.

and you generally get more product from the materials.. ie a NQ synergy synth would give you 6 items whereas a NQ regular synth might give you 4.



I also don't see a huge problem with people being able to have 2 lvl 100 crafts or even all level 100 crafts on the same character...

As others have said.. serious crafters just end up making crafting mules anyways... would save them a bit of a headache muling each time they wanted to change craft professions.

[fyhah]

Just let everyone level all the crafts to 100 already. I never really understood y all those limitations were there in the first place. And stop this incremental stuff. should be like a bandaid.

[Ezekieal]

i personally would prefer to see 80 lvls to share with the cap remaining 60 rather than raising cap to 80 and keepin the 40 lvls to share. as with skill+ gear and adv support its possible to have lvl 85~ skill making it almost possible for someone to craft everything albeit with breaks.

also think its probably time to knock the evolith system in the head. it was desicively underwhelming @75 and now its just plain pathetic as any small niche of usefulness it had died along with the lvl cap.

[Unctgtg]

I say go for it, I hate nothing more then having to mule to craft something to then have to send it back to my main to craft again.

[fredtma]

I couldn't agree more, synergy has mess up the whole crafting system

[Kailea_Nagisa]

Pleas do not go to fast in your implementation of this.

Raising the cap from 60 to 80? not needed
Allowing two crafts to 100, yes this would be nice
Allowing more then two or all crafts to 100? no this is to much and should not be done.
The main thing though, something you do not have listed, is to make craft just alittle easier, the fail rate and/or skill gain rate is still bad.

[Cerelyn]

I'm excited about this adjustment. Now I can get a 2nd 100 Craft on my main instead of having to level another 100 on my mule accounts :)

[Daniel_Hatcher]

Pleas do not go to fast in your implementation of this.

please do, now I wont need to lvl my mules crafting up, I can do it on my main account.

[vedder]

honestly, as someone has previously pointed out, the biggest issue is that there is no huge money-making synths anymore like the days of yore

hakutaku pops/haubs/abj/snipers/ etc etc etc....

this is the biggest reason the AH is dying, why craft anything when the end result is trumped by af3? Gil is a luxury now since abyssea is "all there is" in so many ppls eyes

in my opinion, they need to raise caps on the base synths and introduce a bunch of new synths for lvl 91-99 (eg 150cap some ppl mentioned) to take the "spots" of the old ones and get ppl spending/farming plain out circulating the gil they have, i know so many ppl that have 1m+ on them just cus theres nothing worth buying, and these are ppl that had a hard time getting more then a couple hundred k before.

im not knowledgeable enough about economics to really take a firm stance on this but honestly i dont think this will affect the game too much as it stands

[Treasurehider]

I like the idea. Would be excited to see the aftermath once it's implemented.

However, I agree with a few here that have stated most of the past equipment required a crafter. Heck, Optical Hat, Cursed Gear from sky or whatever, even Salvage Gear, even other stuff.... Relics as well (kinda).

Abyssea doesn't really have much of this and Abyssea gear seems to be the new dominating desires of most FFXI players.

While news of being able to augment pre-obtained pieces was exciting (i.e. Kitty pants), requiring synergy to do it was a bit of a ... well I guess what else would you do. But unless I've misunderstood it, it would be great to offer some new 90~100 level synths to the original set of craft skills to assist in these augments.

If that was done, I think, personally, without trying to be biased, this would be an overall good change.

I've personally felt a bit betrayed lately in the fact that I, as well as many others, spent 7+ years obtaining all this great gear, just to have it replaced by Abyssea gear; which is great, but just as easily obtained within ~month, whether you've been playing the game for 8 years or 6 months. It was nice having gear to show off (gloating) from all of the hard work you've done. (tried wording that without sounding like a leetist (sp?), but I'm sure I failed) :) Sorry.

[ShadowHeart]

yes i myself don't have a group of crafting buddies so synergy doesnt work well for me and i find skill ups a pain in the butt to level :s I myself have leveled crafts up as well as mules but i can't get my head around synergy skill ups at all and driving me nuts trying. PLEASE make the recipes available without having to use syngery as well!!

[Shoko]

I'm excited about this adjustment. Now I can get a 2nd 100 Craft on my main instead of having to level another 100 on my mule accounts :)

Don't get too excited! They didn't say it would happen or not just yet, lol.


I think it would personally upset most who have mules that craft as well to have multiple 100+ crafts since that let's say you make new recepies w/ higher subcrafts required since they'd have to level crafts again that they already have 100+ on a mule.

Nah, we'd just level another craft to 100 to close the spread of 100 crafts [they] have. I for one would probably level up Woodworking on my main to accompany Alchemy and Clothcraft on my Leathercraft mule to accompany that. And Goldsmithing on my Smithing mule... haha.

I for one would welcome the change. There's only so few crafts out there that will benefit from dual crafts @100, and they are mostly consumables, outdated gear/items, or share a third craft that maintains a limitation on HQ tiers. Also like Kirschy mentioned, the top top tier items won't be affected much at all or are already at a T1 because of the new crafting items.

Finally it might encourage a select few people to attempt an "expensive" [rare] craft on their main character (mainly goldsmithing & smithing).

What I'm interested in is if you guys would add newer normal crafts for people that benefit having two crafts @80~100.

[GERM]

Well considering I find the synergy system crap to begin with I could care less about way to improve it for those that do benefit for it.. I think you should just leave the system.. Crystal prices are going to get out of control again and quite frankly im going to stop skilling my crafts up until they go back down because I refuse to pay 5k for a stack and what not.. I think you should look into decreasing NPC price of good or increase the resale price to NPC so that way Im not sitting with a bunch of stuff on the AH that I skilled up on that don't sell because its useless and Im not going broke making stuff and selling it back because I need the inventory space.. just a thought

[Bhujerba]

Synergy didn't ruin Crafting, even tho i hate it.., what ruined crafting IMO, is that SE stopped caring/introducing new POWERFUL gear to crafting alongside Synergy, if that was the case you wouldn't see ppl complaining much about it, except about Synergy having much better mechanic when creating items, basically what we always wanted in crafting (no break, better NQ result, high HQ rate etc) that's about it I guess.

Suggestions:
- As ppl mentioned earlier we need crafting to continue to grow beyond 100+ (maybe in the near future for level 99?). now once you decide to add new items and POWERFUL gear and continue Crafting growth, I really....really wants you to consider hybrid job itemization, in fact any job who is capable of doing different type of damage/utility I consider it a hybrid, what I'm trying to say is that job specific gear and the way you introduce new gear, you always ignore stats that are very beneficial to hybrid jobs, most of these items with different and wanted stats than what originally planned for the job, are extremely rare, randomized and scattered all over the game (with no direction or consideration in continuous gear updates), Crafting/Synergy can be the perfect outlet for these type of items.
for example PUP AF3 is focused mostly on melee/physical dmg for master/pet, with little to no stats for mage pet(pet:fast cast/mab/macc/cure potency/etc), in other MMOs, most hybrid jobs get 2 to 3 extra sets (AF/Relic) to compensate all the different fight style the hybrid job can do, in this game they don't, for some reason, but all I'm asking is to let Crafting help with that, don't add these stats to some random event that we have to repeat many many times until we get the desired stat, or not adding the item at all. (jobs in mind COR,PUP,BLU,DNC,RDM,SCH,SMN,etc).

- As I mention in my previous post, since now we will be able to have 2 main craft after the 40 skill increase, now ppl may need to get new GP items, I just wants you to consider lowering GP cost of items, or enhancing GP gained from the daily quest(get rid of 80 item = 800GP for example) or/and being Veteran will ensure getting the highest GP return per day? anything really would be nice to this outdated system.

[Jamesaji]

I would love to see this happen. Having the ability to level two craft skills to 100 would give me incentive to finish off Woodworking (currently at 79+1), and level another craft to 100 (haven't decided which yet). Moreover, it would probably make me want to level another two craft skills with my mule character.

Low level gear, at least on my server [Valefor], is scarce. I'm in the process of leveling SCH (currently at 25), and the pieces of armor I have been looking for are never in stock on the Auction House. An assumption that is made by a lot of players is that folk level a new job to ~11, get themselves into a "Summoner Burn" party until level 30 and then power through Abyssea until level 90. This assumption is wrong ,and is what I believe to be the reason for this scarcity. There are still plenty of players who level the old-fashioned way (myself included). Therefore there is still a market for low level gear, but there is little to none being produced by crafters. Increasing the extra skill levels from 40 to 80 may partly solve this scarcity of gear.

Something which I believe will compliment this update would be increasing skill up rates. Maybe not a constant increase, but rather, for example, a timed enhancment, obtainable every 24 earth hours, which lasts for, say, 30 earth minutes that will give you at least a guaranteed 0.1 skill up for every synthesis. That's purely a quick example. There would have to be some sort of increase in skill up rates to give non-crafters the incentive to take up crafting (and to give crafters incentive to level a second craft to 100), especially if you [SE] plan on increasing the extra skill levels above 80.

I am certainly looking forward to seeing more update information on this, and also seeing how far it progresses.

[Yekyaa]

Related, but not specifically on-topic:
I doubt this will get considered, but why not remove the 1 Guild Point contract design while in the process of increasing level caps?

Earning GP on multiple jobs will benefit those trying to complete two crafts to 100. As an example, there's still items I'd like to finish from Goldsmithing, but I have to pick Fishing atm to earn GP on. If we're adding another 40 levels to share around crafting, I'd see an additional benefit in allowing us to earn GP on more than just one craft.

[katz]

One of the main problems in getting any craft to 100 is the supply of materials post level 70. It is more to do with the supplies that limits which craft gets to 100. having 2 100 crafts will just mean the supplies for 2 crafts will be rarer unless you make the supplies more attractive to farming. It is the supplies that will force people to chose to level 1 craft or the other craft not that you have craft 100 x2. If you made it possible that all crafts could be taken to 100 unless you change the drop rates on the items no one will have them. Also if its items you are worried about, you can still only sell 7 items at a time on the ah which is another limit to selling stuff.

[Qtipus]

I really can't see any down sides to it. Crafting is alive and well where I'm standing. People are just bitter their gold mines have been cleaned out. Mines that were the only reason they bothered crafting. I wasn't happy either but I moved on. We all know how that junk went. You did wood for staves. Bone for Scorpion harness. Leather for sniper rings. Gold smithing for.. well, pretty much to be filthy rich. Cloth for verms. Cooking for sushi. Smithing for haubs. Everything else was a side bonus to the big synths. And I can't say I blame them, but it was headed that way anyway after the inflation period thanks to gil sellers. People bought a ton of gil and got those 100 crafts.

Exactly. People basically treated crafting like the lottery. I spent years making gil off RR items, Arrowheads and a few random pieces of gear. I did get lucky with some unicorn leggings +1 at one point, but beyond that, I had just had myself in a routine and made money the good old fashioned way. Slow and steady.

I tend to think raising the cap is a good thing, but I have to admit that my initial thought on the subject was "Why?". If they're going to do that, there's a few other things to look into.

- Change Guild Point items and/or rewards. A good majority of the rewards can end up costing 6 figures or have zilch in the way of supply to even craft them. I think a better system would be to give us 3 options each day for points. First option is stuff you can readily buy materials for from an NPC. The second is a mid-ranged option that's going to combine NPC purchases with Auction House. The last would be an option to turn in something you won't find on NPC and would likely have to spend a good chunk of time farming. Also, give us the option to turn in all 3 of those each day or lower the costs of the Guild Point items altogether.

- Treat Cooking like Fishing. It's way too broad and, I may be mistaken in saying this, but there are 0 cooking crafts that involve having a sub craft. Just a bunch of Guild Point items.

- Give other crafts items like Hocho. No, a "Trainee Hammer" is not like Hocho.

- Fix material loss on breaks. There is nothing in this game more infuriating than being 51 levels above the cap on something and losing all the materials. I wouldn't go so far as to say get rid of it if you're above the cap, but I think if you reach the ability to T1 HQ something, you shouldn't lose materials.

- Lastly, give us gear we can craft that's at least on par with some of the stuff dropped from lesser NMs in Abyssea or that even uses items from those NMs. I love Abyssea, don't get me wrong, I just don't think the developers really looked at the impact of adding all that gear on the crafting market as a whole. End game was sorely lacking prior to Abyssea, so you won't hear me trumpeting about how "Abyssea wrecked the game", I just think some of the focus needs to be put back onto the areas Abyssea really affected. Some of that focus is already there with the XP boost in non-Abyssea areas and the upcoming Dynamis and HNM adjustments, so I have faith something good will be done here as well.

[Khiinroye]

I wouldn't mind the change, and I like how it would make finding people with crafts levelled for synergy easier. I don't see it affecting the current crafting recipes all that much--those recipes that could get easier HQ results are mostly outdated by recent gear anyways.

The change could give rise to crafting-only recipes that require double-specialization (lv 100 of two skills) that should surpass the synergy recipes (which only require that someone with the craft skills are in the party. If each double-specialization type has worthwhile recipes, then it could actually serve to decrease the number of crafters competing over these recipes, since they would have to choose which specializations to do.

Currently there are 8 craft skills (not counting fishing and synergy), but with the possibility of 2 lv 100 crafts, this would result in 28 types of double-specification (8 * 7 / 2 choices).

I do see it difficult to come up with recipes that combine certain crafts, such as cooking and anything that isn't alchemy (in before bacon mage to fix that).

An alternative to this could be to only allow one crafting skill past 80, so it would make it so that people have a 100 crafting skill and two 80 crafting skills. This could still create recipes that require a certain specialization, like 100 cloth, 80 leather, and 80 smithing vs 100 cloth, 80 smithing, and 80 goldsmithing. Actually, that type of recipe could still exist even without this alternative's limit, which could decrease competition over those recipes between crafters even further.

A second alternative would be to raise the base level to 70, and keep the 40 points--this would let you have one lv 100, one lv 80, and the rest lv 70, which wouldn't change too much about crafting.

Anyways, crafting would be pretty hectic until the sub-levels are found for the various recipes, especially since the crafting guilds don't give any hint to the level required for additional skills. That is something I would like to see--when asking for recipes at the guild, that the NPC will tell you the craft rank of the subcrafts, as the Synergy Enthusiasts do. Something like Additional skills required: Smithing (Artisan), Leathercraft (Craftsman).

[Fetus]

Go for it. It's not like crafting is good for anything, anyway. FFXI sports the most unfriendly, inconvenient and unwanted crafting system of any MMO out there. Other games let skilled crafters practically design their own equipment or, at the very least, make batches of stuff in one swoop rather than spamming synthesis one item at a time.

Crafting was important years ago- not any more- and nothing short of omgwtfbbq craft-only equipment is going to change that.

[Dathus]

Two non-fishing crafts at 100 would be enough. There are enough crafts that work well together at both over 60 that you shouldn't go much/any further than that. If you plan on doing all crafts able to be 100 in the future, you're just going insane. With the atrocious skill-up rate, most players might barely get the second to 100 when you announce a third.

Two 100 crafts is enough.

[Kailea_Nagisa]

please do, now I wont need to lvl my mules crafting up, I can do it on my main account.

I meant that I would like them to not rush into anything, and think before they change things -.-

[Sparthos]

Can some people give some legitimate reasons why Synergy is terrible? "Waa, its not synthesis" doesn't qualify as a real reason. Being able to simply craft a full stack of 99 bolts with one synergy synth is simpler, rewards more on HQs and cannot break. It's superior.

Since SE brought up Crafting, here are some things that should be changed:

-Convert the entire synth lists over to Synergy.

Everything progresses, including technology in the world of Vanadiel. As it stands right now, Synergy is nothing more than a haphazardly put together list of various synths from various crafts from 0-80. Convert all current synths in every craft over to Synergy such that you can level a synth and Synergy at the same time - skillups included.

-The toolbag system should be taken out back and put down.

It's a chore to trade some random flower + your item to an NPC who exists solely to drive you mad. Oh and why does this NPC vanish during Conquest ties? Is that simply to just to inconvenience people for a week? Get rid of it all and simply have things like Shihei synth out in a bag if you use Synergy. If you want a lore-based explanation, the furnace made the bags/pouches/quivers for you. Wonders of Bastokan technology the furnaces are, aren't they?

-33/66/99 Synths should be all converted to 99/198/297 synths.

This already exists with newer ammo, just make it a standard.

Even with all these changes, Crafting is already DOA. Unless all future gear is created via crafting, the games economy might well be in need of a funeral. I fully expect post-Abyssea gear to create a spike in consumables being used again (like food) but as it stands, gil is worthless and so the driving factor to synth is gone.

[Glamdring]

People still craft? based on the availability of crafted items you would never know. The only thing with even a limited supply seems to be food. Make whatever changes you want, I expect the shelves of the AH will remain just as barren as they currently are.

[Milotheshort]

This is a terrible idea. Once again this feels like a slap and slight against players whom have dedicated themselves to accomplishing specific feats of true merit w/ no true benefit to them. As has been stated all "True" crafters have mules w/ other crafts capped and subs capped. This feels like a feeble attempt to appease the non-crafting portion of FFXI. The inherent problem with this mode of thought, is they still won't level the crafts or corresponding subs. You guys really dropped the ball w/ CoP, and this seems like a repeat. All your managing to do is further alienate your hardcore player base, in order to make a game more appealing to casuals (See WoW Ready MMOs). Its not like rare materials are not already overly abundant. If your looking for some real fixes to the crafting system.
1. Make current non-hq'able items HQ'able. Juice, leather, ingots etc. reward those making the effort already >.>
2. Make certain things stackable that currently aren't. To me it makes absolutely zero sense why juice is not stackable when other food and bottled medicines are.
3.Make players over cap have less fail rate determined by skill above synth, i'm talking no more crit fails on stupid synths like ash lumber.
4. Introduce HQ mats and give a bonus to HQing the result. such as it is in life, this should be in game, a player willing to use HQ goods in there product should have a better chance in making a satisfactory result. making this proportional will help. So in the case of a Dark Staff, using a HQ piece of ebony lumber, and an HQ dark bead would give a 30% boost to HQing the result, conversely using only one of the materials in HQ form would give a 15 or 10% boost (depending on scaling). This would introduce new life into the materials market. (yes i realize this would effect the overall price of current HQ's, but any of my suggestions could be a sole implementation.)
5. Offer new key items that help crafters this could be tied to the lowering fail rate further etc make it only available to veterans.
6. make old gear and other non-consumables, upgradable. So taking that old elemental staff and synthing it with a gold ingot and a new gem, would produce a +2 elem staff (HQ +3)
7. If you want more ppl to craft offer more pathing options to greater open up current bottle necks.
8. Offer better Evoliths, to make augmenting gear via etching more worth while, I have yet to see someone shout for me to etch something. I feal mainly this is because the evoliths are harder to obtain and very limited in there scope.
9. Allow me to buy more than 1 etching item at a time, i always have capped cinder, there is no other use for it so either let me npc out it and recover gil, or allow me to trade it for fewell or some other items.
10. give a boost to having others synergize in a synth. Right now if i go w/ capped synergy and quick spam to completion it is cheaper and safer than picking up lvl 0's or others not capped, ass when they perform actions it hurts my gains and pressure value. (not saying make them skill faster, or make the values be adjusted to my lvl i can see the game breaking possibilities of that, but i'm saying give the main crafter an added bonus to actions they perform whilst others are "helping")
11. Provide more uses for garbage WIP materials ergo (Hunters cotton), its a bottleneck/gap synth and has no real value. sure its used in rng upgrades but that's it, items such as that should have more application. even if the application is purely decorative.
Pick one anyone, would honestly be better than leveling another craft to 100, just so my AH score can go up and show everyone how awesome i am at crafting, they already know since there are only a handful of hardcore crafters left on each server, hence why the number of goods is so significantly lowered.
12. FIX BOLTMAKER IT IDIOTIC in its current form.

[Selzak]

Crafting has been overlooked in this game from the beginning. I say keep trying to breathe life into it until you break it- then you can adjust it for balance. Seriously, nothing done so far has made it a significant part of the game for most people so just go for it.

[Lump]

what developers need to work on is common sense...there should be a 0% chance a Veteran! craftier should Ever! fail at any low level craft, let alone lose any items. Why waste your Time and gil, to level and finish a craft that when you go to make a level 20 recipe or whatever it may be, you might still fail and lose all ingredients. Other stuff to focus on developers!

[Crocker]

Guild Points - Should make it so you don't lose them for switching guilds.

[Megatron]

the crafting system needs morethen being able to up a skill to 80..... peopel dont craft becasue theres no gil in it. you lose more then you put in even if you HQ. skill ups past 60 are to far and inbetween. if you wantto incresses the amonut of crafting here is how you fix it.

1. if you can craft it. you craft it. no more breaks. if you dont have the skill then you cant.
2. incress skill ups on crafting.
3. if you can syerngize it there should be a craft it as well. and vis versa.

these changes allow you to not lose materials. becasue as we know you have the skill to manafacture the items if you didnt you wouldn't try. This makes material cost stay lower due to less waste. the incressed skill up premote people to craft casue they see it as fun and benfishial. it is pointless to allow a person who has invested a large portion of their time into leveling their wood working crafting skill to 100 and finds out they cant make a arrow because its syergy only. simply make one version easierto do then the other or require diffrent miterals. but include both parties. these changes are simple and minute and will revamp carfting the world over. ther is no negative and i personally would start back crafting. insted of simply stanidng in a doms opp party and saling abyssea gear to npcs for gil.

dont reinvent the wheel. jsut make it spin better

[xbobx]

"SE should completely scrap the old system "

so basically we should tell all those people that spent ungodly amounts of time and gil to raise their crafts to baically screw off? SE already slapped every crafter in the face by adding synergy. Synergy was implemented as a way to augment equipment, but it was failing, hardly anyone did it.

So Se did what they did best, let their ego get in the way, they implement something that fails, they try and force people to take part. They added consumable, you want high level ammo, you must do synergy, you want this and that, you must to synergy. But what about all those other crafts I leveled. "What crafts, I know not what you are talking about".

They have done this numerous times, they fail at an event or addition to the game, they throw soemthing in that event to force people to do it. WoE is another example, why do you think they added coins there? Because WoE was seeing zero participation, they added coins all of a sudden alot of people did it. They still hated WoE, they knew it sucks, but if they wanted to upgrade weapon they had no choice.

to the person that said give one reason why synergy is bad. Well that is great that you can create a stack of ammo in one sync without breaking. That is great, but that ability to create that ammo should have never been synergy only. There should be an option to craft it the old way, cant do stack of 99 unless HQ but at least you can make them. That is the problem with synergy. Se lost track of what synergy was because of , as I stated earlier, their ego.

[Jakary]

this also might encourage people to start farming synthesis materials again, instead of just abyssea farming and getting gold chest mats. i think it may be a boom the ingame economy needs(it also might decrease the value of the ending results, ex. armor/weapons/accessories)

[Syntex]

This is a good idea but the problem is that crafting is DEAD.

The economy and the way items are handled are dead.

Because this game doesn't make items soulbound or bind to your character where they are unsellable(on the AH) once equipped that means anything crafted will be flooded and the market will be hard if not impossible to make a profit on. A few years ago Scorpion Harness was a good example, a loss on mats unless you HQ it. Dusk Gloves is one of the few items in that same trend and one of the few items people still need because out of all the items in the game several classes can't get 4% haste on their hands.

That brings me to my 2nd point which is why crafting is dead. Crafting became less and less important as soon as items in the game became more and more powerful without the use of crafting in any way. My monk can get fully geared without a SINGLE crafted item,...

Magian Weapon/Tantra Tathlum
Tantra Helm/Sea torqe/Brutal Earring/Kemas Earring
Tantra Body/Tantra Hands/Raja's Ring/Eponas Ring
Atheling Mantle/Black Belt/Tantra Legs/Tantra feet

Where is any crafted pieces in that set? There isn't a single one and yet thats common for 98% of the best end gear and all the gear leading up to it for most jobs. 4-5 years ago when any one server had only a dozen or so crafters at 100 at most and a lot of items were needed at all level brackets crafting was perfect but now when a lot more people are 100 the items that are craftable for a profit are so oversaturated in the market its not worth it unless its food or shihei.

If your going to allow us a 2nd profession to the 100 cap then you need to look at the profession at a whole and make it useful again. Make magian trials requiring crafted items and maybe HQ crafted items from all professions. You did a good job with magian trials and having people kill NM's that no one ever cared about and using abyssea and Wings of the Goddess we got to spend time in zones that very few people spent more then a few minutes in other then to travel through which was nice because I liked those zones. The one thing you should do is find a use for the 200+ recipes for each profession that NO ONE EVER MAKES because no one will ever buy them, do that and we will see a step in the right direction to revitalize crafting.

Raising the cap without attempting to fix crafting or making crafting useful in any way is adding new NM's that don't drop gear, after a few kills no one will care about them, which is where crafting is, no one cares.

[Bigtop]

I'm a craftaholic and I think this is a great idea.
This is me, I mean just look at my signature I have other crafts (mules) leveled but didn't list only because they are level 60 and not worth bothering to mention

[Daniel_Hatcher]

9. Allow me to buy more than 1 etching item at a time, i always have capped cinder, there is no other use for it so either let me npc out it and recover gil, or allow me to trade it for fewell or some other items.


100% Yes, would be great to trade Cinder for Fewell.

[Berem]

This will solve nothing. There is never enough materials to craft hardly, let alone to even allow people to skill up 40 more skill on another craft (along with everyone else).

[Celerin]

With synergy coming up into the 90s it would probably be a good idea to start raising caps on the other skills. I'm usually working my own furnace and having those skills to do the stuff on my own would be a huge plus.

[Kuwabaraone]

Hmm. I'm not much of a crafter myself, but I do see the benefit of this: If anything, it doesn't mean I have to be locked into a single Craft. I also have three additional characters that are considered 'Storage Specialists' and 'Craftsmen' so I can see the benefit of this. I wonder how my good friend and mentor, Sika, would respond to this...I'll have to ask her in person.

KB1

[cidbahamut]

The crafting situation needs to be steered away from synergy.

2 cents, I'm out.

[Cljader1]

The crafting situation needs to be steered away from synergy.

2 cents, I'm out.


I completely disagree, there's plenty of us who loves synergy and I'm one of them. Synergy is the best thing too happen to crafting in a very long time, you offer a baseless opinion with no substance. Synergy should always be the spearhead for top tier gear, Synergy and old-school crafting need a dramatic boost in the POWER of eqiupment and gear we can make. SE stop embarrassing us synergist/crafters with all this rare/ex nm gear, magian gear should NOT be better than the gear a specialized synergist of group of synergist can make. Sometime I'm even embarrassed to put on my Goldsmithing Smock, SE give us POWERFUL equipment/gear to make, people WANT to make and wear their own top tier gear.

[Caria]

Crafting has taken a turn for the worse in the recent updates, since the introduction of synergy and the new ToM armors. I am not one who believes that synergy is an awful idea, but I believe it has been given too much priority over the traditional crafts. While I look forward to being able to level a second craft on my main to avoid muling materials continually to craft on a mule, I don't feel that this will dramatically change much in the current economy.

The potential solution I see is as follows:

1) Synergy and traditional crafts should not make the same things. There should be objects in the game that are both necessary and in demand which are exclusive to each craft.

2) There need to be craftable armor sets that are potent alternatives to Empyrean gear. This should include both the upgraded gear as promised, but also crafted only gear. Most of this gear should not be meant to compete with the Empyrean Armor options, but made to augment it. Make these pieces useful in other situations. (e.g. As a drg, at level 75 I had a combination of HNM, Relic, Artifact, Sky, and crafted gear. I would be consistently switching between them for different actions, and all were important parts. Crafted gear (dusk, hydra, etc) would provide me haste and dmg reduction, as well as some attribute bonuses. Relic and artifact would provide boosts to job abilities, like high jump, healing breaths, and ancient ward. HNM and sky gear would generally provide large boosts for weaponskill performance.) I also strongly encourage the need for 3+ level 90+ craftsman to work together to make the promised synergy upgrades. In addition, there were some gear slots (i.e. rings, back) which were almost exclusively filled by crafted gear, because at 75 cap, the best armor for these slots was always crafted. The strongest elemental rings, the strongest accuracy rings, etc were all available just from crafting. This is no longer the case, and I urge SE to re-implement a couple of slots in which the best possible option is from crafted gear.

3) Upgrades made by through the Trials of the Magians should -all- require some synthesized material that is unavailable from farming or gold chests. In the past, every powerful upgrade to armor required a synthesized component, whether it was uncursing gear with abjurations from sky or upgrading Artifact and Relic gear. A high-level craftsman was always involved. This was, in many ways, the driving force behind the economy, in addition to the expendables (bst pets, medicines, and ammunition).

4) I urge that the new synergy upgrade require items in their recipes which will only be obtainable through the traditional crafts.


I believe that using all 4 of these suggestions, we could bring a good balance back to the game, reintegrating crafts and providing a unique need for synergy and the original crafts. This would breath life back into the economy and bring new levels of cooperation between crafting and the rest of the game.

I am very hopeful that we can reanimate the diminished art of crafting and hope to see some or all of these suggestions taken into practice.

[Siviard]

I fully support this idea!

Though I think what will REALLY get things going is if SE introduced new low and mid level armors that are stronger than the current low and mid level options.

[Ruujin]

I do think the changes outlined will breathe some new life into crafting for the purposes of synergy sometimes it difficult to find skilled craftsman at certain times of the day. So I am certainly looking forward to crafting the materials needed to put together relic weapons since dynamis changes are being planned. My only issue with crafting that i would like to see addressed is the effectiveness of Hallowed Water on doomed characters. It certainly seems to be a waste to aquire key items, farm synth mats and produce a higher quality holy water that has the same chance of removing doom as regular holy water.

[Wojo]

Awesome, yes please do this. I would love to have a subcraft 75 Alchemy so i can make my own animas. I know that seems lame but this is just an example.

[Exion]

As a lot of people have said synergy has completely killed the other crafts. Yes you need other crafts to do some synergy recipes but there is no point in leveling up a new craft to 100 because no new recipes are being made for these crafts. If you are doing synergy and you needed a cloth crafter, all you have to do is simply shout to ask someone with x skill of cloth craft to sit in your party for 5 minutes and your done.

Whats the point to leveling a new craft to 100?
Solution: Make gear that people would actually use craftable. Back in the day people would use Hauby+1/Dusk gloves+1(they still have their use on some jobs)/etc. But overall almost everything is outdated.

[Godofgods]

almsot 4 years of crafting.. and i am THAT close to finishing leveling all the main crafts... and now this. God forbid i releaxed for a moment and enjoyed my work.

That being said, allowing 40 more levels wont fix the problems related to crafting. And i feel those problems should be adressed BEFORE considering altering the cap.

Bottem line is crafting is almsot worthless these days. (/cry) Other then a few consumables, theirs nothing that ppl need form crafting. THeir for crafting doesnt realy get done. And the very few items left that are needed, have all the crafters competing for which are making them inch closer to not being worth it.
And half of what remained, synergy stole away form it. (worse implacation ever. Id rather have mobs not de-spawn again and kill everyone on the way back to their spawn point, then deal with synergy) Synergy also shouldnt be able to make the same items as normal crafts. You dont see woodworkers able to make adaman ingots do you?

Then theirs the current market. Meterials are very hard to come by anymore. The AH is usaly always empty, and what meterials do remain are sky rocketed to hell in price because supply is so low. Added 40 more skill points is only going to worsen that. If farming isnt worht it anymroe to get mets, then a new way needs to be looked at. Even if its NPC buyable. And not those 10k a log crap >< BUt with no supply, 40 more points to work with, nothing selling, and npcing a complete loss.. its jsut asking for trouble

If it is implamented, you might want to also consider offering ppl a transfere of crafting points from mules. Many ppl spent the exrta time and money to lvling crafting mules. To now say some of them arnt needed, but their stuck with it, is kinda insulting. Should give an option of moving one skill per account, from one char to another for those affected.

and dont fooget how messed up the Guild Point system is. Hard enough getting items for one craft.. idea of needing two will suxxx

And if your going to add 40 more lvls, u had better increase the crystal supply!

[Alukat]

40 more level would be neat.
and i agree that there should be new top gear which has to be crafted or at least that a crafted item is a part of it (crafted item + abjuration system as example).
I was a hardcore crafter, but now all good stuff is r/e so don't really need to craft anymore, so pls less r/e items and more non-r/e top gear pls.

[Darkovercast]

I'm for the change, with the late stage of the game, a lot of people seem to wish to enhance there character even more. Not just with crafting skills, but I mean merits as well. Not only do I think that we should be able to have more crafting skills, but the ablity, to say put more merits in HP/MP, Stats, Weapons, Job's, etc.

[SNK]

I'm fine with raising the cap but Synergy is terrible the way it is.

[GlobalVariable]

2 Crafts at 100? won't make a significant difference. Absolutely do not allow a craft to exceed 100, but I don't see multiple 100's causing any problems - people already have mules for other crafts anyway. Crafting simply isn't worthwhile unless you HQ which is what started the whole spam your way to cap method of skill up in the 1st place. I noted the most recent batch of gear that is crafted has a wider gap (better stats) than usual between NQ and HQ results. And desynthing NQ's back into materials breaks to much to be worth trying, even with mogancement. What are we supposed to do with the glut of unwanted gear? FoV augments are not an answer to that, to random.

Material availability has been a problem lately. We need reasons to craft without HQ being an absolute necessity, with the materials to do so acquirable within a reasonable timeframe. If none are on the AH it should not take me half a month to get a mining point to cough one up. And I have pretty much zero competition when I mine. I've tried all zones that even have the item I need as a mining result.


I was pretty fond of the way abjuration crafts went, even the NQs were worth while for most players.

[Sovereign]

I'd say this is a spectacular idea. Ignoring the vast enhancement it would bring to Synergy, this change would open up a huge amount of possibilities for crafters.

a question though would be concerning guild points, and whether or not you could be part of two guilds simultaneously. I'd hate to swap guilds and lose all of my hard earned GP just so I could get the other guild items (like aprons, furniture, etc). Would there be a way to tie the two together? Maybe through high level Synergy and dual 100 crafts, you could merge your GP items... so like a Smock that had both Goldsmithing and Smithing skill +1, or the same for the shades.

Either way, it'll definitely make things easier for every crafter. I cannot see any downsides to this except for some economy fluctuations, but with most staple materials made easily available as random drops in abyssea, I'd imagine most of that will settle itself out quickly.

[Ecoop]

I believe that raising the ability of crafts is an idea that needs to be thought about more. The main question that should be asked is, Why raise the cap? With so many items that are useless in the game now, what would be the purpose of raising a craft other then one that uses disposable items such as alchemy, woodworking, or cooking. If we are going to have a synergy system then all items used in synergy should need to be crafted to give meaning to what the old crafts are.

Do away with breaks and losing all items. Its bad enough the items are hard to find let alone losing them to a break.

[Cowardlybabooon]

Throw in some awesome items that require 100 skill in 2 crafts to HQ. So we can have something to spend our gil on other than food, holy water and echo drops.

[RAIST]

With over 800 crafting levels under my belt, I think I'm qualified to give an honest opinion on the subject.

I personally don't think raising the crafting caps will make much difference at all. As one or two people mentioned, there will probably be increased demand for some items temporarily for capped crafters to reach their new crafts. This would annoy me, but I assume the effect won't be that bad and won't be too long term. (Crystals on the other hand may get completely out of hand. More on this below.) Also some items will be able to reach new HQ tiers, but there are currently only a handful of these and none that are currently worthwhile.

The change has a whiff of populism and desperation to me while failing to fix the true problems as I see them. Here are changes I'd much prefer to see:

1. Get rid of material losses for synths where I'm above the cap. These are just incredibly frustrating. I think this is why breaks were (thankfully) completely removed from Synergy. (I understand that part of the game is luck, but bad luck is a lot more frustrating than a lack of good luck.)
2. Give HQ results for more crafts. What I mean by this is that there are a lot of low level crafts like Sheep Leather or Cotton Cloths where you get HQ animations, but don't get any extra materials. These always seemed like a slap to the face especially when followed by a critical break of a synth where I'm 100+ over the cap. I think adding some extra HQs might give high level crafters an incentive to keep the materials on the AH stocked. Conversely, it could hurt the profits on NQ synths so it may not be win/win all around.
3. Show me the crystals! The other day I sat down with a nice cup of tea to do some synthing, but I found out there wasn't a single earth crystal available on an auction house anywhere on my server so I was out of luck. Crystal prices today are even higher than they were in the midst of the great inflation period. This change would only put more pressure on the already minuscule supply.
4. Show me the synths! I can't think of a single worthwhile non-Synergy synthesis that has been added since Abyssea was released.
5. Fix synergy. I love the concept of synergy-- team up to accomplish greater synths. The problem is that the menu-based design is miserable, and also seems to be unfair. Since the system is server based instead of client based, I've heard that some people can thwack four or five times before an overload, but I've never been able to get off more than two or three. That's unfair, and incredibly frustrating! The proposed change seems to be an admission of the failure of utilizing teamwork for synthesis by making everything soloable. I'd much rather the design be fixed than completely giving up on the teamwork aspect.

In summary, I am intrigued by this change and agree that it could bring some benefits, but I hope you will consider some of my suggestions instead. Thanks for your time.

I think this lays it out best. I do have one concern though about haveing two crafts at 100. It might get a little funky with a lot of people running round with two skills capped. You only really need those higher skills on secondary craft for Synergy, and with two at 100 it might offset synergy a bit too much. I don't think it will have as great an impact on normal crafting though, it may lead to a bit of a flood on consumables though (or maybe a shortage, depending on what crafts people choose to raise and whether they sell their goods or not). On the other hand, it does open up the potential for more synergy recipes relying on more high-level crafts. No matter how you do it, it is likely to be the proverbial double-edged sword.

Might be better if you could make it so there is an 80 cap on second skills to start with, then lift that later if everything seems stable. That way we don't have a rush of people going straight to 2 x 100.

[Cljader1]

I think this lays it out best. I do have one concern though about haveing two crafts at 100. It might get a little funky with a lot of people running round with two skills capped. You only really need those higher skills on secondary craft for Synergy, and with two at 100 it might offset synergy a bit too much. I don't think it will have as great an impact on normal crafting though, it may lead to a bit of a flood on consumables though (or maybe a shortage, depending on what crafts people choose to raise and whether they sell their goods or not). On the other hand, it does open up the potential for more synergy recipes relying on more high-level crafts. No matter how you do it, it is likely to be the proverbial double-edged sword.

Might be better if you could make it so there is an 80 cap on second skills to start with, then lift that later if everything seems stable. That way we don't have a rush of people going straight to 2 x 100.


The market is already not stable and been that way for a long time, big gil deosn't flow out of peoples hands anymore, and there wont be a whole bunch of people running around with dual 100 lvl crafts. There's only a handful of lvl 100 goldsmiths on bismark, and the hardcore crafters like myself already have multiple mules with 100 lvl crafting skills. This would be a start of sometime good if SE introduce new Top Tier Equipment that takes synergy plus two lvl 100 crafting skill too create.

[Camate]

Lots of awesome feedback so far! Thanks and keep it coming!

[Cljader1]

By the way SE give us a crafting rank for reaching lvl 100 in our respected crafts, it seems so disrespectful too be still called a veteran when u reach 100, I think when you reach 100 your new rank should be "Master." Ex: Master Goldsmith, Master Carpenter, Master Blacksmith etc. Furthermore by added the specialized rank that dictate if you'll truely a lvl 100 crafter you can further make synergy recipes that require a Master or Masters of multiple crafting disciplines to make certain item. For example a synergy recipe could require a Master Goldsmith & Master Carpenter to make a new vest, the point is that the recipe would require a true lvl 100 crafter to complete the synthesis and by giving us the rank of Master the requirements can be accurately portrayed to the crafters.

[Olor]

Something which I believe will compliment this update would be increasing skill up rates. Maybe not a constant increase, but rather, for example, a timed enhancment, obtainable every 24 earth hours, which lasts for, say, 30 earth minutes that will give you at least a guaranteed 0.1 skill up for every synthesis. That's purely a quick example. There would have to be some sort of increase in skill up rates to give non-crafters the incentive to take up crafting (and to give crafters incentive to level a second craft to 100), especially if you [SE] plan on increasing the extra skill levels above 80.



This! With fewer lower leveled character to buy gear made while skilling up - crafting is more expensive and difficult to level than ever. Increase the skill up rates so that people don't have so spend so much money to raise their crafting skills.

[JovialRat]

i like this idea, having two 100 crafts would be nice,
this could be the shot in the arm crafting needs.

[annewandering]

I would like to have a second craft to 100. I would really like having more than two to 100. It is very frustrating to level a mule to 100 then have to relevel related crafts to 60 again and again and again. What would be very nice is to have interaction between mules and mains. I have no idea how it could be done but if we could access our mules levels it would be wonderful.
A selfish reward for us crafters would be to have some crafted gears be usable only by us. These would be something very difficult and very useful for all jobs. Say a Universal Kraken that is strictly only useable by the person crafting it. It would have stiff requirements such as max levels in all possible crafts, not including fishing or cooking. Kraken is only as example but hopefully you see what I mean. Nothing like a little incentive to get us excited about leveling our skills up!
Please allow us to also use multiple guilds. At least two. I would like to not lose gp from guilds when changing but if we could have at least two guilds that wouldnt be as important.
Cooking should be exempted same as fishing is. It is completely useless as a subcraft to any other craft. If you do cooking you are forever limited in your crafting abilities.
Finally it is all pointless if we arent given more crafts to do that are worthwhile. How about a higher level shehie? It would be say level 103 Woodworking and would require a level 60 alchemy to make. (No higher than 60 because Alchemy is useless to Woodworking other than for this one item.) The item would carry say 6 shadows instead of the usual 3 or 4.

[xbobx]

I hope people don't actually believe having two 100 crafts will somehow revitalize crafting. It will do nothing at all, they are doing it to boost synergy. Crafting is still dead, will continue to be dead. Se is only using it to boost something else. If they do only this, then they will have failed. If they take every consumable that is synergy only and make it craftable also, then there is a chance. My guess is they won't.

Cant wait 100k stacks of ram leather though.

[annewandering]

hey xbobx even if it made farming uber nice it would be great! :D

[Windblade]

I like the idea of having all crafts to level 100, myself, but what would make me even happier is stopping the curse of item loss when crafting items I've already leveled to. I can remember wanting a Halcyon Fishing Rod. There was one for sale on the auction house, but I had materials to make one on my mules. So I muled to two characters and got just enough materials to make a Halcyon Rod. I was way over the level for the rod, but it broke! I had to mule again to get replacement materials. I restocked my stuff, again having just enough to craft it, thinking surely I wouldn't get two breaks in a row, but I got a SECOND break and lost even more materials. This time I didn't have enough materials to replace what I'd lost and I ended up buying the darned thing off the auction house! I was so mad my eyes wanted to roll back 180 degrees and expose the nerve connections. It's so senseless. A similar thing happened just a few weeks ago, except it was just one break. I still had to mule more materials, but the second attempt succeeded. Again, I was well over the cap.

Most of the time I send more than enough materials just in case something breaks, and much of the time nothing breaks and I end up muling it all back anyway. So whether I prepare for possible failures or not, multiple mulings to make one item seems to be the biggest annoyance of all in crafting.

Removing breaks for items you've capped just seems like the most sensible thing to do. That I can break a Level 1 cooking recipe with Lv.91 cooking says that I'm able to make fantastic Lobster Thermidor, but I still mess up a pot of boiled water.

As for the problem of procuring items needed for crafting, I recommend another Guild Point Item, maybe make it a key item, or something you could equip, like an earring. It would increase the drop rate for all items needed in that craft. So in Alchemy, you'd be guaranteed at least one, maybe two beehive chips for every kill, in addition to what would have normally dropped without the equipped item.

Honestly, if I need beehive chips, I get them from low-level bees, popping them off one at a time with a crossbow bolt. It's pretty fast, but since I don't like killing mobs where others are trying to level, I often run to unoccupied areas to farm. If higher level monsters would drop higher quantities of items, it might be worthwhile to farm them. But I don't want to go kill bees in the Temple of Uggalepih when they don't drop any more than the bees in Giddeus. If higher-level bees dropped plain old beehives (working like a lighting cluster: break the beehive and get 12 beehive chips), and the drop rate was comparable to one-hitting low-level bees, I'd be more inclined to farm them. The bees in the Crawler's Nest seem like good candidates for dropping beehives.

Windblade on Odin

[Dinh]

i like this idea, having two 100 crafts would be nice,
this could be the shot in the arm crafting needs.

And new recipes utilizing both higher tiers of crafting outside of synergy would be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Band-Aid.

[Seriha]

As long as this doesn't turn into synths needing 100 in two crafts, I don't really care. I'm still bitter about the dismal state of alchemy.

[GlobalVariable]

Yeah being required to level 2 crafts in order to make anything worthwhile would force every lv100 crafter into a 2nd instead of making it optional which would cause some serious RAGE, and quite a few would just quit instead of beginning that grind again.

We do currently have some rare HQ's that might be less rare (I'd have to go look at the caps for specific synths to be sure) after what was a subskill is 100 instead of 60, but that won't be as bad as new recipes being higher in a 2nd craft. Needing 100 something and 93 something else to even try would just be a huge slap in teh face to everyone who has only 1 level 100 craft.

[Zumi]

I would do it 2 level 100 crafts would be interesting. Maybe add some level 91-99 items that take 2 level 100 crafts to make too.

[Lexin]

I really don't know what to say other then why craft when in the games current state it's useless. When I login last thing on my mind is trying to grind out the last 27 levels of woodworking.

Now if you were to add new synths to them then yes this would be a great idea. But my guess is there is no intention of adding anything new unless it's synergy correct? Trial of the Magian also does no good when it comes to crafting armor and weapons.

[Yarly]

Skillup rate increase would heavily devalue crafting. If anything, skillup rates should stay the same, or lower after getting one craft at 100 on a character.

[RushLynx]

I would like the development team to take a good close look at the multiple threads here outlining your crafting community's utter disgust with the effects that the Synergy system has had on all of us...
Being able to level another craft to 100 will do nothing to restore the vitality of the crafting community... what needs to be done is to be able to push a craft PAST 100... Please, for all our sakes, stop giving synergy everything. I, like so many others have expressed whole-heartedly in these forums, find synergy to be monotonous and completely defeating of the "fun" associated with crafting... It's laggy and stressful and we have no desire whatsoever to level it; but alas, it seems ever more apparent that you, the development team, wish to force us all to level it in order to get anything out of our years and tireless efforts toward leveling our crafts to veteran.
From a personal standpoint I have lost many good friends in this game over the past couple of years due to the mismanagement of game balance, especially the addition of synergy. A great many of us do not like synergy, we don't find it fun at all, in fact, quite the contrary... I can't think of anything I'd rather do less than sit in front of a furnace feeding fewell endlessly for skill ups to use a craft I have already leveled.
Take a close look at your servers. Please note that there are a very small handful of synergists on each server making obscene amounts of gil selling synergy items that they have monopolized. This is not because synergy is difficult to level, or even because many people have not figured out how synergy works. It's because we detest it SO much that even the vast quantities of gil associated with it will not drive us to leveling it.

I have all but deleted my character due to my disappointments with the latest developments in FFXI... I've played for many, many years... I've noticed a large decline in player's interest lately due to unbalanced gameplay, lost many good friends in game that have become fed up with it all. Do not let this trend continue; please, tread lightly when making these decisions... Perhaps before increasing the skill allotments for crafts you should, first, address the catastrophe that has befallen said crafts... For all our sakes, please bring the fun back to your crafting system... Not just keep pushing us towards synergy... Ultimately, what you'll be doing is pushing us to ending our subscriptions.

[RushLynx]

Oh... And additionally, with regard to synergy...

The idea of synergy was very exciting to most crafters when it was first announced... Being able to craft things as a team effort really does sound neat... But the current Synergy system is incredibly undesirable, which is what has caused the dramatic unrest amongst crafters. Nobody wants to navigate frantically through a large series of laggy menus under the pressure caused by time-based events trying to make something. Often times lots of time is lost waiting for the lag, or the wrong option is selected accidentally, etc. It's very very frustrating and entirely unnecessary.
My suggestion is that synergy should be completely re-examined and overhauled... it should not be something that you must "level" like another craft, and if skill must be developed in it I would suggest another means of progression through the skill levels than traditional skill up. Crafters have progressed through the crafting levels because they enjoy the crafting system, they have no desire to grind their way through a totally foreign system... It's kind of insulting; they've learned their trade, why should they have to learn an entirely different one just to be able to use their skills?

When I first read about synergy it was my impression that everyone would have something to do in the synthesis operation... I was rather disappointed to discover that only one person controlled the furnace while the others merely needed to be in the party... Likewise, I suspected that such operations would take place somewhere... unique... like a laboratory, or a large magical contraption somewhere deep within the Horutoto Ruins or something, where everyone would need to stand somewhere and channel their skills into the final result... Instead we got furnaces... and menus... lots and lots of menus... Oh and worthless rewards, which brings me to my final point...

I understand the need for a reward for the rest of the party members that contributed to the sythesis, but the "ponzes" yielded from synergy really aren't worth much currently in the game... I suppose that could change, but the whole etching aspect of synergy is incredibly limited currently. I'm beginning to get the feeling that Synergy is potentially supposed to be a stand-alone craft, where one player might have Synergy and they simply need players of the other crafts... I feel that Synergy should be an inherent skill. While it might require practice a proper party should be able to do it without the need for a certain skill level in Synergy. But back to the rewards issue: Thus far, I have discovered maybe 3 potentially useful evoliths in the game... All of them are incredibly difficult to obtain and require time and usually others to assist in their acquisition. I would assume that any additional evoliths added are going to be just as hard if not harder to obtain, and getting anyone interested in evolith with all of the Abyssea equipment floating around is near impossible... So just what is the point of all of it? And what's in it for the other crafters that help in the synergy operations? I think the rewards need to be enhanced... Etching is another neat idea that just doesn't seem to go anywhere with its current restrictions... it all just seems very... unorganized.

Thanks if you read all this! :3

[Maquis]

With over 800 crafting levels under my belt, I think I'm qualified to give an honest opinion on the subject.

1. Get rid of material losses for synths where I'm above the cap. These are just incredibly frustrating. I think this is why breaks were (thankfully) completely removed from Synergy. (I understand that part of the game is luck, but bad luck is a lot more frustrating than a lack of good luck.)
2. Give HQ results for more crafts. What I mean by this is that there are a lot of low level crafts like Sheep Leather or Cotton Cloths where you get HQ animations, but don't get any extra materials. These always seemed like a slap to the face especially when followed by a critical break of a synth where I'm 100+ over the cap. I think adding some extra HQs might give high level crafters an incentive to keep the materials on the AH stocked. Conversely, it could hurt the profits on NQ synths so it may not be win/win all around.
3. Show me the crystals! The other day I sat down with a nice cup of tea to do some synthing, but I found out there wasn't a single earth crystal available on an auction house anywhere on my server so I was out of luck. Crystal prices today are even higher than they were in the midst of the great inflation period. This change would only put more pressure on the already minuscule supply.
4. Show me the synths! I can't think of a single worthwhile non-Synergy synthesis that has been added since Abyssea was released.

With over 160 crafting levels under my belt, I might be a good candidate to give "retired crafting before reaching 100" feedback on this.

1. If I was sure that all my crafting yielded at least NQ, I might be enticed to give it a try again.
2. On another note for this comment, I would like all items used in crafting to be stackable. Together with added HQ to current low level crafts that do not have them, the stocking issues might get resolved.
3. Some time ago, I suggested hybrid weather conditions. Having one weather element flowover to another. I would really like to see weather effects to be populated more frequently and for longer periods. Perhaps Crystals Stacks or Cores can have a "Mog Crystal Pouch" like the Satchel and Sack and can only carry crystals. This might cause people to not toss crystals they obtain and put them on the AH when they get stacks complete. It also helps crafters to keep their inventory managable. Next to this, would like Crystals to get excluded from your 7 limit on the AH and lower the cost to put them on the AH.
4. Very true, there needs to be a clear line for what is done with Synergy and what is done with solo crafting.

[Cljader1]

I would like the development team to take a good close look at the multiple threads here outlining your crafting community's utter disgust with the effects that the Synergy system has had on all of us...
Being able to level another craft to 100 will do nothing to restore the vitality of the crafting community... what needs to be done is to be able to push a craft PAST 100... Please, for all our sakes, stop giving synergy everything. I, like so many others have expressed whole-heartedly in these forums, find synergy to be monotonous and completely defeating of the "fun" associated with crafting... It's laggy and stressful and we have no desire whatsoever to level it; but alas, it seems ever more apparent that you, the development team, wish to force us all to level it in order to get anything out of our years and tireless efforts toward leveling our crafts to veteran.
From a personal standpoint I have lost many good friends in this game over the past couple of years due to the mismanagement of game balance, especially the addition of synergy. A great many of us do not like synergy, we don't find it fun at all, in fact, quite the contrary... I can't think of anything I'd rather do less than sit in front of a furnace feeding fewell endlessly for skill ups to use a craft I have already leveled.
Take a close look at your servers. Please note that there are a very small handful of synergists on each server making obscene amounts of gil selling synergy items that they have monopolized. This is not because synergy is difficult to level, or even because many people have not figured out how synergy works. It's because we detest it SO much that even the vast quantities of gil associated with it will not drive us to leveling it.

I have all but deleted my character due to my disappointments with the latest developments in FFXI... I've played for many, many years... I've noticed a large decline in player's interest lately due to unbalanced gameplay, lost many good friends in game that have become fed up with it all. Do not let this trend continue; please, tread lightly when making these decisions... Perhaps before increasing the skill allotments for crafts you should, first, address the catastrophe that has befallen said crafts... For all our sakes, please bring the fun back to your crafting system... Not just keep pushing us towards synergy... Ultimately, what you'll be doing is pushing us to ending our subscriptions.


Please speak for yourself, alot of us loves synergy and took the time too master it and understand it, plus it is a much better system than old school crafting which took no skill and no talent to make items, not to mention tons of gil to skill it. I have exactly 1200 crafting skill pionts with those being 3 lvl 100 characters with all subs capped at 60 with also 160 synergy skill pionts, I been crafting for nearly 9 years and needed a better system to allow crafters greater control over making and HQing items, and synergy was perfect. If you don't understand, that is your problem it not even remotely as hard to skill up as traditional crafting. I'm tired of newbie crafters crying about synergy, most of us synergist are hardcore crafters and this system is made ESPECIALLY for us

SE I would encourage you too please keep enhancing synergy it still need too be giving greater power in the equipment and items in can make. Currently the best gear is acquired 1st by rare/ex nm drop, 2nd magain trials and 3rd synergy/crafting. We should not be 3rd in line for producing gear we should be a direct alternative to rare/ex nm drops. The Goldsmithing earring and ring line up is especially embarrassing, there are countless numbers of earrings and rings out there that beats our best line up please fix this. Moreover, please keep enhancing and empowering synergy because us most dedicated and hardcore crafters really love and appreciate the system, for it is us who have the ability and talent to produce the most difficult of synthesis.

[RushLynx]

Can you not notice that you're the small majority that is so happy with this system? I'm happy for you, I really am, but I think it's important that SE hears the rest of us who the system is killing the game for... It's really easy for you, who have had great success with Synergy, to say "oh, yes! please, continue to give me everything." While the rest of us are being suffocated by this system's poor design.

[Cljader1]

Can you not notice that you're the small majority that is so happy with this system? I'm happy for you, I really am, but I think it's important that SE hears the rest of us who the system is killing the game for... It's really easy for you, who have had great success with Synergy, to say "oh, yes! please, continue to give me everything." While the rest of us are being suffocated by this system's poor design.

How is it so difficult? Its easy to level, you only need fewell which is dirt cheap if you have a alchemy sub. The recipe elements is not even a mystery, your given the elemental recipe all you have to do is match it up. God how hard is that it cant be any simplier.

[GlobalVariable]

While I hate the laggy menu the things I really like about synergy is the fact I don't lose materials when I fail and the small measure of control I have vs regular crafts random "oops you lose!" crystal explosion. I can be 40 levels above a recipe and just randomly lose everything for no reason. That is a huge deterrent that doesn't happen in synergy. Taking regular crafts past 100 does not help anything. Say the cap is moved to 150. You grind away to reach 150 and then you get all the exact same problems we had at 100 and you'll be suggesting a new cap of 200. I want regular crafting revitalized but a higher cap isn't going to accomplish that. Once its taken care of maybe in the future it can go up, but no point increasing the cap on a broken system.

[annewandering]

I would not like to see the overall cap increased. I dont see much purpose to that. However it would be great if we had some synths that were usable besides consumables.
Everytime we get one a new r/e shows up that kills it. The Thallisocrat is a very good example. It was a great money maker yet it wasnt long before it became useless because a r/e showed up that didnt need to be crafted.
It would be so fun, for me, to have the possibility of all my gear signed by me and be sought after items. Now it only happens when leveling low level jobs. Not exactly what I had in mind at all.
The biggest problem in crafting is not synthing. Its synergy. The idea of people working together was great and intriquing but it has been too clumsy and quirky to carry out the promise. As others have said the menu is laggy. The principles are not difficult to get but the speed to do it with the laggy menu is difficult.
In my opinion, not speaking for others at all, more work needs to be done on the mechanics of synergy before dealing with other possibilities. My friends do synergy but as one said this morning when I asked if they liked it they said "Does anyone like it?" Its like cleaning out the toilet. It needs to be done but few enjoy it much. This is a game. How about if it becomes more enjoyable?

[Godofgods]

I like the idea of having all crafts to level 100, myself, but what would make me even happier is stopping the curse of item loss when crafting items I've already leveled to. I can remember wanting a Halcyon Fishing Rod. There was one for sale on the auction house, but I had materials to make one on my mules. So I muled to two characters and got just enough materials to make a Halcyon Rod. I was way over the level for the rod, but it broke! I had to mule again to get replacement materials. I restocked my stuff, again having just enough to craft it, thinking surely I wouldn't get two breaks in a row, but I got a SECOND break and lost even more materials. This time I didn't have enough materials to replace what I'd lost and I ended up buying the darned thing off the auction house! I was so mad my eyes wanted to roll back 180 degrees and expose the nerve connections. It's so senseless. A similar thing happened just a few weeks ago, except it was just one break. I still had to mule more materials, but the second attempt succeeded. Again, I was well over the cap.

Most of the time I send more than enough materials just in case something breaks, and much of the time nothing breaks and I end up muling it all back anyway. So whether I prepare for possible failures or not, multiple mulings to make one item seems to be the biggest annoyance of all in crafting.

Removing breaks for items you've capped just seems like the most sensible thing to do. That I can break a Level 1 cooking recipe with Lv.91 cooking says that I'm able to make fantastic Lobster Thermidor, but I still mess up a pot of boiled water.

As for the problem of procuring items needed for crafting, I recommend another Guild Point Item, maybe make it a key item, or something you could equip, like an earring. It would increase the drop rate for all items needed in that craft. So in Alchemy, you'd be guaranteed at least one, maybe two beehive chips for every kill, in addition to what would have normally dropped without the equipped item.

Honestly, if I need beehive chips, I get them from low-level bees, popping them off one at a time with a crossbow bolt. It's pretty fast, but since I don't like killing mobs where others are trying to level, I often run to unoccupied areas to farm. If higher level monsters would drop higher quantities of items, it might be worthwhile to farm them. But I don't want to go kill bees in the Temple of Uggalepih when they don't drop any more than the bees in Giddeus. If higher-level bees dropped plain old beehives (working like a lighting cluster: break the beehive and get 12 beehive chips), and the drop rate was comparable to one-hitting low-level bees, I'd be more inclined to farm them. The bees in the Crawler's Nest seem like good candidates for dropping beehives.

Windblade on Odin

I was wondering when i would see you on here WB!!

[Kluaf]

Well i skimmed through a lot of peoples opinions and seen several great points. But i cant really complain after the fact the system has changed if i dont voice my opinion now. I started this game in Dec 09 so i havent played that long jus a lil over a year. But I LOVE Crafting and i have several friends that are hardcore crafters and have been for years.

High Level Skilled Crafters having low level recipe busts...
I gotta say having busts on synths were players are 80 levels above the recipe is jus dumb. Maybe not HQin every synth i can see but breakin sheep leather ok even ram leather being 60 levels above is dumb at some point there should be an update to where the breaking is cut way way way down for people with skills thats way over the recipe level.

New Synths ...
Synergy or no synergy its in the game its not coming out and i hardly ever see anybody using the synergy pots on Phoenix. But u cant take abysea out of the game and u cant take synergy out as well. But what happened to new synths??? They really hasnt been any :( But with new level caps you introduce new higher level sub requirements for new synths at least. So insted of the 100 60 60 you can introduce a whole plethora of new synths. And needs to be new synths added.

Synergy...
Now again you cant give kids candy and let them eat it for awhile and then all of a sudden take it away and tell em they will never get it again. Basically no matter if people complain about synergy or not its part of the game. What need to be done is a further emphasis on the combining of the 2 systems. Obviously there has been some of that done but it needs to be a bigger part imo.

Farming Mats...
Idk what yall was thinking by giving hard attainable materials away in abyssea like free cheese that was previously gotten from other more challenging means. To mean that was jus dumb. But in order to save the crafting and synergy systems as they are yall need to make USABLE and NEEDED items used in combination of using both abilities!!! also yall need to make the lower level items more readily needed as well...

Neways jus my opinion LOL

[RAIST]

Synergy's biggest problem is the menus for me. Otherwise, I love the concept behind it all, just wish it worked better in practice. I was stoked to find out I could Hq my drinks. Wish I could do the same tiwh the 3 hour items too--it gets old to see lots of HQ animations on Jack-'o-lanterns.

They need to revamp the interface so you aren't constantly waiting for it to reload. IDK how the heck people do it as a group. Click add fewel, scroll down, pick your element. It remembers your last selection so you can spam it until you need to change elements, which helps a little, but there is still the lag in getting the menus up each time. Then you have an explosion and it all resets. Cast your -na spell to clear the status affliction, then it's a few seconds pause to get the @#$@#$ menu back up again. Meanwhile, the state of the furnace is ticking down. I get more time-outs on synths because of this crap.

Change Synergy's interface so it is easier to do and more people might be inclined to do it. Make it so we enter Synergy like a stance and make the synergy interface part of our main menu so we don't have to click the furnace and wait for that menu to spawn. If I could just lock-on to the furnace like a normal monster and run my synergy actions from the main menu, it would go a lot smoother.

Fewell >> element list
Action >> Operate Lever, thwack it, etc.
Trade
End Synergy

Something like that as main entries off the normal menu so we can run it just like picking spells to cast during a fight. no more laggy menus, more efficient synergizing.

[Zirael]

Hello!

In an effort to enhance future development, we would like to gather some feedback from all of the crafters in Vana’diel in regards to the below. We encourage you to discuss this with your fellow players and provide feedback on the direction we’re contemplating.

As you are aware, there is a limit for craft skills where once you reach skill level 60, you are limited to 40 more levels to distribute amongst the other eight crafts (excluding fishing). As such, the system only allows you to be able to reach 100 if you gain all 40 skill levels in one craft, or you can raise two crafts to 80 if you gain 20 levels in two different crafts.

For the future expansion of synthesis and synergy, we’re looking into raising the skill level limitation from 40 to 80 during the next version update. Once this change takes place, you will then be able to have two crafts leveled to 100.

Since this change would alter the core of the crafting system, before serious development discussions begin we would like to hear feedback from all of our hardcore crafters.

The main points of adjustments beginning from the next version update and on are listed below:



Raise the 40 skills levels that can be distributed when a skill reaches 60 to 80. (Makes possible the ability to level two skills to 100)
For the next version update “Revoking Craftsmanship Status” will remain the same as original (Bringing your skill down to 60). For future version updates we plan on making adjustments so that the system allows you to decide which craft skill you would like craftsmanship revoked.
Additionally for future adjustments we are thinking about increasing the levels further beyond 80.



This will be extremely advantageous for synergy, however, due to the fact that these changes would likely cause the number of players with skills at level 100 to increase significantly, there might be some concerns in regards to how the balance of supply and demand are affected.

After collecting your feedback for about a week, we’ll examine it closely with the development and operations teams after which we plan on working on this after the next version update. In order for us to improve the synthesis and synergy systems of FFXI please leave as much feedback as possible!
Dear SE, can I ask why do we need two lv100 crafts all of sudden? As many people said here already, first we need crafts to become relevant/useful/worthwhile again, since aside from ninja tools and few food items it's all dead. I don't think giving your 'hardcore crafters' a grindfest just for the sake of it is what crafts need right now. Will seeing additional blue 100 on the list make anyone happy, help in any way?
I'm really curious about your priority choices and reasoning in this.
Don't get me wrong, two 100 are better than one (as in: less limitations), but you could maybe utilise your work time in a better way.

[RaiseIII]

I welcome the addition of levels to Crafting.

While there will be a vocal few that oppose change, the reality of it is that this is a natural progression that should happen right along with the evolution of the gameplay.

We'll adapt and the game will progress and thanks S-E for a great game.:cool:

[RAIST]

I have actually considered taking some time to level other crafts more now. I focused on leveling everything I needed to make all my NIN tools reliably, but that is kind of useless now with the addition of universal tools--I pretty much just make tsurara and shihei now. knowing I can take some of the other past 60 and have a shot at making some previously un available items above 60 gives me more incentive to start leveling again.

Cook(91) Alch(59) Bone(25) Leather(15) Cloth(51) Gold(27) Smith(24) Wood(49)

[Shirkan]

So far most everybody that wants to promote two crafts to 100 on the same content ID either 1) give no reason for their excitement or 2) are happy because they can level a second 100 craft without the need to log to a mule.
The main reason they should be so overjoyed is that the two level 100 crafts can all share the same sub crafts.
Two level 100 crafts,sharing the same subcrafts and still nothing to make.Woo!

If you can't make gil out of your current 100 craft now,you should give up! And how do you expect to level a second craft 100 financially? and then when you finally get there you need to bring up new subs.And when your finished you must compete with people like me that have been veterans in that craft for years.
Yes you have fallen into yet another time sink trap.A waste of time,a waste of gil,no use.

And as for positive reasons for me to level a second craft on my main account,currently Bonecraft,I'd need to see new synths using my new / second 100 craft.
As Khiinroye stated in post #61-there will be many combos with two crafts 100!
So 100 Bonecrafters with 100 leathercraft will be able to make items that 100 bonecrafters with 100 Clothcraft can not!
This will cause rage.

@Bigtop-post #75.Why the hell would you want to have the choice of 2 100 crafts on the same character? you already have
"Crafts Level 100 = Alchemy, Bonecraft, Woodworking, Fishing (noted most don't consider craft),Level 96 Goldsmithing, Level 90 Smithing, and level 86 Leathercraft". Where would you begin?

SE want us to have a choice of a second 100 craft to be able to solo more Synergy synths.

Ultimately what the JP players(being the majority) want will decide the outcome of this,we need to know what their saying too.

I am an active crafter and I use what secrets crafting has left in it to make gil.Synergy is my main income,althought I hate it.

What I want and would love to see is the crafting level cap lifted to 150 and beyond.

This would give me a rush like I had leveling my main crafts and sub crafts.

It would also attract newer veterans to the race,giving them the chance to overthrow current tycoons.

Crafting rank Prosessional would be sweet.

[Sharain]

I'd like this change. I have a mule for every craft, most at 90-100, a few in 70s or 80s, that I've completely lost interest on because they can't do synergy without leveling couple dozen levels (one explosion and they're dead). And since they're on same account, I can't use them to help my main synergize either. I'd gladly skill up those crafts again if I could actually use them with synergy. So I'd be all for completely removing the restrictions. Two crafts to 100 is a good start.

[RAIST]

lol at the idea of the potential to make more gil with 2x 100 crafts being an incentive. Gil is so irrelevant if you have even 1 craft at 100. I only have one at 91 and I don't fret over gil these days.

The real incentive for me is the prospect of being able to get higher levels across more secondary crafts, opening up more possibilities not only for crafting but for Synergy as well.

[Alistrianna]

When will we be able to sign items made via synergy! I worked hard to level my Goldsmithing to 100, to sign items like manteels and rings for my friends and I. Synergy doesn't have that option at all.

[SubDragon]

I don't mind raising the restrictions on crafting to help in synergy but I would rather the cap be raised to say 120 for a craft.
Being a Clothcrafter at 100 the highest skilled item I can make is for level 70.
What I don't want is everything to be given to synergy.
Synergy itself is a Fail in my opinion. AF3+2 outshines everything in the game for the most part. I understand there is still 9 levels to go and many more adjustments planned but crafting wasn't just overlooked in the recent updates it was stepped on.
I think we need new recipes to take our crafting to say 120 that adds enough new synths for us to make gear to level 99.
If anything the one thing I agree on is getting rid of breaking synths you are 100 over. Seriously critical breaking grass cloth 2-3 times in a row? Sure grass thread is cheap but I must say Thank you for slapping us in the face.
I don't see any issues with unbalancing HQ items if a new tier of crafting were added as again AF3+2 outshines everything.
I also think we should obtain the rank "Master (insert craft)".
Currently the ONLY thing in demand on my server are consumables. Ninja tools, food, jugs, etc. Outside of that crafting is dead and 2 crafts at 100 will serve just as much purpose as 0 crafts at 100.
We need recipes and new synths for the skills we already have. Things that people actually want.
NOT great I just grinded a second craft to 100 so I can do synergy by myself.
Synergy is not nor should be the end all be all for crafting armor 75+.

[Neptuna]

I'm all for raising the overall cap to 80 levels collectively above 60. Within the last few updates SE added some new items to be purchased with Guild Points (the 50k and 15k items). Myself, as I'm sure is the case with most people who have a craft to 100, have a stockpile of Guild Points already with their current guild. I can't see myself taking another craft to 100 without going for the +1 gear and some of the other GP items (Key Items, furniture, etc) but at the same point, I don't want to toss away my current guild point stock.

Being able to switch guilds without losing points would work, but could also be cumbersome. Having to switch each morning to turn in my GP items lol would be cumbersome. At the very least, I would like to see us be able to be registered with 2 guilds at any time. If I'm going to have 2 Level 100 crafts it would only make sense I would be able to register for both of those guilds.

[Cljader1]

I really think SE should add a 2nd tier of the Aern type weapon line up, and make this line-up very powerful with the possibility of each weapon having its own unique WS. Moreover, I think these weapons should be fitted with it own very potent evolith. There alot of things can be done with synergy making its own rare/ex type gear and weapons and I would like to have that area explored alot more. Next I think SE should GREATLY improve the power of evolith stones, because alot of them are just flat out awful. SE please remove the VS. Family crap we see from a bunch of evolith stones. To make evolith valuable and more accepted among the player base and especially the crafters these stones need to have UNIVERSAL STATS.

I have an AERN Greatsword (the Galatyn), in which I worked hard to get and make, and it upsets me that I can no longer use it. I wish SE should adleast add synergy recipe to enhance the sword I already have and take it to another level or add a new recipe of a 2nd tier of these weapons all together. However I refuse to get rid of the sword for the hopes that SE will offer the option to enhance it or use the sword for a synergy recipe to create a new weapon. Hopefully SE will consider this and give more exploration into synergy making its own line of POWERFUL rare/ex weapons/armors.

[Chronofantasy]

As synergy is advancing through future updates I think the original crafting system should advance too. I looked at the synergy ingredients for 70+ before and most of the good materials need a high lvl Goldsmith, and since I took the less profitable path of taking cooking to 100+ and having alchemy at 60, I think I would like to get Goldsmith to 100 one day too if we're able to take two crafts to 100.

[Pagronith]

I'd like to add in my thoughts regarding synergy, multiple 100 crafts, and possible crafting ideas.

Synergy itself actually has a level requirement on certain crafting skills for certain recipes. While I'm set for any clothcraft-based synergy recipes, I usually have to scrounge up help for something like say smithing or cooking. I made several of my friends Bakery Platters for a Christmas gifts 2 years ago. However, I had to find a high level Cook in order to make this recipe who just stood in the same zone as I synergized the platters. I would like more options to do synergy on my own despite its group-based dynamic. Most people I know dislike synergy and thus usually just stand in the zone as I do the work.

One thing that irks me about synergy is the idea of a minimum crafting skill requirement for some recipes such as the Bakery Platters I mentioned above. I would prefer if Synergy became a bit like crafting in the sense that there was some variance in synergizable items, a range let's say. So let's say we have the Bakery Platter which is listed at the Adept level (81-90). It'd be nice if 2 things happened. The first, the level of allowance to be synergized had a grace of perhaps 5 levels below it's minimum level. Now this may sound like saying just lower the minimum requirement of each recipe by 5, but here's my second idea. For this grace levels, allow a small chance for skill-up while crafting this recipe on the craft skills that are within the grace period.

So let's say the Bakery Platter has a level 90 Cooking Skill requirement. Allow level 85-89 Cooks to be able to Synergize this recipe and when Synergy is complete, add a small chance for possible skill-up. As to whether to make the chance comparable to regular crafting, I'm still unsure about that. If that were to be the case, I think most recipes at the lower synergy levels perhaps should be lowered to allow for already existing high-level crafting recipes not to die out. Of course, that last statement is more of an opinion rather than part of my suggestion.

One thing I think could stimulate crafting is actually use crafted items as base items for higher-level crafting/synergy items. A simple example are Hydro Claws which use regular Claws as part of its recipe. Another example from Synergy this time are the various teleport earrings which use Silver Earrings as part of their making. Square-Enix keeps on adding new recipes using new base materials which push out older materials and recipes into the closet as if they never existed. How often have you used such obscure items such as Rainbow Velvet (a crafted material) or Tokyuu Tama-Hagane (an Oztroja NM drop)? You want to stimulate items, make more older equipment act as consumables for higher level equipment! Oh, and make sure they have some use as well even if they're side-grades. At this point, the Lore equipment which currently uses older equipment is fairly tame compared to more commonplace stuff such as the Teal set (not to mention the Lore items also are free drops from chests in Abyssea with already added augments)!

I'd also like to echo a few complaints already made. One of my pet peeves is not being able to make multiple cloths from my threads in Clothcrafting. It's not really about saving money as the crystal money for me is negligible (since I usually farm them anyways as a personal preference), but I like to save the time crafting these materials. I think the Crafting Ring which prevents HQ was a great addition since I hated seeing the HQ animation again for these crafting materials but knowing I wouldn't get any bonuses. I would probably prefer to be able to HQ my base materials though. I also would like having a second crafting guild with this new addition (and please separate Fishing Guild from the other crafting guilds).

That's my two-cents.

[Xikeroth]

I guess I'll put in my 2 cents....

I personally would like to see multiple crafts at 100, however at the same time I'd love to see he Development team STOP focusing all of their time and energy in synergy when it comes to crafting. This seriously needs to end the only thing you're really doing is killing crafting quicker. While people like to debate and say "you only say it sucks because you haven't tried it". Actually I started crafting so I could farm and make stuff WITHOUT RELYING ON ANYONE ELSE Synergy forces me to rely on others and since it makes me do that when I already have to do it enough to get anywhere in the game it makes me not want to do it. Because crafting was a thing of peace.

IN my opinion Synergy shouldn't be able to make a SINGLE ITEM AT ALL, instead it should do nothing but enhance items made by other crafts and I think the majority of the crafters would agree. Go ahead synergy nuts be blind and tell SE everything they do is perfect, the only way to get something changed about it is to complain about it enough.

The development team isn't very smart when it comes to crafting, I'm sorry but synergy DID ruin crafting on the respect that its making items that there is no reason at all say Leathercraft, Clothcraft, or smithing can't make. Someone else posted a thought I very much agree with they had synergy right when it fist came out, the ebon gear you could change the color and give buffs to through synergy were all made by the base crafts that's how it should be.

The dev team needs to think before they leap to "OMG GOOD IDEA" then have it turn into a disaster. Sure abyssea ruined crafting, but synergy didn't help. There are plenty of items on the AH that are made through synergy that have no reason they couldn't have been made through another craft. You could use synergy to enhance these items instead of make them.

SE needs to smarten up and stop focusing so much on synergy and try to give a lot of new items to make to the old crafts. I think the majority of the hardcore crafters would agree with me on this.

[RushLynx]

I agree that synergy should be solely for item enhancement... As it stands it doesn't make good sense that as a single craft it has so many different purposes... Etching and Evoliths and soon-to-be Augments... Why does it need to be able to create items as well when there are already other crafts specifically for that purpose?

If anything, synergy should be able to craft evoliths... Instead of the many random ways currently available to obtain worthless evolith, especially when you don't even want them, why not be able to craft them? While you're at it make them AH-able so the AH isn't as bloody empty as it's been lately... It's becoming way too common for there to be page after page of items that aren't in stock and haven't been in a very long time...

[Cljader1]

I agree that synergy should be solely for item enhancement... As it stands it doesn't make good sense that as a single craft it has so many different purposes... Etching and Evoliths and soon-to-be Augments... Why does it need to be able to create items as well when there are already other crafts specifically for that purpose?

If anything, synergy should be able to craft evoliths... Instead of the many random ways currently available to obtain worthless evolith, especially when you don't even want them, why not be able to craft them? While you're at it make them AH-able so the AH isn't as bloody empty as it's been lately... It's becoming way too common for there to be page after page of items that aren't in stock and haven't been in a very long time...


Synergy is NOT a stand along craft, in enhances your current crafting discipline. You basically can not make anything in synergy without having a crafting skill. Giving recipes to synergy is giving recipes to crafting, a goldsmithing synergist CANNOT make the samething as a blacksmithing synergist or a clothcrafting synergist. Btw you can't even get high synergy unless you have a high crafting skill, and you cant even cap synergy unless your a veteran in your particular craft. So that's how I know the people that are complaining about synergy are sub lvl 100 crafters and even sub veteran crafters. Synergy is a mechanism that enhances a players crafting skill and uses the player's crafting skill to make greater items, and its not a whole another craft all together but rather a system built around crafting and it cannot exist without the crafting skill. Any +75 weapon or armor synergy recipe requires a Adept or a Veteran crafting skill to make the item, most require a Veteran, so if your NOT a veteran you have no right to even comment on synergy. Because the crafting boat have long sailed you by, the grind to the top is even harder. 1st you need to get your respected craft too 100 then after that you need to push your synergy to 80. Synergy is the 2nd tier to your crafting skill, and like I said before..If your not a veteran crafter you will not be able to make +75 eqiupment with your synergy.

Furthermore vast majority of the recipes in synergy requires crafted items, so thats another fallacy going on in these forum from sub veteran crafters. Anything for a Goldsmithing synergy take almost all its items from base goldsmith crafting, for example all the ingots, the variance of ingots, the base high lvl rings even right down to the new jewels are cut using the traditional goldsmithing crafting system, to bring that all together is what the goldsmithing synergy is for to make the final product. Blacksmithing synergy is the same way, it uses the Smithing crafting skill to make the majority of the base items. Moreover blacksmithing synergy uses base items that needs too be made by multiple other high lvl crafts, items such as cerberus leather, durium ingots phrygian ingots etc. So when someone says or refers to synergy as a stand alone craft it just speaks of ignorance.

[LucasOfTitan]

As a crafting junkie (100+6 Gold 80 Synergy most subs 60) I don't think having 2 100 lvl crafts will do much at all for the issues crafters have been facing because it doesn't address one of the biggest problems we are having. Materials for synthesis. While having 2 crafts at 100 would be very cool, if there is nothing to make because of the lack of mats, it would be a mute point. Since the introduction of Abyssea most other areas have been deserted which in turn makes the materials that used to drop in those areas no longer available which in turn makes the final item that it was used for no longer available. This is why most of the time the auction house has been empty of materials and why countless crafters are hovering around the auction house camping items. Either give players a reason to go to non Abyssea areas again or have the items that are needed for several crafts drop in abyssea. Until the materials are readily available again it dosnt matter of you can have 5 level 100 crafts.
The other recommendation that i hope may get implemented is the HQ synths that yield nothing different then a NQ. Its a complete smack in the face to yield a HQ that is the same as a NQ and what makes it even worse is that its usually followed by a critical fail on the next synth. A HQ should ALWAYS yield something better. If its an item like a cloth or a thread it should yield more then 1. If its something like a reraise earring a hq maybe should be a reraise2 earring, etc. And a critical fail being over 50 levels above cap should be completely eliminated. Thats just ridiculous. Some people choose not to do synergy and in their defense there should be other synths released that are Non Synergy synths. To spend years getting crafts to lvl 100 and never having any new items for them to make is also a smack in the face. All the new items cant be Synergy synths only like it has been. I am a synergy addict but in all honesty its not fair for non synergy crafters to not have new items to make. In fact the best items of the game should come from crafters. It gives them a reason to craft. While abbysea is fun and has great drops and trials.... the best gear of the game should come from crafters. If that is addressed and the materials problem is addressed the economy should come back to life again and there wont be a million people gathering around the auction house just waiting for something to come up for sale.

[Nephilipitou]

IN my opinion Synergy shouldn't be able to make a SINGLE ITEM AT ALL, instead it should do nothing but enhance items made by other crafts and I think the majority of the crafters would agree. Go ahead synergy nuts be blind and tell SE everything they do is perfect, the only way to get something changed about it is to complain about it enough.


You're off your rocker. So you have problems with synergy being used to make teleport earrings? You have problems with Synergy being used to make some arrows and bullets? Get off your high horse man. Synergy is something new Square Enix tried out, and these adjustments mean that you and a friend can have up to 4 crafts capped out. If you can't get a friend to join your party for a few minutes while you make a couple items, or to party up with you while he AFKs and you craft... that's your own problem.

I didn't start up crafting so that I could be a lone wolf. I started up crafting to help people out like making Quake Grenades for LS members, or making profits on item X Y or Z. You relied on people to make items from other crafts, and put them up on the AH or to sell them to you directly or what ever else. So now you have to form a party with a skill you don't happen to have. Grow up. Heck all crafts at level 80 will make you MORE sufficient at Synergy since most Synergy up to this point don't require you to have more than 1 craft above 80. So all you're doing is QQ because crafting is perfect in every conceivable way that you personally want it to be.

In my opinion they just need to add higher level gear that means something to crafting 100 or even make the max go up to 110 or something and they could add really nice lvl 95 or 99 gear to old crafts, or even make base items for synergy to craft up, or to enhance, or what ever.

As someone who is focusing on taking synergy up to cap most likely, I still either need to level up goldsmithing or bonecrafting to 80+ or get other people to craft the ingredients for me for the bullets and arrowheads needed to make bullets and arrows. But if I was doing another craft instead of synergy, it'd still be the same story. I'd have to have other people do the crafts for me cause there's no way I'm making a party worth of mules just so I can have all the crafts covered in some way.

I like the direction of crafting, I'd just like to see some new powerful items that could be made for 80+ level range in the older craft system so that people who did that much work, still have relevant gear. But to act as if Synergy should ONLY be enhancement and anything else it does is just pure wrong, is just arrogance. There's enough room for all crafts to make items of worth.

[RushLynx]

Synergy is NOT a stand along craft, in enhances your current crafting discipline. You basically can not make anything in synergy without having a crafting skill.

I never said that it was a "stand alon[e] craft"... But thank you for proving my point that synergy being able to craft various armors is completely pointless and simply depriving the respective crafts of their own recipes...

If the synergy recipe calls for clothcraft skill, and makes cloth-based armor, why isn't that armor a clothcraft recipe rather than a synergy recipe? It doesn't make any sense. My point is, that each craft makes certain types of equipment and uses certain types of materials... It makes sense... Synergy does EVERYTHING, and just stands on the backs of other crafts when there's no reason you couldn't just give those crafts the recipe to begin with...

My point is: Synergy does do something unique that other crafts can't do, and that's augment items and etch and insert evolith... So why isn't that the sole purpose of this craft, rather than it literally sucking in everything new like a black hole and leaving everyone else scratching their heads as to when it's going to be their turn... I already leveled a craft, it's the one I enjoy... I don't want to level another one just to be able to use the one I already leveled.

[Cljader1]

My point is: Synergy does do something unique that other crafts can't do, and that's augment items and etch and insert evolith... So why isn't that the sole purpose of this craft, rather than it literally sucking in everything new like a black hole and leaving everyone else scratching their heads as to when it's going to be their turn... I already leveled a craft, it's the one I enjoy... I don't want to level another one just to be able to use the one I already leveled.

All I can say to you my friend is that you fell behind as a crafter, you can't expect too reach a certain lvl in crafting and just sit on that for the duration of the game's life time. That's a you problem, I didn't do that I was proactive I lvled multiple crafts and continued to push the envelope to explore new innovations via synergy and its link to my multitude of crafting skills. If your not putting in the work to better your crafting skill and explore new innovations then you dont deserve to reap the benefits.

[RushLynx]

There's a difference between reaching a certain level and sitting on it, and hitting the cap...

Which brings me back to my original post here, and the purpose of this thread in general... Instead of allowing us to level a second craft to 100, they need to raise the caps above 100 and start putting the synths they're tossing into synergy back where they belong.

[Cljader1]

I think synergy is the way to go, its easy once you know what your doing and its cheap. I cant imagine another 20 or 50 more lvls of goldsmithing that would be outrageous. I already spent 100's of millions of gil too reach 100, and dont want too spend another 100 mil more. Moreover if they do raise the cap I doubt i can skill 50 more lvls of top tier goldsmithing within a year, it'll probably take adleast 2 years or even more.

[Bubeeky]

synergy was a huge slap in the face to those of us that spent massive amounts of time/gil/energy focusing on one craft and the appropriate sub crafts...we all invested our time and money and effort in a craft because it's supposed to pay off in the end, but then they bring in synergy and now all of our investments are completely wasted because everything we make through our efforts that we spent years perfecting can be made better, quicker, and easier with synergy....with one foul swoop, my craft has been diminished to a novelty/charity project for ppl that know I craft.

Synergy should be removed from the game or made to be completely dependant on the synergist actually having a craft leveled, like not being its own skill, but being an ability to use the furnace with your traditional craft. I'm sure I'm not explaining the idea well lol, but there it is :P

[Daniel_Hatcher]

Synergy was the best craft they added, hopefully it'll never be removed.

[annewandering]

The more I think about changing the caps on crafting the more I dislike the whole idea. The problem with crafting isnt the caps. Its not having good items to make. We can blame the rmts for that. It forced SE to go to r/e which threw a lot of our items down the drain.
I have been working on synergy and while it isnt my favorite craft it has some things that I do like. No loss of items for fail is a big one. You do have to have your craft leveled to do synergy except for a few items that are geared to pure leveling of synergy. Sadly synergy does favor goldsmithing and blacksmithing over all others. I would think that this would change as it is developed to be more balanced.
If certain things were changed in crafting it would be better than changing caps.
I would suggest that cooking be made a craft like fishing and not count on the points to 100. It has little to do with other crafts other than fishing. If there were two crafts to 100, cooking would be crippled by not being interactive to other crafts.
New elite items need to be added to the recipes. It does no good to get a craft to 100 and have the profit being only in the consumables at level 30. Give us a real incentive to get to 100 besides pride.
Synergy needs the ability to sign. Not sure how but it does need that. Perhaps the person with the high craft level makes it autosigned with their name?
If caps are changed make the subcrafts to 80 not 60 but keep the main craft to 100 and only one craft possible at 100. If there is any way to do it make craft levels accessible to all on account. If you can send r/e it seems like it might be possible. If only up to subjob levels it would be great to not have to do subcrafts over and over and over and over for mules. Seriously that is a real pain to no real purpose except untold time and gil.
There is plenty of room for improvement without changing the 100 cap.

[Wenceslao]

Well personally i hate synergy and i really don't care much about getting two craftskill at 100 (and with it im not telling its a bad idea) what i would love more to see, its better recipes, since abyssea came out, people are needing less and less often a crafter and this is because they level to fast, i would like to see recipes that are worth doing, for example i don't a reason to keep crafting a lvl25 shade harness set as there are no lvl cap in CoP areas anymore so who would want it, as well why should someone would want a lvl59 Vermillion Cloak with all the abyss buffs and atmas you can get, (as you can noticed by now im a Clothcrafter) I rather have better recipes or at least a way to improve the ones already existing without the use of synergy, be aware that not all players like that system and that no many players has the time or willing to level it, it would be better to get reborn the old recipes or add new ones, that allow players to have 2 skills at 100 when nobody is using what is crafted, Well this is my opinion

[Alukat]

i am against it. it will just end with a ton more cooking/alchemy/woodworking ppl. consumeable items are the only things that sell good atm, at least on my server.
so make some new top gear from regular crafts.the old abjuration + cursed items system always made it worth to skill a craft beside cooking.
or at least add an augment system to the old gear.
most of the best gear drops from NMs and is r or/and e.
and synergy idea was nice, but there is just to much stuff coming from synergy now.

[Camate]

Thank you all so much for the huge amount of feedback!

In regards to our plans to raise the crafting skill limits during the next version update, we thought it’d be the perfect time to implement, alongside the auction house merge and Synergy-augmented content. We felt it would serve as a countermeasure to the low amount of active crafters and the low number of items up on the auction houses in the three nations. However, as a result of discussions based on all of your feedback we have opted to postpone this. To get a better idea of the community’s opinion and also to further our discussions we would like to explain a bit about our future plans for synthesis and synergy, and give you plenty of time to discuss and provide feedback.

For the past couple of updates we placed a heavy emphasis on level cap increases, Abyssea, and other new battle related content. For the version updates in 2011, along with the level cap increase and battle related additions and adjustments, we are planning a significant amount of adjustments to synthesis and synergy as well.

Future plans
Based on our desire to reevaluate how players obtain items, as well as adding attractive item recipes, we plan on changing our focus from shifting synthesis to synergy. We’re also planning on strengthening the specialties of each (Synthesis and Synergy) as well as creating their own special uses and objectives. Along with this we will also be looking into raising the crafting skill limitations.

Our ultimate goal is to add numerous items so that you can select what you wear depending on the situation and slot. This is similar to when the level cap was 75 and you have Relic, Salvage, Einherjar, and Limbus-related gear to utilize.

• Premise

• Expansion of new items and recipes similar to the abjuration equipment system
• Fixing of locations to obtain general purpose materials (Shop and loot expansion)
• Improvements to synergy, fishing, chocobo digging, harvesting, mining, gathering systems
• Synthesis in Perspective

• Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items
• Benefits of HQ synths are reflected largely by an increase in stats
• Possible to create base items through synthesis
• Possibility of losing materials as a result of failure
• Synergy in Perspective

• Possible to mass produce items and create EX items
• Benefits of HQ are strongly demonstrated through mass production recipes
• System to add stats via augment synergy
• No loss of materials upon failure (Fewell and cost are separate)
There were some concerns about the addition of items that can only be made by having multiple skills leveled to 100, but rest assured that we have no plans of introducing recipes of this difficulty.

The above content is not finalized and is a plan that we would like to try and apply in the future. Since this is a pretty large change to our approach, in order to create an even better direction for this, please let us know your thoughts.

We will continue to bring you updates on our plans as we receive your feedback and continue to make gradual changes as we solidify our plan.

[Randwolf]

Personally, I thought Synergy was a horrible idea in the first place. Especially, in a shrinking population. Prior to Synergy, you simply had to hunt down a single highly-skilled crafter and bring them your materials. Not always an easy task. But, I could often find someone by asking around. With Synergy, it is now quite possible that you will need to hunt down several highly-skilled crafters and get them to gather at the same place at the same time. Anyway, just my thought on Synergy in general.

[Militis]

Personally, I thought Synergy was a horrible idea in the first place. Especially, in a shrinking population. Prior to Synergy, you simply had to hunt down a single highly-skilled crafter and bring them your materials. Not always an easy task. But, I could often find someone by asking around. With Synergy, it is now quite possible that you will need to hunt down several highly-skilled crafters and get them to gather at the same place at the same time. Anyway, just my thought on Synergy in general.
In my opinion to counter this is to allow players to have multiple crafts over 60, possibly allow them a choice of up to 2 or 3 crafts to 100. I personally do not foresee this being too much of an issue for balance, considering you may only be an active participant in only one guild at a time, referring to Guild points system. That and everyone would have equal opportunity to have multiple crafts. This would also help make it easier for crafters to get a hold of high level materials for their crafting when it is a high level synth for a different craft.

[Vold]

Thank you all so much for the huge amount of feedback!

In regards to our plans to raise the crafting skill limits during the next version update, we thought it’d be the perfect time to implement, alongside the auction house merge and Synergy-augmented content. We felt it would serve as a countermeasure to the low amount of active crafters and the low number of items up on the auction houses in the three nations. However, as a result of discussions based on all of your feedback we have opted to postpone this. To get a better idea of the community’s opinion and also to further our discussions we would like to explain a bit about our future plans for synthesis and synergy, and give you plenty of time to discuss and provide feedback.

For the past couple of updates we placed a heavy emphasis on level cap increases, Abyssea, and other new battle related content. For the version updates in 2011, along with the level cap increase and battle related additions and adjustments, we are planning a significant amount of adjustments to synthesis and synergy as well.

Future plans
Based on our desire to reevaluate how players obtain items, as well as adding attractive item recipes, we plan on changing our focus from shifting synthesis to synergy. We’re also planning on strengthening the specialties of each (Synthesis and Synergy) as well as creating their own special uses and objectives. Along with this we will also be looking into raising the crafting skill limitations.

Our ultimate goal is to add numerous items so that you can select what you wear depending on the situation and slot. This is similar to when the level cap was 75 and you have Relic, Salvage, Einherjar, and Limbus-related gear to utilize.

• Premise

• Expansion of new items and recipes similar to the abjuration equipment system
• Fixing of locations to obtain general purpose materials (Shop and loot expansion)
• Improvements to synergy, fishing, chocobo digging, harvesting, mining, gathering systems
• Synthesis in Perspective

• Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items
• Benefits of HQ synths are reflected largely by an increase in stats
• Possible to create base items through synthesis
• Possibility of losing materials as a result of failure
• Synergy in Perspective

• Possible to mass produce items and create EX items
• Benefits of HQ are strongly demonstrated through mass production recipes
• System to add stats via augment synergy
• No loss of materials upon failure (Fewell and cost are separate)
There were some concerns about the addition of items that can only be made by having multiple skills leveled to 100, but rest assured that we have no plans of introducing recipes of this difficulty.

The above content is not finalized and is a plan that we would like to try and apply in the future. Since this is a pretty large change to our approach, in order to create an even better direction for this, please let us know your thoughts.

We will continue to bring you updates on our plans as we receive your feedback and continue to make gradual changes as we solidify our plan.

Glad to hear you are postponing this. I thought you were kind of rushing it. Anyway, the above details all appear very sound to me. I will take this time and drop a little idea on you guys, however... it's something I enjoyed from a different game that I feel would greatly benefit this game, though I'm sure it would require a lot of work to achieve. Basically you expand on the idea of augments. I would like to see augments created by crafters that can be sold. How you apply that augment to gear can be done by whatever means you see fit, but the important part here is creating a new market for crafters. For example:

A goldsmith can craft goldsmithing augments. There are multiple augments to choose from. An augment for each of the stats. An augment for HP. An augment for MP. An augment for resist. So on. An augment HP can look like this: Neck, Ear, Ring, Waist slot - HP + 10. An STR aug would look like this: Neck, Ear, Ring, Waist - STR + 1.

A good way to spread the augment love around is for each craft to have it's own augments for it's own synthesis items. So, for example, you would require woodworking augments to augment a Jupiter's staff. Taking that to the next step of augmenting end game gear, you use clothcraft augment to augment a Morri Robe as it would logically be a clothcraft synthesis item. If you want to keep augments really simple, just go with one or two crafts to synthesis them, whatever makes sense. Unfortunately that would probably mean goldsmithing or smithing. You could limit the work output by going with just a few slots that can be augmented, or go all out and go for most slots. Another idea is for there to be HQ augments. I'll stop there but you get the general idea. I think it is something worth exploring and possibly worth the effort at some point. As for the means of augmenting gear with these augments, you could use Synergy as the method of augmenting the gear since you are already down that road.

Basically, it's your idea of augmenting end game gear but with the crafters in control. The lone downside to this idea though, is that because FFXI isn't the typical MMORPG with tiers of end game content where gear is constantly outdated, an augment system may not be very realistic. But a good way to counter that is for augments to actually be more rare than not. Perhaps requiring rare materials. Goldsmithing can use a new ore that can only be mined... woodworking would require a new log to log for, so on. Anyways, something to think on for the future.

[Zumi]

Awwww come on i really wanted some multiple 100 recipes to make some elite gear, that would of been cool. Once again the complainers get their way it seems.

[Cljader1]

Awwww come on i really wanted some multiple 100 recipes to make some elite gear, that would of been cool. Once again the complainers get their way it seems.

Yeah I was thinking the samething, it a shame that SE listened to these complainers, and ignored the hardcore crafters. I hope you know what your doing SE because I devoted almost all of my time to both crafting and synergy...it'll be a shame if the casual crafters get there way.

[annewandering]

Right now I am level 75 synergy. I am WW and have already made my carpenters stall, which by the way I completely LOVE. How do I level to 80? The only way I see right now is to toss my stall and level on that or wait for SE to make at least one new recipe at 80 to skill up on.
Please, SE, even if you delay crafting changes, Please add some new recipes at 80!

[Bubeeky]

disliking synergy doesn't make us casual crafters...we're just as dedicated to our crafts, which is why I (I can only speak for myself here) have such a problem with synergy...in creating synergy, those of us dedicated to our crafts that we've spent years perfecting seem to have just been forgotten about with synergy being the new kid on the block...again, that doesn't make us casual complainers, that makes us crafters that have a real issue that needs to be addressed.

[CrystalWeapon]

Synergy is insainly easy to skill up due to the inability to lose your materials. Went from not having it unlocked to lv 70 spending a whole 200k and taking 3~4 days. If goldsmithing had that luxury I'd have been lv 100 years ago. It's nice to see that the synergy system will continue to expand and grow, but it would be nice to see more improvements to synthesis besides just a cap increase. Maybe lower the curb between NQ and HQ synths. Make more ingredients available from NPC sources. I wouldn't complain about having faster skillups either.

[GlobalVariable]

• Synthesis in Perspective

• Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items
• Benefits of HQ synths are reflected largely by an increase in stats
• Possible to create base items through synthesis
• Possibility of losing materials as a result of failure
I'm sorry but nothing angers a crafter more than being level 100 and failing a lv 20 synth and losing all materials involved or losing that pain in the rear to acquire material that is never on the AH. Its been repeated over and over and over and a major lure of synergy was the lack of material loss. Sure we spend gil to replace fewell. Fewell, a generic easy to acquire item that doesn't take a multi hour camping or farming session to find. Should have never been a separate skill for synergy; should have just let it be an alternate system for the normal crafts. To late now.

The minimum break/item loss chances on crafting need removed. My skill level should not give me tiers of chances of breaks but directly point for point reduce my chances of breaking and losing materials. By the time I'm capped on a skill and HQing a recipe it should not ever be breaking and losing 100% of materials. Hell make each recipe like a quest; did you clear it? HQ = cleared. Not saying add to quest log, using as a comparison there.

[Okiro]

Letting a second craft skill go to 100 would perhaps revitalize the market somewhat, whereas it has essentially died now. It's disappointing you decided to delay this as a result of the whining. The reality is that it wouldn't affect game balance in the slightest because the most devoted crafters already have mules for the other crafts they wanted leveled and wouldn't waste time releveling that craft again on their main character. As for the market on consumables, it would probably drop their price down back to the normal price before crafting started to fade away (100K Shihei Toolbag Stacks > 40/50K) and that is only beneficial for everyone at this point. The people complaining about that will still make a profit making these tools; it'll just take making more of them to accrue the same profits, but the price will be much more stable than it is now.

[Randwolf]

Awwww come on i really wanted some multiple 100 recipes to make some elite gear, that would of been cool. Once again the complainers get their way it seems.

I wasn't going to chime in but I am really disappointed also. I wanted to make Goldsmithing my main craft. However, because of the cost, I can only work on it a little at a time. Yesterday in shell, before I saw this, I was asking what should I choose as a second craft to 100. Since, I would have been able to take that to 100 first without dashing the dreams of skilling Gold to 100. My first thought had been Cooking. Since, I really enjoy being able to make all my consumables.

Anyway, yeah, I was pretty disappointed in S/E's decision. I really don't enjoy skilling up crafting. But, I was looking forward to being able to make more of my own supplies.

[Avina]

Awwww come on i really wanted some multiple 100 recipes to make some elite gear, that would of been cool. Once again the complainers get their way it seems.

:( I was really looking forward to working on a new craft this coming update. It bums me that they announced this and then they doubled back on it...

I mean, they let us level any job we want to max by sitting around in Abyssea trading keys to a box, but still maintaining these rigid crafting caps which have to actually be earned through a lot of time, work, and money, in a game where people aren't even crafting anymore since it it only makes obsolete gear these days. It just seems backwards to me. Maybe it won't fix the game's economy on its own but it would at least give players more ability to craft their own stuff.

The issue really is that crafting is irrelevant since the way people experience now makes buying the early gear irrelevant. Until SE finds a way to bring exping back outside of Abyssea for lower levels in a way that doesn't infuriate those that seek Abyssea parties to leech, I don't think you will see a more populated Auction House.

[GlobalVariable]

The issue really is that crafting is irrelevant since the way people experience now makes buying the early gear irrelevant. Until SE finds a way to bring exping back outside of Abyssea for lower levels in a way that doesn't infuriate those that seek Abyssea parties to leech, I don't think you will see a more populated Auction House.More specifically convince low level people actually play their jobs. You can enter at 30 but can't really do anything in an exp party except open boxes - the problem isn't WHERE they get their exp, its HOW. If those boxes for exp popped up in FoV zones and it were easier to build lower level parties people would.

[Okiro]

Also, I'd say you were right about the timing of the increase to craft skill limits being perfect with those other adjustments as every one of those things occurring at once might create a little economic boom in the crafting industry that would be beneficial for everyone, as I said before. This next comment of mine may not be popular here, but sadly a high percentage of posters on the official forums aren't the ones to be influenced by as they would have this game in "easymode" and make everything obtainable without much effort at all (Essentially, this is abyssea; everything is too easy to get except *maybe* cards). That's not to say I don't enjoy abyssea, but you've done the casual community a favor with it and still they complain that it's too hard to get seals and things even though it's really not; it just takes a little effort and the rewards are well worth that effort being put forth. These same people are the ones now who are complaining about letting a second craft go to 100; these people who now make their gil off of crafting consumables that have in most cases over doubled in price because no one crafts and they think that if you let a second craft go to 100, it might impinge upon their profits. Realistically, the most used consumables are craftable as is with subcrafts leveled to 60; sure you can't HQ them at the rates of higher levels, but there's still profit in NQing them with the occasional HQ currently and even before when the market was stable. The purpose of allowing a second craft to go to 100 would be reigniting the interest in crafting that there was years ago which will hopefully re stabilize the market and make things better for the entire economy.

[Cljader1]

This decision SE made delayed many intermediate crafter's dreams. What I mean by this is that some players may have been low on gil and as a result decided to take up a easier craft like cooking to get a good healthy stack of gil going for themselves. However after a couple years of building gil through cooking, these crafters finally have enough to invest in more prestigious crafts like goldsmithing, blacksmithing, leathercraft etc. By allowing a second 100 lvl skill cap would've freed many players from there starter crafts but SE decision for the time being denied them this. Thus pigeon-holing crafters to remain with there starter crafts and force the more buying and usage of mules.

[annewandering]

It would be lots of fun to have all crafts to 100 or even two. I just am not sure how much good it would do. If there are new recipes introduced that would be great for WW and Bonecrafting wonderful. Now if other recipes were introduced for WW and Smithing, Great! Except that now I can make any WW recipe and with those I would only be able to make some. Maybe it seems petty but truth is I leveled my WW to 100 with my subcrafts specifically so I could make any recipe in the WW list. It would anger me to not be able to continue to do that. We would be forced to chose WW+ one other craft. That means there are WW + 5 others I could not do.
Now from a consumer point of view consider this. If they cant find a crafter now, it would be 6 times harder to find the RIGHT WW in the future.

[Aquilla]

I apologize in advance if this has been said before in this thread... I don't have the time to read through all of it atm, so I'm just replying to Camate's post.

I am glad that improvements are being looked into in the gathering, and in crafting as a whole. In my opinion, the problem with crafting is two fold: base materials, and reward.

1. base materials for crafting: especially at higher levels, it becomes nigh impossible to gather with any sort of efficacy materials to level up. In every craft, it's easier to simply make the gil elsewhere, and then possibly blow it at the AH to get a few skill ups. Skill-ups are few and far between, but that wouldn't be an issue if I had a real chance to farm/gather ingredients. I used to be a prolific miner (i funded my blm's staffs that way back in the ye olde days), but if I went back to leveling goldsmithing seriously, I certainly wouldn't be trying to mine up gold/platinum ingots for skillups. This is not to say that it is impossible to get gold/platinum ingots through mining, but I will say this: If I went to, say, Sea-Serpent's Grotto as monk/thf and killed sahagin for nothing but gil drops, I would get more ingots by spending a few hours there and then buying them off AH, than I would mining any given area.
Crafting is a bit about the journey. It is cool to put the drops/gathered items to use by making something out of them. Buying stacks and stacks of stuff off the AH doesn't quite have that same allure... and simply isn't fun. If I'm looking at crafting as a simply monetary venue, and not anything that has any other value except for how much money I can make ...that brings me to point number 2.

2. reward.
No craft is worth much at 100 anymore.
Yeah, some HQs still sell very decently, and I am sure that people who are more committed than I can spend the time investing a lot of gil into a certain % of return based on HQ percentage. Okay. I am not hard core crafter, or player, of any sort. However.. It's a lot easier to make money in any number of ways.
Well, I'd venture to say that most people don't play for imaginary riches, so what other reward does crafting offer? What unique ability/aspect of game do I get as a lv 100 crafter?
None. Outside of a few furnishings, there is no reward for me hitting 100 in any craft. I've had friends who've put the time to level a craft, taking years to hit 100, only to see that there is very little they can do with it. Most good armor now is no longer crafted...and there is no real way to produce 'unique' armor in the game. I thought that the idea of coloring certain furnishings, or the evoliths idea, was gonna lead to a way for us to produce truly unique things, but that isn't going to happen.
Why not give us more control over the output of our crafting? Why not really let us decide what stats are going to go into it, what color it will be, what it will do? Why not give crafters -- especially those who hit 100 -- a bit of a boost or ability of some sort, something that's going to improve their gameplay overall -- a stat bonus, maybe? Would it really break the game at this point? What if cooks could make unique r/e aoe foods, that stacked with regular foods, that could buff their parties? What if goldsmiths had a gem-O-finder ability, a mining widescan of sorts?

If we choose to be crafters, why not let us be unique for that aspect? It's okay to have crafting be a difficult journey, but give us something to look forward to... something other than a furnishing and an apron, and a knowledge that 99% of the recipes of our given craft are useless, and the remaining 1% just don't add up to much more than a side-grade.

Having a ton of side-grades at 75 was much derided on the internets for a good reason, and it's not something I'd like to see at 99.... instead of giving us gear where we need to change pants every time we cast a different spell, why not allow us to combine some of that gear...but that's a separate rant, I suppose.

In short, crafting and gathering in XI have always been a less-fun part of the game, something that seemed tailormade for bots due to the high time-cost, and sheer un-funness of hitting 'craft' button millions of times to get to 100. Let's hope that changes!

[Avina]

First of all I want to say that even though I definitely disagree with the decision to postpone raising the crafting skill I do appreciate the effort being made on the community team and the devs to address this issue... but there are some points that I think really deserve to be addressed.

Here is how I see the current problem with crafting (aside from consumable crafts such as WW and Cooking, although those have taken a hit as well):

As said in my earlier post a huge problem with crafting jobs that specifically craft gear (armor, accessories, etc) now have enormous amounts of what basically amounts to as trash when you look at how the game is run. There use to be a time when being well geared at level 40 was actually important, people camped NMs for gear and bought high quality low level gear. Since so much of the player population has taken to trading keys to chests or even simply just idling in Abyssea, to the average player there really isn't a point to investing in lower level gear. If you can find one, tell me... and I don't Abyssea burn my jobs either and actually try to gear myself as best as I can at these lower levels but being honest to myself; I'm just making it hard for myself because I liked the old way. And it really fails to feel rewarding.

I know other crafters will turn to me and say that all the money from crafting came when you got to level 100 and were HQing... and its true, that's where the big money was at for sure. But crafters were still able to turn a profit or at least break even with staples such as the Eisen set for smithing or Seer's for clothcraft, etc, both which were low level synths that people used to buy. The point being there was still money to be made at these lower levels of crafting... but the way SE has set up the game now, very nearly all of the recipes for gear we can craft won't be bought and won't be used.

This is the biggest problem I see for crafters... its easy for SE to make new recipes for new gear that can be used at the 75+ level that have awesome stats... but now you can really make the case that the great majority of crafting recipes is garbage. Crafters might argue that this has always been the case (lots of statless gear that no one would buy) but it is much more pronounced when no one is playing a job at a level that they'd use the gear that you can make. Crafting and the Auction House will always have problems if this issue is never addressed by SE... merging the auction house won't fix it, raising the crafting caps won't fix it, nothing will unless SE makes some serious change that would give players a reason to really *want* to level their lower jobs outside of Abyssea. We need a new perk for doing so.

Taking this all in, there are some things that Camate said that I have questions and concerns about specifically:


In regards to our plans to raise the crafting skill limits during the next version update, ... However, as a result of discussions based on all of your feedback we have opted to postpone this.

Although I definitely believe that raising the crafting cap won't solve the problem we have, I don't see any reason to avoid doing so. It's a lot of work as it stands now, you really have to earn it, and it would revitalize it a bit. It would not bring lower level gear into the AH again... that's going to take a bigger fix that doesn't have anything to do with the crafting system. My biggest question is how is raising the crafting cap bad? What was the reason that they decided to postpone it specifically?


Our ultimate goal is to add numerous items so that you can select what you wear depending on the situation and slot.

Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items

System to add stats via augment synergy

I have some hesitation on these things based on how they are worded. But the basic gist is that people just don't like the randomness that has been thrown into so much of the newest gear that has been introduced into the game, as well as with the augment system. Fields of Valor gave us random stats that could possibly even result in the item becoming worse than it was before, and would always render it 100% unsellable with no way to remove augments (I still don't know why SE hasn't retroactively corrected this to allow FoV augments to be removed through synergy...). Synergy gave us reliable results with evoliths, but the evolith stats themselves were too specific to have many of them hold much merit. No one really wants to carry around on them a weapon that has WS Acc +5 against birds, especially since synergy favored augmenting weapons that were already statless. If we were augmenting pieces that were already good with WS Acc +5 against birds as an additional stat on top of that, it could've been much more worthwhile. But what the statless weapons needed were solid, reliable augments such as attack +5, accuracy bonuses, attributes, etc...

There are also some items that have been thrown in like those series of earrings that gives bonuses depending on if the part has a certain job present. We really need items and gear that don't require correct alignment of the planets in order to make use of them.

So yeah, I hope you are taking efforts to avoid that kind of 'situational' gear, since that sort of stuff was way too situational and has never really been used because of it, or the benefits from using it weren't good enough. I think if it isn't a piece that you don't think a player would want to keep in their inventory most of the time when they are playing, it probably isn't worth putting into the game. It's clear that you guys know what kinds of things we want... Abyssea is full of such treasures, let the crafters make some compareable stuff. Hopefully this is meant when you wrote "Possible to create attractive, one of a kind items" ... I'm just responding to the things we've seen in the past.

If we ever can breathe life back into lower level exp party like I described in the first half of this post, I think its possible to salvage some of the systems already in place... as any crafter knows who crafts armor we have lots of statless armor that are perfect blank slates for augmenting... but the current system has been too unforgiving. Potential fixes could include:

Fields of Valor Elite Training: Remove the negative stats. We are, after all, putting down our time in the form of tabs for this... it would make sense for the system to not butcher our piece and make it worse in the process. Make it so that weaker (but all positive) augments are more common with a small chance of a significant stat increase or a rare augment type (Haste, for example). Let us remove augments we don't like with synergy so that taking a chance at these doesn't ruin our chance to ever sell the item!

Synergy Evoliths: Improve the quality of the evoliths that fit on weapons that are naked and statless... no more of this "vs. beasts, only with dark magic" kind of boosts. Like I said, have evoliths drop varying levels of attributes like STR and straight stat mods (accuracy up).

I really am getting to the end, I'm sorry for the length lol


Possible to create base items through synthesis

I'm guessing that this is referring to stuff like the ebon ebur etc line of gear... I don't think the relationship between Synthesis and synergy really should follow the direction of Synthesis > Synergy. Synthesis crafters should be able to materials that can be used in synergy, base armor/weapon/accesories pieces to be augmented, but there should be an equal amount of gear that only those high level crafters can make on their own, which can rival even augmented gear (but with very difficult to obtain materials). Likewise, synergy should also be producing unique materials that could be used to help make those fancy gear items.

There should be an interplay between the two types but a crafter should be able to make solid, viable gear on their own. Especially since crafters run the added risk of losing their mats... you can fail synergy all day long if you have the fewell and you won't lose anything. But in Synthesis the crafter runs the risk of losing sometimes millions of gil not from lack of skill but because of the internal dice roll the game does for synthesis... such great risk needs a great reward.

[Atomic_Skull]

It's taken me 7 years to get level 94 fishing. I think if the goalpost was moved and I suddenly found myself 26 levels from cap instead of 8 my head would explode.

[Anapingofness]

I also apologize if any of this has been mentioned before, I do not have the time to read the 17 pages of posts. Therefore, I am mainly responding to Camate's post.

Here are my two cents~

It is kind of difficult not to draw parallels between FFXI and FFXIV not only because the games are made by the same company and one game in many ways mirrors the other but also because it feels as if they had attempted to do things that they didn’t complete in FFXI, so to speak.

This is best seen in the fact that FFXIV gives you the option to level a craft as a “main job”. While it certainly isn’t a bad idea, what SE failed to do was shift the game play to suit the players that opted to play a crafter rather than a typical mage/dd job.

That being said it is rather important to note that crafting as a whole is a very, grossly, outdated concept in FFXI. Simply put the time and effort spent crafting in FFXI does not equal to (even by a fraction) the reward. It simply takes too long to really get anywhere. Challenge is important in any game and one certainly wants the players to feel accomplished but often times that is not the case in FFXI. I, personally, have lost count of the many times I’ve said to myself “Christ, that too way too long to do.” but I digress (slightly).

In addition to what has been stated about giving crafting meaning and the like, it’s important to understand that it will take more than that to revive it. I’ve been level 87 Alchemy for quite some time now (well over a year, not to mention that it took me several years to get that point). I’ll be perfectly honest, as it is right now, I’ve no desire to touch it. The reason is really two fold. Firstly, there is nothing that I can make that is worthwhile- about the only thing I’d like to make is the Crystal Rose furnishing but even that doesn’t make up for the aggravation I’d face trying to get to that point. Not to mention since we can’t increase the size of our Mog House to be able to put more furnishings in there the furnishing that I’d eventually get around to making (if I’m bored enough) would only end up being inventory +1. Secondly, the journey to reach level 100 is such a bloody pain in the ass (if you’ll forgive the cursing) that just thinking about it is a huge turn off.

Speaking of crafting and the Mog House. Back in the day when the crafting signs ( i.e. Boneworker’s Signboard, Goldsmith’s Signboard... etc) came out many players thought that they would be able to use their Mog House as a shop of sorts. That would have been really cool- sadly that didn’t come to be, nor were we able to have our own stands/stores. It is something to consider and maybe even pass on to the FFXIV dev team if these changes are too much for FFXI.

A slight comment to the Mog House bit. The Mog House is a fairly original idea that I applaud SE for. I was very disappointed that they didn’t have it in FFXIV and I can only hope that they add it in rather quickly with adjustments to the Gardening (yet another idea that I applaud SE for) aspect so that it reflects more like a mini Farmerama/Farmville/LOTRO farming style. However it is my personal belief that they should allow for an actual Mog House expansion because furniture crafting is a rather large part of crafting. I know for a fact that I am not the only player who likes to buy furnishings for show and invite my friends over to chat it up and admire them. It is rather depressing that one cannot make the Mog House grow and show off more furnishings. Another thing I’d like to point out is an overall lack of interaction with the furnishings (but this is an overreaching problem with an overall lack of interaction with the world that is going to be saved for discussion on a rainy day).

Some players may discredit the idea of decorating the Mog House for frivolous reasons but one must consider- we picked the characters we picked because they appealed to us. They in many ways become an extension of ourselves. The Mog House, likewise becomes that extension as well. Being able to decorate it how we see fit is something that is small but that does bring joy to players- it gives us a sense of accomplishment and individuality. It is the same reason people want barber shops and casual clothing. It is as if a small piece of Vana ‘diel is “ours”.

All in all the things to keep in mind about crafting is number one- it should be fun and number two- that the time/effort put into the endeavor should directly effect the reward.

P.S. Feel free to pass this onto the FFXIV dev team as it can help, I’m sure.

Edit:
It would be very beneficial for craters to have "Craft Bags"- as in, bags/storage/etc that crafting/gathering items would go into. You will not believe just how much inventory the crafting/gathering materials take up- especially in the higher levels.

~ Thanks!

[Avina]

It's taken me 7 years to get level 94 fishing. I think if the goalpost was moved and I suddenly found myself 26 levels from cap instead of 8 my head would explode.

I don't think anyone is suggesting they raise the crafting cap in that sense. We're talking about more 100s, but I wasn't able to read all the posts so I'm not sure if it had been brought up... if so, yeah, I agree with you. I just want to be able to take more to 100.

[GlobalVariable]

I don't think anyone is suggesting they raise the crafting cap in that sense. We're talking about more 100s, but I wasn't able to read all the posts so I'm not sure if it had been brought up... if so, yeah, I agree with you. I just want to be able to take more to 100.SE only mentioned multiple level 100 crafts but a few posters were suggesting beyond 100 for their main craft earlier in the thread.

I'd like to be able to take cooking up without worries that I'm losing out on recipes in my main craft that would need a higher sub or needing to spend those points on my main craft so I'm against going past 100 for now to and all for having as many 100's as we feel like grinding out. I feel other issues need taken care of before bother though or we'll just have a short burst of power level crafting and NPC'ing the results. Hardly anybody to buy the low level stuff, and no low level stuff for anybody to buy. Catch22. So I think the decision to postpone was a good one.

[tharpy]

I'd like to see a move to make cooking a secondary skill (like fishing).

I like the extra 80 points so that you can have to 100 level jobs. Crafting is a very lost art.

[Avina]

I just want to know just what the reason really was that has caused SE to back away from an idea that was met with overwhelming praise for the first several pages of this post. I think especially after telling us you'd be raising the cap, we should be given a solid reason why.

[Zared]

Ya, it's not like you said you were considering it, you said with certainty that the cap would be raised. People started leveling in anticipation, and now you are yanking it away from us. Well, looks like I'm still stuck sending broken Lu Shang's Rod to a woodworking mule.

[RushLynx]

I think it's important to note that they didn't say they weren't ever going to do it... they just said they're holding off on it for now to reevaluate where they were going with it all...

[GlobalVariable]

Ya, it's not like you said you were considering it, you said with certainty that the cap would be raised. People started leveling in anticipation, and now you are yanking it away from us. Well, looks like I'm still stuck sending broken Lu Shang's Rod to a woodworking mule.
I thought that was exactly what they were saying.
In an effort to enhance future development, we would like to gather some feedback from all of the crafters in Vana’diel in regards to the below. We encourage you to discuss this with your fellow players and provide feedback on the direction we’re contemplating.

As you are aware, there is a limit for craft skills where once you reach skill level 60, you are limited to 40 more levels to distribute amongst the other eight crafts (excluding fishing). As such, the system only allows you to be able to reach 100 if you gain all 40 skill levels in one craft, or you can raise two crafts to 80 if you gain 20 levels in two different crafts.

For the future expansion of synthesis and synergy, we’re looking into raising the skill level limitation from 40 to 80 during the next version update. Once this change takes place, you will then be able to have two crafts leveled to 100. The last line that says "once this change takes place" is looks to be in an if sort of context to me. And they haven't said this won't ever this; just postponed their plans to consider adjustments to those plans based on our feedback. Hopefully this is so they can figure out a way to have all the items made by people leveling a new craft post update to have a place to go besides an NPC.

[Godofgods]

Future plans
Based on our desire to reevaluate how players obtain items, as well as adding attractive item recipes, we plan on changing our focus from shifting synthesis to synergy.

what do u mean plan on shifting from synthasis to syngery? Its all SE has done since its introduction. Its realy a bad system start to finish. Its better off being removed much less imbelished. Youve heard plenty of ppl here that would like the skill cap raised to start crafting more, dispite the fact that theirs no profite in it. Theyde do it jsut for the enjoyment of it. Somehting you wont find much of for synergy. The only ppl defending that are genrealy those few making some gills. Noones doing syngery because its actuly enjoyable. Even with 532 combined crafting skill levels so far, i want to do synergy about as much as i want to electrocute myself.

[Wenceslao]

I'm a Clothcrafter since 6 years ago and what i would like to do more than using synergy (a skill I personally find bothersome), is the ability to ensorcell my cloth with some kind of items or KI to give a boost on them (Example: once we get a Vermillion Cloak, have the ability to fuse it with other Clothcraft materials like a Magical Cotton Cloth and give it some extra stat boost) or the ability to use my Mog House as a Shop. SE please understand not all players like synergy, and many crafters I meet on the long run, where dedicated to just one craft and the idea of being forced to use synergy, and gather many mid-high level crafters at the same time its terrible, many players are focused on abyssea activities only, and if its difficult to find one crafter these days, imagine to find more than one just to do synergy.

Another point I think many crafters are been waiting for years is the ability to give that personal touch to the results, like changing colors or add some feature to the final product, anyway I think asking for these kind of changes would be useless as SE keeps forcing us to use synergy, and low-mid level players won't come out of abyss... and use our crafts

[Anapingofness]

Hello again~ I’m back with another point/suggestion for SE.

Just a little while ago I made a Duchy Earring with my sis and was both happy and well, very disappointed about 2.5 seconds later. Which brought me to typing this little bit up.

There are a number of crafted items that have charges, such as the Duchy Earring or the Warp Cudgel but the cool down timer on such items is kind of ridiculously long. Then there are other items, ones that are not crafted such as the exp rings or the Nexus Cape that also have the same issue- but I’ll get back to those items in a bit. First the crafted items with charges. I’m not sure how it would be game breaking if either the Duchy Earring or the Warp Cudgel had let’s say, 5 min timers. If anything it would ask for an increase in production of those items because people would want to use them more and actually be able to use them efficiently. What I’m getting at is, in a nutshell, please rethink the cool down timers on crafted items that have a certain charge. If you want players to actually use those items then you have to enable them to be used in a rather sensible fashion.

Onto non-crafted items with a charge/timer. Things like the exp rings have a long recast time before they can be used again 16+ hours, depending which one you use. Reducing the cool down timer on them wouldn't do much since you can only charge them once a week anyway. Homing rings are another example- instead of teleporting you to your home nation it teleports you to the OP of your home nation (in the zone you’re in) if your nation owns it. Which is kind of silly but not so bad because some zones are rather huge and OP’s are sometimes the fastest way to warp. The real killer is the 24hr timer on them. It makes them virtually useless. How many times do you think players would need such a service? Once a day? You’ve got that wrong. Another example is the Nexus Cape. It was a reward for buying all of the Mini Expansions (ACP, MKE, ASA) which is great! However... it has a rather very silly timer on it, which would be fine if it wasn’t so restricted in where you can use it. If the cool down timer for the cape is 48hrs then why is it so bad to be able to teleport to the party leader’s location, regardless of where he is? It’s a fair enough of a trade off if you ask me and something you may want to look into.

Ah, one more thing! I was checking out the FFXIV forums and found a rather tantalizing bit of information. It was a response to a question about if SE will let the players see food stats or not. The answer was well, yes, in no uncertain terms. I’d like to point this out to you and please have you mention this to SE. It’s a bit late in the game but better late then never. In short, please let us see food stats- it would certainly prompt for more food usage or even promote more crafting- especially if we’re allowed to use multiple foods.

Thanks for your time!

[Cljader1]

what do u mean plan on shifting from synthasis to syngery? Its all SE has done since its introduction. Its realy a bad system start to finish. Its better off being removed much less imbelished. Youve heard plenty of ppl here that would like the skill cap raised to start crafting more, dispite the fact that theirs no profite in it. Theyde do it jsut for the enjoyment of it. Somehting you wont find much of for synergy. The only ppl defending that are genrealy those few making some gills. Noones doing syngery because its actuly enjoyable. Even with 532 combined crafting skill levels so far, i want to do synergy about as much as i want to electrocute myself.


God the Synergy cry babies are back, give it a break...SE is not going to remove a crafting system just too please you...there many of us who like synergy and mastered it, synergy it suppose to be more complex than tradition crafting...If you dont like it or UNDERSTAND it dont do it, that your problem, leave the synergy to the talented crafters...

[Avina]

God the Synergy cry babies are back, give it a break...SE is not going to remove a crafting system just too please you...there many of us who like synergy and mastered it, synergy it suppose to be more complex than tradition crafting...If you dont like it or UNDERSTAND it dont do it, that your problem, leave the synergy to the talented crafters...

Last I checked this was a discussion topic where SE was gathering the opinions of crafters to see the direction that crafting wanted to go. And that's what he did, and huh, he didn't insult synergists like you did to him. You call him a cry baby, insinuate that he's dumb and not a talented crafter, kind of more than enough to qualify for a flame post.

Write something constructive next time.

[annewandering]

Cljader, I am glad you love synergy. Seriously. Lately I have been enjoying it more as well. You are lucky, Cljader. Your favorite craft is booming with SE! The rest of us would like similar love from SE for our favorite crafts. What's wrong with that? Nothing :D
Oh for people who hate synergy I did discover something interesting. The drag on timing in the menu seems to be better if you have your own private crucible. The necklace one. I havent had a lot of chance to try it out but the little I did try seemed much smoother. Crossing my fingers it wasn't just a fluke.

[Cljader1]

Cljader, I am glad you love synergy. Seriously. Lately I have been enjoying it more as well. You are lucky, Cljader. Your favorite craft is booming with SE! The rest of us would like similar love from SE for our favorite crafts. What's wrong with that? Nothing :D
Oh for people who hate synergy I did discover something interesting. The drag on timing in the menu seems to be better if you have your own private crucible. The necklace one. I havent had a lot of chance to try it out but the little I did try seemed much smoother. Crossing my fingers it wasn't just a fluke.


I'm glad synergy is working better for you, all people have to do is try and work to understand it. Synergy isn't that difficult once you understand the basic mechanics and do all your tuturials. It was overwhemming for me to when I first started it, but after I learn the basic mechanic for it I was shocked on how easy and understandable it was.


Last I checked this was a discussion topic where SE was gathering the opinions of crafters to see the direction that crafting wanted to go. And that's what he did, and huh, he didn't insult synergists like you did to him. You call him a cry baby, insinuate that he's dumb and not a talented crafter, kind of more than enough to qualify for a flame post.

Write something constructive next time.

I'm a master synergist and it easy to tell when a poster is speaking about synergy when they have either never done it or have extremely low lvl in it. I hear the spillage of many fallacies posted in these threads about needing 6 crafters or multiple crafters to be able to do synergy, this is untrue there only a few recipes that require another crafter and those are the Aern Weapons and the Galley Kitchen that it; 98% percent of the recipes are done solo not requiring another crafter at all. Moreover, outside of a few people complaining about menu lag, there has been NO constructive criticism of synergy what so ever. I hear certain people say its a bad system from start to finish and I ask how or what so bad about it and the people who dislike synergy comes up with nothing.

[Kari]

@Camate, I'm sorry, but we're never going to see an increase in things being sold on the Auction House unless MAJOR changes are made.
As-is, nobody will sell anything on the AH that doesn't make a good amount of money, mostly due to the 7 item limit.

As much as I'd love to put up all the random things I obtain that are worth ~1k on the AH, I'm not going to waste that space for the many things I have easy access to that are worth 20k.
You'll almost never see low level gear, spells, etc on the AH because there isn't a market for them. However, plenty of people do get these scrolls from monsters and such, but they usually go straight to the NPC because the amount of time it takes to sell such an item isn't worth wasting 1 of their 7 AH slots. Not to mention, even if it did sell, you wouldn't make a whole lot of money.
However, if it was possible to put many items on the AH and also not have them get sent back in a few days, you'd likely see people putting these things they find on the AH, and eventually some noob who needs it will buy it. The noob gets their hands on a spell that otherwise could have been annoying for them to obtain, and the person selling the scroll got a random small amount of Gil.

Adding new synthesis recipes is cool and all, in fact I'm quite excited, however you can't really even mention such a change having any effect on the AHs.
All it will be doing is creating a new market on new items, which is nothing new.
I'd really like to see an update to the AH, to allow us to put a LARGE amount of items on it at once like other MMOs, but I don't think it would be doable because of PS2 limitations. =/
Every other MMO I've played with similar AH-type systems allowed you to put up AT LEAST 50 items, if not infinite. This allowed said games to have an extremely large economy, and a huge variety of items for anyone shopping around.
I can only dream of FFXI getting such an update, it seems.

[Militis]

Yes, please! I think this will help to restore the in game economies again. This will bring the supply back into various markets, and increase demand for materials again making it worthwhile to farm once again.

[Vold]

@Camate, I'm sorry, but we're never going to see an increase in things being sold on the Auction House unless MAJOR changes are made.
As-is, nobody will sell anything on the AH that doesn't make a good amount of money, mostly due to the 7 item limit.

As much as I'd love to put up all the random things I obtain that are worth ~1k on the AH, I'm not going to waste that space for the many things I have easy access to that are worth 20k.
You'll almost never see low level gear, spells, etc on the AH because there isn't a market for them. However, plenty of people do get these scrolls from monsters and such, but they usually go straight to the NPC because the amount of time it takes to sell such an item isn't worth wasting 1 of their 7 AH slots. Not to mention, even if it did sell, you wouldn't make a whole lot of money.
However, if it was possible to put many items on the AH and also not have them get sent back in a few days, you'd likely see people putting these things they find on the AH, and eventually some noob who needs it will buy it. The noob gets their hands on a spell that otherwise could have been annoying for them to obtain, and the person selling the scroll got a random small amount of Gil.

Adding new synthesis recipes is cool and all, in fact I'm quite excited, however you can't really even mention such a change having any effect on the AHs.
All it will be doing is creating a new market on new items, which is nothing new.
I'd really like to see an update to the AH, to allow us to put a LARGE amount of items on it at once like other MMOs, but I don't think it would be doable because of PS2 limitations. =/
Every other MMO I've played with similar AH-type systems allowed you to put up AT LEAST 50 items, if not infinite. This allowed said games to have an extremely large economy, and a huge variety of items for anyone shopping around.
I can only dream of FFXI getting such an update, it seems.

Personally I'd like to see a MH addition called bank or whatever where you can put items to be sold, choose the price, items are updated to the AH system. Tax is taken out once items are sold. I guess just like bazaar except it goes through the AH. But I bet that's an idea that is surely is impossible to come true for some reason or another. Just seems like a simple way to bypass the AH problems. Key word seems.

I also really wouldn't mind tax having an overhaul. I'm all for the bazaar system but it would be extremely helpful if people could just put high end items on AH to sell them without some silly tax taking out unreasonable amounts of gil from the sale...

[solidss]

Let crafters do quest daily and gets gil back as reward im talking about good reward not for craft cost 5k reward 4.8k cause there is many people with high craft skill allrdy.

[Genryuusai]

Hmm... but then I think there would be some motivated people like me who would totally level every craft to as high as they could... just because they can. But I think it'd be better to raise the total number of levels you could increase after 60 from 40 to 80 rather than raise the subcraft cap to 80. This way, recipes could still call for a specialist in one arena. If everyone could get 80 in every subcraft, then specialists would only be needed for very few recipes.

Also, I like synergy, but I hate leveling it. Platinum Leaves and Vitriol go in... platinum leaves and vitriol come out. Repeat ad nauseum. I'm at 29 and sick of it.

[Urat]

I never ever understood why on earth there was a crafting limit in the first place, it's a needless limitation. We were allowed to level every job to 75, why couldn't we take every craft to 100?

Sure maybe to add a bit of balance make it so that past 40 levels garnered over 60 each level gets progressively hard to obtain, until taking the last craft to 100 takes much more effort than the first.

I don't see a reason with the current economy to have any limit at all. If people have the time, effort, and means to take all crafts to 100 what reason is there to prevent them from that?

Second, if you really want to reinvigorate the economy for ffxi crafters, the answer is simple. Abyssea is all the rage so take advantage of this.

Make 9 NMs, one in each zone, that are popped by trading an item to an ???. Their pop items are made by crafting a couple of other pops dropped from various other NMs in their respective zones. Said synthed items each have their own respective craft.

And most importantly, make sure every single one of these NMs drops something worthwhile so there will be demand for said items.

Demand for these items will go through the roof. Crafters will have something to profit off of again, and third parties will have items they can farm and sell to crafters.

Nearly all abyssea zones at the moment have a fishing spot. Off the top of my head tahronghi and attohwha seems to be the only one lacking. Make a fish in each abyssea one give up a pop item for an NM when traded to Zaldon. Boom fishing now has an epic new fish to sell on the AH to everyone AND RMTs have little to no access to it due to the nature of abyssea.

Also: I love the direction you guys are going with furniture, pretty much every piece of furniture you guys have been adding recently is absolutely beautiful. I just recently obtained the Galley Kitchen and have to say its stunningly well made. My compliments to your designers on these objects, they're doing a fine job!

So on that note, I would very much enjoy more of these epic pieces of large furniture. One of the biggest thing I've noticed you guys have missed out on in mog houses are... chairs. We literally have no chairs. We have a couple stools and a bench, but there is nothing that really fits with our tables. A couple different types of chairs would be cool.

A wider variety of paintings and other wall objects would also be enjoyable. Maybe another big wall hanging like the Gustaberg painting would be nice.

As per crafting, it seems that food has quickly dropped to little use. I mainly suspect this as to Abyssea's incredible size of buffs now dwarf the importance of food.

Maybe add some food items that somehow augment your character in abyssea? A set of foods that increase the potency of lights you gain in abyssea would probably sell like wildfire on the auctionhouse, or maybe in the form of stacks of "drops" from alchemy in the medicine section.

How about some Treasure Hunter food? Now THAT would be well sought after on the AH.

Also: You guys really REALLY need to add all the new post ToAU arrows/bolts to the NPC for quivering, too many really good arrows and bolts are having 0 demand because they can't be quivered and thus take up too much inventory space.

Finally, either increase the rate of skillups in synergy or lower the cost of Fewell. It shouldn't cost 100~150K to get 10 levels in a craft. Maybe lower the cost of fewell as you level up, or the inverse?

Also fishing seems to be getting a lot of love lately regarding items to make it easier. Maybe consider adding a new 150K cost GP armor to each craft that gives something like "HQ rate +10%" or something. A lot of the economy ran back in the day on GP, demand for products to make GP items helped run things but now everyone and their mule has their apron and item.

These are all things I just thought up off the top of my head.

[Rakam]

If i read right max will be 80 for all craft and 40 extra level pass that mark
So 2 craft at 100 and rest at 80...

[Bling]

I just ran across this thread and wanted to voice my disappointment about the postponement of the skill cap increase (prolly too late but what the hell). As a very old school crafter, when I heard about the skill cap increase I thought it could breathe some life into a portion of the game that I think needs it.

There are very few things craftable (not synergy) anymore that are even worth bragging about; and I hate it. Synergy is a stupid and clumsy system; hardly anybody does it. Requiring 2+ people to make anything worthwhile is difficult, makes such items very unavailable, and ruins one of the best things about "crafting"; it's something to do when none of your friends are online or you don't have much time to play.

Multiple 100+ crafts would ease the burden synergy imposes on crafters. Who cares if we have multiple 100+ skills; just makes it so we have to mule less and might increase supply in terms of old synths. Since gil is useless anymore (R.I.P. relic and mythic weapons, salvage gear, H.Q. anything cause it'll be junk in 1 update, etc.) some of synths that require subs might be able to be HQ'd at a higher rate and will hopefully increase supply of some of the things that have become rare because hardly anybody crafts for money now it seems (arhats +1 for example).

I could prolly rant forever; but in short:
1. Please don't postpone the skill cap increase.
2. Please stop making consumables like arrows/bolts/bullets synergy only.
3. Please stop making the "awesome" armors synergy only.

Or you could just give up on synergy like you gave up on the ebon/furia/ebur armor you released with it; because it sucks.

[Bling]

• Improvements to synergy, fishing, chocobo digging, harvesting, mining, gathering systems

Wow, it's been a while; a very long while. I don't think many people dig anymore. Maybe it's because damn near everything you can dig up now drops in a gold chest in abyssea which people farm 24/7, because it's the entire game to do so.

[Wenceslao]

Wow, it's been a while; a very long while. I don't think many people dig anymore. Maybe it's because damn near everything you can dig up now drops in a gold chest in abyssea which people farm 24/7, because it's the entire game to do so.

lol there are people who still lives outside abyssea, lmao

[Jada]

I'm on the line about having 2 level 100 guilds. I see 2 happening things with this.

I see the materials to make items sky rocket and the price of the end result of the syth lowered drasticly due to the fact that there will be so many in the Auction House. The player purchasing the item would not see a problem with it, but the amount of gil lost will hurt the person that made it.

I also see an improvement in HQ'ing items that can sell quick. Like Bullets, Arrows, Shihei, Sneak, Invis, etc. If you have the right guilds leveled that is.

Although synergy has its benefits, I haven't grown fond of it. I understand that now:

1: ) Adventureres now can work together to make something. (Which I haven't grasp whether this is good or bad now)

2: ) There is no loss of items (why don't they make this for the normal guilds instead of having our MH filled with crap to prevent a lost by a certain %?)

3: ) You can add slots to certain weapons and armor
(Now this is what synergy is about to me but the problem now is the augmented armor / weapons people don't use because of abyssea, dynamis, magian trials.) Can we make an update that adds more weapons and armor to the slot system?

[GlobalVariable]

3: ) You can add slots to certain weapons and armor
(Now this is what synergy is about to me but the problem now is the augmented armor / weapons people don't use because of abyssea, dynamis, magian trials.) Can we make an update that adds more weapons and armor to the slot system?

The things you can fill the slots with are complete trash. I'm not farming a bunch of NM so I can be carrying 10 different situational evolith that give me marginal +attack vs specific mob families and re-augmenting my gear (which will have crap for non augment stats if it can be augmented) everytime I switch to fighting a different mob.

Just look at it.
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Evolith#Evolith_Shape_TriangleUpFilled

[Jada]

The things you can fill the slots with are complete trash. I'm not carring 10 different situation evolith that give me marginal +attack vs specific mob families and re-augmenting my gear everytime I switch to fighting a different mob.

You're right. I don't know why I didn't bring that up.

The Aug's you can add to the slots are pure crap that players would not use even when the system 1st came out.

Add slots to Emp/Relic/Mystic weapons and good evolith's drop in Salvage/Abyssea/Dynamis lol

[GlobalVariable]

Just edit the stats on all those evolith stones, change what can be placed in which gear after. Fixed sizes and +amounts off specific targets of actually useful stats like it that leaping lizzy can cough up +2 agi on a small sized stone to fit a small sized slot. None of this vs lizards crap. Nussknacker being a much high level can cough up a larger stone for +6 instead (which would not fit the smaller slot). Just completely overwrite the existing evolith stone possibilities.

Make the shape/element stuff sort out mage/melee stats and such instead. Mages didn't need +attack(melee stat) vs birds on their INT gear...


Gonna stop talking about synergy's evolith now, before its to far off the topic of crafting. >.>

[Tazz]

really bummed that this is not in this update when it very much sounded like it was going to be

[jonrambo]

That is an excellent idea to put forward, but if it is can the issue of skill ups be addressed, as speaking for many the ability to level crafts at times is absurd, and as example alchemy synth to cap at 61 venom dust to get from 58 has so far taken 12 stacks of farmed scorpion claws, synths made on the right day and moon phases and resulted in 1 broken synth and .3 skill ups only, which is by my reckoning an awful lot of work for so little reward.

[Bhujerba]

Crafting:
- remove the wait time between crafting.
- add "Craft All" option when choosing crystal+mats, it will repeat the same craft as long as you have the mats in the inventory.
- remove guild points restrictions, allow us to gather points for different crafts at the same time.
- Crafting will be revived if you bring it back to the end-game scene, powerful crafted items alongside dropped items, like cursed gear.
- let Crafting share a good amount of new unique items like it used to be, nowadays there are many sources that give items like boxes and such, leaving nothing to add for crafting...

Chocobo Digging:
- increase the Stack of greens to 99.
- increase the maximum items per zone, with Chocobo Endurance gear I usually dry up a zone myself before reaching the cap...(from full)
- Add more zone with new items to dig with.
- make personal Chocobo Digging stats relevant, and enhance the abilities more than just adding new items to the pool (sometimes its even bad when new items are crap..) make them target rare items more often.
- add a massage when the Chocobo hits the daily cap (for fishing too if you didn't do already?)

[Totema]

Was this implemented in the update? Not seeing it anywhere in the update logs.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

Was this implemented in the update? Not seeing it anywhere in the update logs.

No, it's been put on hold for the time being.

[Huevriel]

Crafting:
- Raise of 80 from 40 should be fine. It'll be nice to do more crafting after 100/60/60/etc. It'd be nice to make stuff just out of my reach too.
- Do bring back the end game synthing stuff. This was sorta done with the aptant armors and I love it, but I know everyone just powerlevels past those armors. It makes me sad face.
- "Synth All" i think was kinda implemented with certain KI (like tirturation, or sheet making). Making "synth all" feels rather bot-ish.
- DO NOT MAKE GUILD POINTS AVAILABLE ACROSS ALL CRAFTS. This will ruin crafting as people will get KI's across the board and screw with the economy.

Chocobo Digging:
- increase the Stack of greens to 99.
- increase the maximum items per zone

[Aena]

I feel lonely in not wanting Cooking to be a free 100 craft like fishing, as suggested earlier a couple of times! :confused:

This is a little rambly, but I've always enjoyed the culinarian line of synthesis as my main craft, and there is no shortage of chefs filling up the food markets or taking up the craft as it is. It would only provide even more competition and less of a market for those who chose to save money and make a steady income off of one category of consumable item rather than hit it big from a lottery off of a lucky synthesis (once upon a time--I realize this is hardly applicable lately). I did not pick this craft to fund another, but because I've always thoroughly enjoyed the prospect of making and selling delectable dishes. Unless mastering all crafts becomes an option, I don't see why it makes sense to make cooking a free 100 skill like fishing. Players have a choice in what crafts they would like to master, and cooking was neither forced upon nor restricted from anyone, and you can level/delevel it easily at any time if you want/dislike it that much. A Linkshell member spent this last week (with a job and house hunting) boosting cooking from 60 to 96ish for Dawn Mulsum - it's not a huge loss if you want it, it's not a huge loss if you want to get rid of it.

In response to a very early post in this thread, fishing does not only go hand-in-hand with cooking, where it mostly benefits chefs who have invested in Raw Fish Handling and some lower demand items - which not all chefs solely specialize in: it also provides Alchemy and Woodworking materials (ink, poison, paralysis, furnishing materials). Cooking also does have a handful of subcrafts within its synths: woodworking and clothcraft are two sub-crafts used in high-level cooking recipes, for example, and there is also a need for items created from other crafts, such as Maple Sugar if San d'Oria is in last and you don't have any saved as back-up. At least on Bismarck, there are enough chefs to keep prices reasonable in regard to ingredient price and rarity, and there is no shortage of competition for ingredients in popular dishes. I can already name at least 10 active chefs with whom I compete in various markets. I don't understand the basis of the argument for making high-leveled Cooking a free craft.

Erm, but I am all in favor of having another craft at 100 (or my considered one craft at 61, one at 80, and one at... 79?--however that maths out). :D

[Bhujerba]

"Synth All" i think was kinda implemented with certain KI (like tirturation, or sheet making). Making "synth all" feels rather bot-ish.
expanding the items that can be crafted at once is welcomed too, the "Craft all" is a known feature in almost every MMO I played that has crafting, its a legitimate feature before its a bot.
I guess the "don't know any better" still applies to this community..:(

DO NOT MAKE GUILD POINTS AVAILABLE ACROSS ALL CRAFTS. This will ruin crafting as people will get KI's across the board and screw with the economy.

huh? :confused:..you know, you can always get any KI/items from any guild, this isn't something new (what you can buy is limited by your crafting skill already), removing the limitation on accumulating guild points will only makes the process faster, otherwise it would take years to gather ~300k (sub)-600k(main)~ GP for each craft one by one. something tells me you dont have many sub-crafts at 60...
plus the limitation is already lifted by simply having crafting mules, I don't see how this have ever screwed the economy...

[Zaknafein]

Yes please raise the cap

[Ragearo]

While I enjoy synergy and am in the process of leveling it up, I hate that normal crafts are all but stagnant save a few synths (primarily cursed gear and consumables). I've also noticed (on Siren server at least) that the consumables made with synergy are so overpriced based on their mats simply because there are so few people making them. Things like oberon bullets have never sold in stacks of 12 pouches on the auction house. I've resorted to buying consumables far below what I consider the acceptable level (Iron Bullets or below for corsair) simply due to a lack of supply, and the minimal supply an the Auction House is typically drastically overpriced based on the material cost. Most of these consumables take a high level craft, so you cannot synergize them yourself unless you happened to have leveld that craft. Before the 75 cap was raised and the highest level consumables were all from synergy, I was able to make steel and iron bullets for corsair with smithing and alchemy as subcrafts without any issues. Now even if I had synergy to the proper level, I would not be able to make the newer bullets without a proper craft rank in my party, which tends to be difficult to find. This follows in the same vein as arrows and the higher bullets that rangers can use. I see many rangers reverting to demon/scorpion arrows etc simply because the supply for them is higher and they are not severely overpriced as well.

I don't mean to complain, but I feel as though it is ridiculous that EVERY new craft is actually a new synergy recipe, and the new synthesis recipes are typically just to make materials for the synergy recipe that makes the end product. While this is fine for armor I suppose, I would much prefer synergy to be for what it was originally released with - not so much the evolith system itself but the concept of the weapons and armor in that you would have to seek out the materials (in some cases r/ex drops from notorious monsters) and synergize them with a small group of people to have the most desirable result. I feel as though the teamwork in synergizing to turn your earned r/ex materials into a usable piece of gear was pretty exciting, especially when the same group that fought for the materials helped you synergize them into something usable.

Yes, there should be some profit synergy recipes, and some armor should be synergized, but making all consumables and equipment recipes synergy and none synthesis just seems unfair, and skews the market way too much. Right now there just aren't enough synergists with the proper 100 crafts to supply the auction house with the number of consumables that it should have. For instance, while I may finish my synergy to the current cap, I would be unable to make any consumables because I do not have woodworking or smithing above 60. While I would be happy if veteran smiths and woodworkers could simply synthesize consumables, the fact that these recipes are restricted to those crafters that have both synergy and woodworking or both synergy and smithing leveled restricts the market far too much.

/rant off

[VoiceMemo]

Another thing related to synergy. I really don't like that once we upgrade a skill we cannot change it. There should be a way to remove it and chose something else. Because there is some debate over which skills are best to lvl, ie safety lever or pressure handle or repair. The only way that I found was to pick 1 and test. But what in the case that we don't like it. I for one did 5/5 repair, which after testing I would not have done. The amount of repair gained from 5/5 is not enough. I would like to drop the 5/5 repair and put it into safety lever.

Please allow us a way to decrease the skills we have for synergy.

[Coldbrand]

Why on Earth did you people try and stop this from happening? YES I want two 100s.

[Raksha]

Why on Earth did you people try and stop this from happening? YES I want two 100s.

Yeah i'm baffled also.

[GlobalVariable]

Why on Earth did you people try and stop this from happening? YES I want two 100s.
That isn't what most of the replies tried to do at all. Most were fine with multiple lv100's and had a lot of "ifs" attached to related related concerns like going past 100 or being required to have lv100 subs on new recipes.

SE didn't say this was never ever happening, they just said they weren't doing it right now.

I for one, am happy that for once we got asked before something was decided - as far as I can recall that has never happened before. If they actually believed most of us posting were dead set against having 2 lv100's..Well I dunno what to say. But that was how I read the post (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/4771-Craft-Skill-Limitations?p=78836&viewfull=1#post78836) saying it was postponed (not canceled).

[RushLynx]

Why on Earth did you people try and stop this from happening? YES I want two 100s.

Yeah, most of us were for raising the caps, but wanted to know exactly what their plans were... And voiced our opinions and concerns as to where this was heading... Which in my opinion is what the purpose of this thread was...

I'm all for raising the caps, but I strongly believe that some severe attention needs to be payed to the existing crafting system before they jump in and start adding things... As it stands crafting is in pretty sad shape, letting people level another to 100 really isn't going to fix that...

[Vold]

Why on Earth did you people try and stop this from happening? YES I want two 100s.It's called balance. As things stand, it wouldn't really matter if we could skill all crafts to 100. But imagine for a moment, what if they started caring about crafting again, and they started giving crafts synths that replaced the old money makers. I'll tell you exactly what will happen. You'll get money synth A. You will rejoice. Then, once you realize that all the extra competition is flooding the AH, you'll start getting bitter. Unless you're a cook or alchemist and are the extra competition in the other crafts.

It's a complicated issue. It was for the best that they stop, take a step back, and consider everything. And make no mistake, there is a lot of "everything" to consider. Crafting was/still sorta is a very important part of the FFXI experience. It needs work to recover from the level cap raise.

[Zaknafein]

raise the cap!

[Deadmen]

I like this idea, but what it actually comes down too prolly been said multiple times here, crafting is now useless gear wise, food/fishing/medicines/ bolts anything like that with craft its an okay craft but we need more gear, more craftable gear. Not gear to just have gear, but better gear worth crafting

[Coldbrand]

Yeah sorry, that was a terrible explanation as to why I can't have my second 100 because of people like you whining. You used a buzz word and then rambled about some hypothetical situation without a structured argument leading up to how it would come to be.

Try again harder if you want, but I'm really hoping we get dual 100s in July.

[Godofgods]

actuly coldbrand, his point is quite valid. your the one whinning lol

[Cljader1]

I agree with coldbrand, godofgods you are the one thats whinning

[GlobalVariable]

Yeah everyone else is out to stop you all from having dual 100's and crying their eyes out that it's coming eventually. /rolleyes.

[Kikkyo]

I'm pretty much with everyone else who thinks that other things should be focused on first. Dual 100's isn't going to matter much to anyone if you're not able to use them for anything worthwhile.

[Zidian]

Do this, fixing crafting is another issue all together, but being able to take two crafts up to 100 is a god-sent.

[Elidani]

Yes, please add this feature in. I just started crafting again and this will be very helpful. I do agree with some of the other people that it would be nice if we had more synths added to the normal synthesis. The current ones are a little dead, but I think it would be nice if they got revived.

Synergy was not a bad idea...it would've been better if it were initially a little less complicated. If synergy were used solely to augment equipment/weapons it wouldn't be a problem.

Traditional crafts should be creating the gear, while synergy gets used to augment the pieces for more player specific needs.

Another thing to note is that many of the current gear recipes (low level especially) have really useless stats. It would be nice if we had synths that made more sense. For example, all those low level earrings/rings with elemental only boosts that very few (if any) people ever buy...the best you get is added defense +1 if you HQ. While in some cases these earrings might help lessen the magic dmg received, they are just not very practical. They don't get used and crafters who make them lose a lot of time and gil doing so. Want to revive crafting and improve synergy? Make it so that they are still crafted in the traditional way only, but can get interesting augments through synergy.
Augment examples:
Treasure Hunter +1
Charm +1
Magic atk bonus +1 : associated with the element of the original item.
Magic Def +1: same as above.

As the level of gear increases so should the lvl of augment. It could be implemented same as with merits (i.e. a lvl 20-29 item has + 2 vs a lvl 30-39 with +3).

These are just a few ideas, but they could help with the slow economy and the lost hope of many crafters.

[CapriciousOne]

Personally I really don't see the point of any limit whether it is a 40 point or 100 point limit. I hate limits of any kind. The only limit that should exist to me is whatever one that I SELF-IMPOSE. Personally I think the fact that you even have to create mutliple mules to have multiple 100 skills is complete crap especially considering the crappy 8 item delivery system unless u actually bother to level up that mule which is also useless too. I mean who wants to spend more endless hours exping on a new character. I suppose it not an issue for those who have been playing longer than the 2 years I have been but I personally would just like to see the whole system undergo some changes beyond just the skill point.

[CapriciousOne]

Well synergy is based upon the ranks you have achieved in each of the base crafts though the enforcement of those ranks to the recipes are a bit weak but i'm not complaining. I dont think that adding another 50 levels to crafting will work at all because the skilling process is already horrible as is past 60 and i dont plan on spending forever and a day trying to get up to 150 and I doubt many others will either. There are plenty of things that can be done to improve what is already there before introducing lot of new stuff. People need to readjust their thinking and fix what is broken with what already exists then add new stuff instead of just throwing new crap on top old broken crap. Oh and this thread is related to all crafting the basic as well as synergy if forgot the original posters subject line.

[DomenicOfSylph]

How about creating items for Empyrean +3 items? :D Breathe life into crafting. Everyone is too GAGA over Abyssea while other elements of the game suffer.

[CapriciousOne]

I have what would probably sound like a dumb question about these 40(or possible 80) skill points since this is related to crafting. Ok I have two skills past 60 but neither has quite hit 100 yet (alchemy and cooking both about 70). So anyway let say I get Alchemy to 100 and now I want to switch and make Cooking 100. Is that an one time deal where once i move those 40 points to cooking it is final or can i switch all 40 skill point back and forth between all crafts as many times as I want and need with out having to manually skill up past 60 all over again?

If I dont have to skill up all over again for those crafts past 60 after allocating all 40 points to one craft, then unless they are adding new recipes where the sub craft skill needes is higher than say 80 like (alchemy 100/ Smithing 85) then I really dont see the point in an increas but I guess I would still utilize it if it was available. On the other hand if it works like lowering a merited skill by one level means that if you want to raise that skill back to where it was before you have to regain all the merit points needed to do so then HELL YEA they need to increase those points to like 160 as far as i'm concerned.

I dont really craft for profit because the ah is garbage and everybody basically sells everything at or near what u would get from a npc so why bother listing it and the items that sell for higher are usually harder to get but I guess I could always do Abyssea(sigh). Anyway an answer to this question may help me to decide on whether or not to remove an earlier post so much thanks to anyone that answers this clearly in a YES or NO fashion.

[WilmaFlintstone]

Its "mostly" the level cap increase that affected the game, Abyssea is merely a place to level and obtain the new items, specially the latter, they cant put all the new items on old monsters/areas (they need new outlet for items, to avoid cluttering/etc), plus any level increase will ALWAYS throw any game off-balance, whether its drastic(Abyssea) or not, what was at level cap before will never be the same after, welcome to change.

I think some of the balance can be regained if they make Abyssea a level cap area where you have to be level 75+ to enter intstead of the current lvl 30. This would force people to go back to partying in the older areas as well as having to use items from the AH of consumables and gear. Yes, welcome to change, but with change you should be able to fix your errors.

[Goddessofwar]

This seems like a fantastic change! After leveling my first 100 craft, I have been contemplating leveling another but did not want to have to resort to a mule. Would love to see this go live!

[Wojo]

Obtaining the 'phat lewt' is what motivates us. I want to spend my Wednesday nights playing FFXI with my friends working toward obtaining items.

If you want draw people to synergy, include it in this process. If Synergy/Crafting skills were required for Magian Trail upgrades, that would be a huge boost the economy. This should be easy enough to implement.

*Edit* I think I posted this to the wrong thread....

[Gokku]

as a person who recently leveled alot of his crafts and sub crafts and synergy to 100 /60 /60 /80 respectively i am extremely disappointed in the synergy system. Now Cloth craft and Goldsmith have great synths they can do and even make very good money. when in retrospect the amount of profitable synths for Smithing leather craft woodworking etc are next to none and the only synths making money are among some of the most difficult synths to do in the game.

There is nothing "positive" about leveling a craft in final fantasy you spend millions of gil and at least a month of your time for what? some crafts cave some synths but its nothing like it was with the level 75 cap. No longer can you level a craft to 100 and feel accomplished now you level and its pointless since every synth that used to be worthwhile is useless now and all other synths are synergy.

I know Se plans to add Dual 100 crafts and 100 synergy and crafts for both , but unless there is revisions made to basic crafts or even attractive crafts for just your BASIC crafter its going to remain something only a few do. Synergy wise there needs to be a small heal or buff to the furnace when doing the harder synths you cant expect a solo player to make these increasingly harder synths. Se really needs to stop punishing players and add some sense of accomplishment when you reach 100 or at least allow skill ups on synergy and the craft your doing .

tldr , make normal crafts , my synergy synths for all crafts , stop punishing crafters and start rewarding them for there work.

[CapriciousOne]

Do this, fixing crafting is another issue all together, but being able to take two crafts up to 100 is a god-sent.

No god sent is being able to take all crafts to 100 and never having to buy a single item off the ah ever again from you price gougers, lol

[CapriciousOne]

I couldn't agree more, synergy has mess up the whole crafting system

I disagree the whole crafting system was already screwed to start. I mean when I first got my key item to enchant ingots I was all excited "yea I can enchant all my weapons and armors" only to find out that I can only enchange like a select few ingots and only to make a few selected POS armors/weapons I dont even want to use. Ooooh how about thinking that as my skill past the cap for the recipe that as my skill reaches like 2x the cap that I should be able to hq1 like almost all the time and hq2 and hq3 more often now that my level 60 kill is being used to make a lvl 20 or 30 synth. I dont even bother crafting any more at this point it is all a waste. Even synergy is a waste because it is based on the rank you acquired in craft and after like novice or so skill ups become so rare that you feel like u making no progress what so ever. In addition some of those synergy requires 3 or crafts above craftsman rank I think but with skilling up BASIC crafts as it is where the highest skill up u get is 0.3 in comparison to like 0.5 for normal combat skill up why does anybody bother after reaching 60 I sometimes wonder.

LOL ok I think i'm done ranting.

[axlzero]

i say go for it also might walla look intomaybe allowing people to take crafts to 120 but have no items that take more then 100 it will allow people to HQ hard stuff to make easyer. also how about a system were you can buy crafting materials from guild make the next teir of that material and sell back to guild fpr small profit.
I would also like to see a type of store that only sells crafted armors & weapons from crafters is stocked by crafters and sells only the amount of goods sold to them so crafters can move there finished items faster. instead of waiting on something to sell in the aution house they can npc there good in a way that they make money off them and the price wont be unreasonable i would recommend that this store only sell finished products like amror weapons medicines ammo and only stuff that is made no RAR/EX stuff

[Yugl]

* Chance of HQ increases with number of members participating in Synergy
* Add more skill up recipes
* Allow members past a particular level the ability to teleport to their respective guild
* Improve GP acquisition by increasing the points obtained and selecting recipes that correspond to materials most available (Alchemy gets screwed on this when the recipe requires a piece of smithing armor no one makes anymore).

[KigenAngelios]

* Chance of HQ increases with number of members participating in Synergy
* Add more skill up recipes
* Allow members past a particular level the ability to teleport to their respective guild
* Improve GP acquisition by increasing the points obtained and selecting recipes that correspond to materials most available (Alchemy gets screwed on this when the recipe requires a piece of smithing armor no one makes anymore).

Really good ideas, I agree with all of them for sure. A buyable-with-GP ring that has an auto-refillable once a day charge to tele you.

About Evoliths:
I actually came over here from the Evolith thread. When I came back to the game, I thought this was a really cool idea - a controlled augmenting system - but the implementation was poor and the Evoliths available were worse. I got excited when AF3 came out because I thought it would be a make-your-own-relic-armor type of deal rather than the static stuff given. This make-you-own-gear SHOULD be what Evoliths become.

I would like to suggest that Alchemist be able to make non-EX AH-able Evoliths (it would revive alchemy to an extent as there are no high level sought after recipes for alchemy or synergy-alchemy). If done right this would surpass the augmenting system (which I'm not really a fan of). And please just have generic stats that people want (STR+X, Attack+X, Acc+X, etc. and NOT atk vs. slimes +X, etc.)

[Sargent]

As a crafter whose only craft is Synergy, my request is this:

Add a recipe that will allow us to level Synergy to 80+ without having to level another craft to 70 or more.

At the moment, you can only get to 70 unless you have another craft levelled

[AyinDygra]

Since Chocobo Digging was mentioned on that list, I just thought copy my post (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/4778-Chocobo-Digging-Updates?p=65925&viewfull=1#post65925) into this discussion.

---

Chocobo Digging really does need changes.

Available Items
As a maximum skill digger with a Chocobo raised for max digging stats and a full set of chocobo riding gear including the special digging body piece, it used to be my primary method of making money (combined with crafting what I dug up), but the most profitable directly dug up items (elemental ores and orichalcum ore) plummeted with the introduction of Magian Trials and Abyssea's gold chests (massive supply, itsy-bitsy demand.) It is still possible to make money with digging, but I wouldn't count on it as my main source of income anymore.

Inventory
My main issue these days is still inventory space. To most efficiently use my time, digging requires me to go out with about 20 stacks of Gysahl Greens and enough room for everything I'll dig up without tossing every single junk item (pebbles, I hate you so.) Before, I had no trouble making room for about 40 slots to dig comfortably. These days, I have so many unused seals from Dominion Ops that I eventually want to use, and don't want to discard, plus all the Rare/Ex accessories and items that are not covered by the new storage slips, that I really don't have much room anymore. I have all the inventory expansions that are available, and it's still tight. Once my server finishes its merge, I'd have to go play inventory juggling through the delivery box to make room again.

RMT
My main issue with RMT was that they'd "Dig up" certain zones so no items were left for me when I got there. The fatigue idea stopped individual diggers from 24/7 digging, but they had multiple accounts that they simply rotated... making fatigue only really impact honest players who can't dig 24/7 with different characters. The only thing that really stopped RMT, in my experience, was the drastic drop in price of anything worth digging up. It was no longer profitable for them to abuse the digging system.

3 things that would help bring back Chocobo Digging, for me, would be:

* Gysahl Greens stacking to 99. This alone would probably give me enough space to dig these days. (4 stacks plus 15-20 open spaces for dug up items would be easy to make room for.)

* Add new items to digging (perhaps in new areas) that are worthwhile to dig up. I don't expect exclusive items to chocobo digging, but we need something. (I wouldn't mind completing some quest like digging up new chocograph pieces to bring chocobos into the new areas, or only allow personally raised - not rented - chocobos to dig there.)

* Availability of items tied only to Fatigue, not to "Zone stock." I wouldn't mind the fatigue-limited number of items I can dig up if I could use all of my dig attempts in only the area that has the valuable items that I'm trying to get, during a single digging session, at the time convenient to me to go digging. When zones are "all dug up" -- empty of items -- either you wait for the zone to slowly restock (chocobo riding time is limited, so you can only wait for so long before having to either rent a new chocobo and ride back out to the desired zone, or use another charge on your whistle) or move on to another zone that has less optimal digging results, just to get "something" while you have time to dig (real life schedules, limited time).

I may add a few more suggestions as I take more time to think about it.

---

I have other thoughts on Evoliths and other gear upgrade systems to share at a later time.

[Madawc]

1. Evolith + Magian Moogle = Enhanced weapons and Armor.

Let us get Evoliths from synthesis, synergy, PvP rewards (Colosseum *twist fingers*) and quests. And then use these to augment weapons and equipment without the restriction of having the right socket/elemets.

2. Reuse old equipment Sky Gear/Homam/JSE/AF -> Synergy = Lv99 equipment.

3. Higher tier of food and drinks from synergy.

[VoiceMemo]

Since we now know the update is scheduled for Sept 19th from other posts, I was rereading this post and it occurred to me that there seems to be 2 options here.

Case 1:


For the future expansion of synthesis and synergy, we’re looking into raising the skill level limitation from 40 to 80 during the next version update. Once this change takes place, you will then be able to have two crafts leveled to 100.


In this case if the limitation were raised from 40 to 80. This would mean 2 crafts at 100 and the rest at 60.

Case 2:


The main points of adjustments beginning from the next version update and on are listed below:


Raise the 40 skills levels that can be distributed when a skill reaches 60 to 80. (Makes possible the ability to level two skills to 100)
For the next version update “Revoking Craftsmanship Status” will remain the same as original (Bringing your skill down to 60). For future version updates we plan on making adjustments so that the system allows you to decide which craft skill you would like craftsmanship revoked.
Additionally for future adjustments we are thinking about increasing the levels further beyond 80.



In this case if the base skill was raised from 60 to 80, this would mean 2 crafts at 100 and the rest at 80.

Between the 2 cases I would prefer case 2 because It would not only give us 2 100 lvl crafts, but all the subs would be 80.

Can we have clarification which case is being implemented?

[CapriciousOne]

After re-reading what you posted, this might not be such a bad idea in either case. Sounds like u can technically have either 3 crafts to 100 or 2 crafts to 100 with 2 additional crafts to 80 if one likes on the same character. I didnt think about it like that but still i hate limits of any kind and would like all to 100 but this is a good start I suppose. One thing I would like though is a small change to the Revoke craftsman rank. In stead of completely wiping say the 20 skill levels above sixty for the craft being revoked what I was able to revoke only 10 so I can put it elsewhere?

[VoiceMemo]

Huh, I don't see how you got 3 crafts to 100 from my post.

Case1 of increasing the levels beyond 60 from 40 to 80 means 2 crafts to 100. 60 + 40 = 100 for 2 crafts(40 x 2 = 80 for craft skill limits), rest at 60.

Cast 2 of increasing the base level when the craft limitation is applied, but leaving the limitation at 40 is 80 + 20 = 100 for 2 crafts(20 x 2 = 40 for craft skill limits), rest at 80.

Even if you combined both cases you would not get 3 guilds at 100, combining the 2 would give 4 guilds at 100.
80 + 20 = 100 for 4 crafts (4 x 20 = 80 for craft skill limits)

[FrankReynolds]

I think something was lost in translation. Camate only listed 1 scenario. He just worded it in a confusing manor. He's saying the same thing in both of those quotes.

[Limecat]

I don't suppose we could get an update on the implementation of this? I'm getting itchy with my stockpiled skillup mats.

[kewitt]

Well patch came and went? What happened to this?

[Crocker]

Looks like they forgot about this update that so many wanted, guess making it a sticky was a late April Fools joke...
If not its October now! please give us this now its been long enough.

At the very least allow cooking to 100 for everyone tired of never having the food I want on the Auction House.
Its the same food curry/buns, mithkabobs, low supply of tacos, 3 types of sushi, and pizza that's it. (and now skill up food) Would be nice to make myself food that no one makes or uses.

New issue now also new jug pets are 70-80+ cooking so us BST without cooking can't even make them and I am not paying the overpriced prices on them, so my bst is stuck with level 80 jugs.

Screw all other update's postpone level 99 cap increase if needed and revamp crafting

1)Allow another 100 craft or just give everyone cooking uncapped how fishing is now.

2)Multiple Guilds at once, Up to 3 would be nice. - Right now if I want to get Guild points in another craft I lose all points in the current guild im in.

3)Less or no Breaks once you are a certain level above the cap. (example Tsurara cap is level 6 - I am level 100 I broke 4 in a row, that shouldn't happen!)

4)Revamp Guild point items and amounts needed - As an alchemist I am lucky to see an item I can make 2-3 times a week and when it is something i can make it needs like 8 of them for like 4k guild points. Its sad when stuff like a dex potion shows up and you need 6 of them and its impossible to make 1.

5)More stackable and higher stackable items - All Crafting items that doesn't stack needs to stack to 12 stuff that stacks to 12 needs to stack to 99. In a game where we are struggling with inventory space due to "PS2 Limitations" you as a company need to go above and beyond to help us out. Storage slips was a great start but it isn't enough we need a full item revamping to make it work on all systems.

[FrankReynolds]

Looks like they forgot about this update that so many wanted, guess making it a sticky was a late April Fools joke...
If not its October now! please give us this now its been long enough.

At the very least allow cooking to 100 for everyone tired of never having the food I want on the Auction House.
Its the same food curry/buns, mithkabobs, low supply of tacos, 3 types of sushi, and pizza that's it. (and now skill up food) Would be nice to make myself food that no one makes or uses.

New issue now also new jug pets are 70-80+ cooking so us BST without cooking can't even make them and I am not paying the overpriced prices on them, so my bst is stuck with level 80 jugs.

Screw all other update's postpone level 99 cap increase if needed and revamp crafting

1)Allow another 100 craft or just give everyone cooking uncapped how fishing is now.

2)Multiple Guilds at once, Up to 3 would be nice. - Right now if I want to get Guild points in another craft I lose all points in the current guild im in.

3)Less or no Breaks once you are a certain level above the cap. (example Tsurara cap is level 6 - I am level 100 I broke 4 in a row, that shouldn't happen!)

4)Revamp Guild point items and amounts needed - As an alchemist I am lucky to see an item I can make 2-3 times a week and when it is something i can make it needs like 8 of them for like 4k guild points. Its sad when stuff like a dex potion shows up and you need 6 of them and its impossible to make 1.

5)More stackable and higher stackable items - All Crafting items that doesn't stack needs to stack to 12 stuff that stacks to 12 needs to stack to 99. In a game where we are struggling with inventory space due to "PS2 Limitations" you as a company need to go above and beyond to help us out. Storage slips was a great start but it isn't enough we need a full item revamping to make it work on all systems.

agreed. I gave up crafting because i'm sick of the inventory bS. I don't have room for anything anymore. I literally drop items that are worth less than 10k nowadays because there isn't room for them. I quit cooking because half the crap doesn't stack, or not high enough. I don't think that people should have to have 7 mules in order to do crafting.

Instead of storage slips, maybe we could do craft lockers at the guild, so that you can store all your craft items there. Those storage slips are a pain in the ass. I can never remember what i put in them, and have to pull each slip to see whats in there. Losing your Homam Body is lame. Not remembering where you put a stack of Fire Crystals is far less traumatic.

[Aarahs]

If you read the whole thread you'll discover that it was decided to be postponed with no eta.

[SMD111]

agreed. I gave up crafting because i'm sick of the inventory bS. I don't have room for anything anymore. I literally drop items that are worth less than 10k nowadays because there isn't room for them. I quit cooking because half the crap doesn't stack, or not high enough. I don't think that people should have to have 7 mules in order to do crafting.

Instead of storage slips, maybe we could do craft lockers at the guild, so that you can store all your craft items there. Those storage slips are a pain in the ass. I can never remember what i put in them, and have to pull each slip to see whats in there. Losing your Homam Body is lame. Not remembering where you put a stack of Fire Crystals is far less traumatic.

hay if you want you can send all your items less then 10k to me lol

[FrankReynolds]

hay if you want you can send all your items less then 10k to me lol

You would have to follow me around everywhere, because I am typically at like 78/80 slots when I am killing stuff. I used to move stuff to my sac/satch, but then when I go to jobchange, i get in the mog house and realize that i have no space to move gear. then I have to run outside again to transfer to a mule/NPC/AH the items. which is a major inconvenience when the items end up adding up to like 35k total.

[Onitaru]

You've always been able to take two crafts to 100, unless you're publicly stating Fishing was never a craft. Also there are a lot of synthesis that produced undesirable gear (by undesirable I mean useless.) Perhaps make them part of a synthing tree to produce a better more desirable item. Also if you're going to raise the cap you should raise the amount of consumable items produced per-synth. For example Meat Ball, Sliced Carp, Trout Ball, ect are all still x12 per synth perhaps make them 99 so it still makes a stack.

[anjisnu]

how about something other than leather smithing or goldsmithing getting new synths bonecraft just got an ass full of hot coal each update since alcides crap gear