Quote Originally Posted by Zeargi View Post
I would beg to differ, while the OP was talking about Skilling for your Automaton, crafting is equally a skill just the same. You can get sparks gear, rings, earring, and food and go to town for yourself or take the route of using the sparks to go from 0 - 400+ with a 100% rate. Likewise, a Automaton can equip the Percolator and be set on something and still gain skills at an equally high rate when teamed with Stabilizers/Turbo Chargers/Mana Channelers/Scopes, then the effects of each one can be augmented further by the Optic Fibers. All of which only need to be purchased once. All the while Crafting only gets 1-70? Where is the gear for crafting skill gain? What about the kits 71-90(100)? Not to mention the major difference is that those skill books are bought with sparks vs the kits bought with gil. FFXI has been all about change to fit your needs, except when it's comes to crafting. Back when the game first started that was understandable because there was a large group that could craft and place those items into the market. But for a few crafts: Goldsmithing for Attachments, Cooking for Pets/Food, and Woodworking for Ammo; they ended up getting the short end of the stick with RoV. A way to retool a character isn't something that shouldn't be shunned when only one craft can go to 100+
The currently implemented skillup books were added to address the problem of combat/magic skills not keeping up with the exp/leveling rate after all of the myriad boosts to exp gain made it nearly impossible to do so without purposely slowing down your grinding speed. The only combat related skills that were left out were automaton skills, which are still painful to cap in part because none of the existing skillgain+ bonuses apply to them. The OP's request for automaton skillup books makes sense and I fully support it. (I don't play PUP btw. I'm just all for addressing glaring imbalances/exclusions.)
It is still entirely possible to get capped crafting skills on a lv1 mule. There is no connection between job level and crafting. There is no connection between combat and crafting. Having low crafting skills are not likely to make you dead like gimped combat skills can. So there is no justification to add books for crafting. Having to take the time/expense of actually making things in order to increase your skill of making more stuff makes sense. Complaining that you can not do so for free does not.