% chance for 'basic synthesis' and 'basic touch'

I'm new to FF14 and sorry if this info is somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

I have crafted 100's of items over 50 levels of different jobs and it seems the same for all. The % chance for 'basic synthesis' says 90% but it is not at all, the average after 100's items says it's more like 70% or less. The % chance for 'basic touch' says 70% but it is 50% or less.

I'm crafting items with 'basic synthesis' with a 90% chance of success and item after item after item it constantly fails way way more than 90%. Over 100's of items it's the same! And 'basic touch' works only half the time, no more.

Am i missing something?? I pray it's not something obvious... Thanks in advance for any help or info, it's driving me crazy! <3

We can only go by what the game is telling us and sadly the sample size of 100 for something like this is nowhere near enough. Now is it possible that the values are slightly off, maybe but unlikely the dev team have taken steps to make sure we don't have the crafting nightmare that was XI with it's you must face this direction under a full moon for maximum effect crap. I could postulate that as you craft more and more approaching infinity the percentage chance should go up and eventually reach 90% but as your sample size is limited to 100 or so that makes it less likely that you will have a perfect 90% success rate as each synth is taken individually rather than as a whole set

I know what you're saying, but I did say 100's not 100. Many many hundreds, not one. I hope a dev sees this and checks the code, because if there are not other factors effecting those % then they ARE way off.

Unfortunately you are looking at percentages as an absolute. In FFXIV there is RNG at play which means that there's only two true percentages - 0% & 100%, anything else is unreliable. For example, at 90% success rate you would expect to get 90 out of 100 successes, *however* it is subject to RNG so you could actually never succeed in 100 tries!

Every try is like rolling a pair of dice, if you get two 6s then you win, anything else is a fail. You could roll from now until Christmas & always roll double 6, or you could never get double 6. That's the Random Number Generator (RNG) in play.

TL;DR - Ignore the percentages unless they are zero or 100. It doesn't work how you were taught at school in this game!

Bringing moves to 100% is the reason every crafting class gets Steady Hand, and why Culinarian's 37 cross class move is Steady Hand 2.

That aside, you might want to invest in bringing Weaver up. Careful Synthesis is slightly less Efficiency than Basic Synthesis, but it is 100% success rate without any Steady Hand buff up.

For what its worth though - be glad that the RNG works the way it does. You would never get anything melded past the 2nd forced meld otherwise!

The percentages really do work. There's just a strong tendency for people to take particular notice of negative outcomes or rare outcomes (which in this case are the same thing, so a doubly strong perceptual bias). If over half of the items you make have a basic touch that fails, but also include a couple others that succeed, you'll just remember that those items didn't get their full allotment of touches. The perception ends up being that the touch is failing most of the time, when it's really not. Or if you even occasionally have an item where multiple touches fail, it will again feel like touches fail a lot, even though on most items, it doesn't come out that way.

If you want to avoid it, try to avoid steps that can fail. Combine Steady Hand with your Advanced Touches, or Steady Hand II with your Basic and Standard Touches. Replace Basic Synthesis with Careful Synthesis (or better yet, Careful Synthesis II once you can get it).

Succeeding 90 times in a row doesn't guarantee the last 10 times will fail. The game doesn't look at previous actions to decide whether to succeed, it just rolls a new dice. Statistics say that they should, but... it doesn't mean that they will.