What's next for crafting?

I have been an omni crafter/gatherer for some time now, and I believe nothing crafted is out of my reach. Now my sights turn to Endwalker and I'm left wondering what is in store for crafting/gathering. Mostly crafting.

Are we going to get the same thing as Shadowbringers, every crafting job homogenized? Are we going to see new skills? Are we going to see the return of shared role actions? Are we going to see expert recipes be the new norm for master tier recipes? Are we going to have more RNG to complete HQ gear?

Because I hope so! I love the expert recipes and enjoyed the thought process behind them, but I know not everyone does. I hope they can spice things up a little with crafting to make it not so samey.

We really don't know, they haven't shared much developer views regarding crafting this expansion. Ranked seasons received a lot of negative feedback for being an unhealthy grind and crafting has been stated as being too easy quite often, but at the same time lots of people participated in the Skybuilder rankings and we have more crafters than ever. It depends on what their view of "success" is, enjoyable gameplay or high participation rates.

Bots are rampant but we do know they can't do much to detect them, so it's hard to say if they'll simply ignore the issue, or try to introduce harsh anti-bot systems into crafting, such as limits to the amount of crafts or items a player can gather within a day.

Resplendent tools were a flop, the Pteranodon is exceedingly rare and has been botted and Experts, while an enjoyable system, have so far been strictly limited to special crafts. Their idea seems to be that veteran crafters want "prestige", but no one really cares enough. They might learn from this, or they might mistake it as low demand for challenging crafts and cut back further (when in reality it's the sheer length of the grind and low rewards for time spent that causes many to avoid it).

Crafting could go anywhere, we need the devs to share their thoughts and long term vision.

Being something of an omni-crafter/gatherer myself, I'd love to see general crafting remain as "easy" as it is now. By that, I mean, figuring out a macro that works best for me at my current gear level and busting through my crafting log until I've either leveled out of the macro and/or have crafted high enough that I need to figure out another way to use abilities to be more effective. I very much enjoy the relaxation/mindlessness of mass-gathering and mass-producing (for leves and such) as a way of leveling. Since it's also good for farming scrips, I appreciate the ability to essentially "print my own money" in a relaxed manner. I'm a filthy casual whose endgame is making furniture and other things to decorate my doll house and make some money with. I'm not terribly interested in what I say below for myself as a player, but I do understand people wanting more challenge out of crafting as an activity, so my suggestion is below.

One thing I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see the highest-end gear not be obtained directly from raids/trials, but from crafters who have to use materials from said raids/trials. I think this would encourage FCs to actively seek maxed out crafters and gatherers or encourage current members to level one or more DoH/DoL to make these items. Crafting at this level should also be very challenging to get the recipes for and complete the items. Crafting as a means of making money has certainly been good, but the botting and "crafting for other crafters" is limiting what we as a crafting community can offer the wider populace.

I'm just afraid that Expert Crafting's role is going to be expanded, or goddess forbid that resplendent tools are mandatory in order to make certain things.

Don't get me wrong - I leveled all of my crafters back before the Ishgardian Restoration made it Easy Button, back when different classes had different skills (cross-class), ie. 'Old School'. I really learned it from the ground up. I remember the chance-based skills, and the ones that increased those chances.

But Expert Crafting.. man I just hate that. I know it takes the smash-macro-make-things model and throws it away, but holy cow the RNG it relies on..and how many steps..the grind for Resplendent tools.. once I got a method down for just the "A" material, with more or less a 75% chance of meeting the minimum, then saw how many of the B and how many of the C it took, and how much harder they were, got a huge "I love crafting but seriously, SCREW THIS!!" from me.

So imagine on Day 1 of Endwalker. New crafting gear is available. Hell, new "everything" gear. One of the requirements is "Must be crafted while equipped with a Resplendent tool". Those brave few who actually survived that grind will be GODS for months...

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Originally Posted by TattersailNightwish

But Expert Crafting.. man I just hate that. I know it takes the smash-macro-make-things model and throws it away, but holy cow the RNG it relies on..and how many steps..the grind for Resplendent tools.. once I got a method down for just the "A" material, with more or less a 75% chance of meeting the minimum, then saw how many of the B and how many of the C it took, and how much harder they were, got a huge "I love crafting but seriously, SCREW THIS!!" from me.

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I love Experts, I just don't understand why they turned them into a grind. The system just isn't built for grinding. Long, complex crafts with lots of steps and a dash of rng that requires adapting to are brilliant for single endgame crafts, but not for repeating thousands of times. They'd be much better suited for certain Master Recipe items.

I doubt they'll require Resplendent Tools considering the tiny percentage of the playerbase that even owns one. I just hope they'll learn from it.

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

One thing I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see the highest-end gear not be obtained directly from raids/trials, but from crafters who have to use materials from said raids/trials. I think this would encourage FCs to actively seek maxed out crafters and gatherers or encourage current members to level one or more DoH/DoL to make these items. Crafting at this level should also be very challenging to get the recipes for and complete the items. Crafting as a means of making money has certainly been good, but the botting and "crafting for other crafters" is limiting what we as a crafting community can offer the wider populace.

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While that would be great, I can't see them doing that. For one, too many players would complain that the best gear that they earned from beating the hardest content is gated behind a crafting grind. Also, assuming those materials that dropped could be sold, or the resulting gear could be sold, gil would become an avenue toward BiS, and gil-sellers would flood the game. SE is aware that if gil is too useful, people will buy more of it and botting/RMT would become rampant. At this point, gil is a convenience and nothing else and I suspect SE will keep it that way.

I would be perfectly happy if they at least made augmented craftable gear penta-meldable. It still wouldn't be BiS, only slightly better than un-augmented tomestone gear. That gives players a choice of whether they are happy with just augmented, pentamelded gear, or if they want to grind to trade the extra substats for 10 more ilvls. Not to mention, it gives lower tier DoW/DoM materia more uses/value.

But at this point, I have given up on hoping that anything like this will happen. SE clearly does not want crafting to matter that much. They don't care to give us a market outside of glamour/housing/niche stuff. Which is why I have never bothered to care much about DoH/DoL in this game. Doing all this work to make all this cool gear just to turn it in to NPCs does not seem right.