4.05 crafting disappointment

You can edit your post to go past the 1k character limit. Also you mean Prudent Touch, not Precise Touch. :P

Also I don't get why people want starred crafts to be a "puzzle". Sure a puzzle may be fun to solve the first time, but what about the 2nd time? The 10th time? The 100th time? Do you really want to spend that much time and effort every single time you craft something from a master book?

SE has repeatedly said they wanted to make Materia easier to get in Stormblood. Sure Crafters currently do not have a reliable source of G6 outside of Mutamix's RNG but we can easily get all the other grades through Ixal or Red Scrips. Why is this an issue?

And one last thing; why can't SE add new powerful skills? Do you want us to use Hasty Touch forever?

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Originally Posted by magnanimousCynic

You can edit your post to go past the 1k character limit. Also you mean Prudent Touch, not Precise Touch. :P

Also I don't get why people want starred crafts to be a "puzzle". Sure a puzzle may be fun to solve the first time, but what about the 2nd time? The 10th time? The 100th time? Do you really want to spend that much time and effort every single time you craft something from a master book?

SE has repeatedly said they wanted to make Materia easier to get in Stormblood. Sure Crafters currently do not have a reliable source of G6 outside of Mutamix's RNG but we can easily get all the other grades through Ixal or Red Scrips. Why is this an issue?

And one last thing; why can't SE add new powerful skills? Do you want us to use Hasty Touch forever?

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I know you said reliable, but spiritbonding is REALLY a lot easier to do now this time. You don't have to waste on 1 star crafts. Get the ALC spiritbonding potion, Better crowned pie, NQ vendor gear with 2 materia melds instead of 1, and craft away on mats like Gazelle Leathers, Molybdenum Ingots, Persimmon Tannin, Twinthread/Twinsilk, Zelkova Lumber. You can get it done quickly. The lumber can be made to make HQ of the right side of gear to use one materia to spiritbond faster.

I've been getting 2-3 per time I spiritbond.

I haven't tried spiritbonding 4.0 crafter sets yet as I only have CRP+BSM at 70 and I want to get more crafters to 70 first.

Also doesn't only one spiritbonding boost work at a time? I thought I remember reading that on the FFXIV subreddit. If it's true then you only need either the Potion or Pie. I wouldn't know as the last time I truly did spiritbonding was for G1 Crafting materia in North Shroud before the Ixal gave them out like candy. And even earlier than that was buying the i45 Mor Dhona gear and spiritbonding that for the slim chance of G4 red materia at Urth's Fount! ;-;

That's the point - if you want to craft effectively as hell, you should be forced to play the puzzle, not just click 1 button. It's removing the point of even having this puzzle with so many skills in the first place. Like being a WHM and only having Cure as the only skill you need to use to win each encounter.

When I was leveling 1-50, I had constantly changing stats and craft requirements so every time the puzzle was slightly different and I would have to adjust accordingly every time to craft a good batch of it.

Come specializations and you have a whole different ballpark of gameplay where, depending on the RNG, you have to dynamically change how you will be solving the puzzle. Planning becomes in the moment. Last night I crafted 30 palladium ingots using only NQ onion soup for CP past the min req and always starting with Initial Preparations and the Whistle stacks. Were the puzzles fast? Hell no, I had to stop to think every 3-4 moves. Was it effective? I hit a constant 90%-95% from all NQ towards the end of it, once I got the hang of abusing all the spec skills. Was it fun? I hadn't had that much fun crafting in ages! Every puzzle is a little different due to more or less IP, good/exe procs early. It becomes much less reliable gameplay and 70-80% touches start to get used more often, but you always have reclaim so while a chance to fail appears, the average becomes much greater. Reaching that strong average and reclaiming the bad rng is how I think the puzzle should stand. It's a whole skillset to learn to abuse spec skills.

As it stands, you have 3 openers: MaMa, IP(if spec) and MM.

MM for quick crafting at much less reliability.
MaMa for very long crafting sessions with a lot of reliability. Whistles can be put in here too for added power. It's easy 100%
IP for specialist crafting with, imo, the most potential to push the HQ marker without spending 30 turns spamming FS.
Of the 3, IP is completely unmacroable and by far most enjoyable to use, but you need to play smart and you won't always get 100%. While MM, which should be the WORST opener, but FASTEST, is atm enough for 100%. That should not be the case. MM should only be effective to HQ that which you already outgear or to do NQ items only.

As it stands, having 3 openers, each with a distinct style of "fast, stable-but-long,unstable-but-most-potent" is amazing, yet there is no NEED to make a choice. I also don't like how MaMa combos with Whistles so well that it's in many cases superior to IP. I need to do more testing on that one to be sure, though. Need more hard math on IP's CP savings.

This isn't really different from your battle class leveling. You had to figure out your skills as you leveled. However, once you got to end game you pretty much figured out "best practices" at the end. Mag is right. There doesn't need to be a way to solve the puzzle once figured out. It would be like trying to figure out a raid every time (some may like more RNG in it, but that's another topic).

While people are complaining about the new skills, keep in mind not everyone is also set out to be an omni crafter or did not level other crafters to use all the skills in a lot of rotations/macros. So they may have a different challenge than an omni crafter. Remove those cross class skills and come up with rotations without Byregot's Blessing, and so forth.

So with that, I'm curious to see what end game rotations people have without those cross skills.

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

While people are complaining about the new skills, keep in mind not everyone is also set out to be an omni crafter or did not level other crafters to use all the skills in a lot of rotations/macros. So they may have a different challenge than an omni crafter. Remove those cross class skills and come up with rotations without Byregot's Blessing, and so forth.

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Precisely this. From a design perspective, endgame crafting difficulty should be based on the skill sets available to those who only level a single DoH. It should be difficult but doable (though not with 100% reliability from all NQ materials) to anyone with only a single DoH class leveled. So long as cross-class skills exist, those with more crossclass skills available to them will have an easier time. That's a side effect of the system according to this design.

The fact is that the efficacy gap between having a single DoH leveled and all of them leveled with all crossclass capabilities is too wide to make endgame crafts difficult yet attainable for both ends of the spectrum.

That brings me to the Specialist system. While it would seem that the initial intention of the Specialist system was to decrease that gap, in implementation it failed miserably to do so. Even with the addition of powerful Specialist actions in Stormblood, the Specialist system still does not come close on its own to comparing to the power of a full set of crossclass skills. The gap between single-DoH specialists and full crossclass suite omnicrafters is still too wide for both ends of the spectrum to achieve difficult yet realistically possible crafts.

Personally, my only stance on this topic is that the hardest of crafts should be semi-reliably achievable with the most clever usage of skills available to any one specialist DoH (without crossclass skills). I otherwise make no assertions that the current balance is fine or not, or that they should change any particular thing in any particular way. This is just a short analysis of why the current system is the way it is from a design perspective. Glean from it what you will.

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Originally Posted by Vandril

Personally, my only stance on this topic is that the hardest of crafts should be semi-reliably achievable with the most clever usage of skills available to any one specialist DoH (without crossclass skills).

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I honestly want to see someone try to make the 2-star stuff with only the level 15 cross-class.

I'm glad they've made crafting accessible and all, but now it's just far too unbalanced IMO, especially with Manipulation II and Prudent Touch, I hope they do away with how this scales later in the expansion, now the market is currently just flooded with people that can, at best, press 2 buttons rather than needing to think of a rotation. I understand crafting is like a mathematical question, once you know the formula it's just plug it in, but it was the RNG in the first place that prevented this mess. I never see NQ end products on the market anymore, before this it was at least 2 NQ per item, Which as much as I hated it, I'd love it to return. Doing commission crafts right now is a pointless endeavour, you're at a significant loss for profits on many of the items you'd commission unless people provided the materials + tip, in which case they'd still be better off buying the end products anyway. Again, I'm hoping this mess doesn't scale well later in the expansion, or they just give up entirely with this cross class system, and give us all equal class skills from either a pool, or higher level abilities, similarly to what they done with Rapid Synth II and Hasty Touch II, but extend it to skills such as Piece by Piece and Ingenuity, though Ingenuity I'd much rather have tied to specialist system. At least then all crafters are on equal footing in terms of crafting. Contrary to my reply below, they've pretty much made omni, to an extent more mandatory than it's ever been. With low prices and all, sure, you can make all items in the game on the standard Lv.15 cross class, with some extent of RNG, you NQ that, I can comfortably say on the majority of servers that's a profit-loss, some servers have the new 2** items going for 200k at HQ, NQ that you may as well just discard it, nobody is going to buy that unless the cost of item < cost of grade VI materia. I'd much rather just halt that for the time being and get the mandatory cross-class, and make RNG irrelevant entirely. The only real, quick solution to this would be putting specialist recipes back, even then when you can HQ something with 0 RNG from all NQ on minimum melds + tea (Company control buff), just seems, in my eyes it's having abilities for the sake of, having abilities rather than having it somewhat as a puzzle which is what it was in ARR + HW.

Again, I like they've made crafting accessible, but making it too accessible, in the end only ends up cutting the 'little guy' out.

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Originally Posted by magnanimousCynic

I honestly want to see someone try to make the 2-star stuff with only the level 15 cross-class.

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If this includes the abilities native to the respective class you have at 70 then it wouldn't be as difficult as you'd think (E.g. Can use Muscle Memory, Manip II as a CUL, or Ingenuity II as a BSM). CUL is rather easy to have a rotation that works, similarly, with most crafts, albeit a little more challenging than CUL. Currently, just some favourable RNG.

Only HQ Fennel was used:
https://image.ibb.co/cYBJ9k/Level_15.jpg

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Originally Posted by magnanimousCynic

I honestly want to see someone try to make the 2-star stuff with only the level 15 cross-class.

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Here you go. I took on this challenge of "Not using any level 50 cross class skills". It was actually fun.
http://i.imgur.com/pxoedfy.jpg
Ok, I did cheat a little bit. I equipped "Reclaim" which is a level 50 skill, and I reclaimed twice.
At first, I tried to use Initial Preparation + Reflect together with the Whistle system. That didn't work.
Then I tried using Initial Prep + Refurbish with Whistle. That didn't work well either.
At the end, I used Maker's Mark + Flawless Syn together with Whistle. That worked out. I used 3x Patient Touch to quickly increase IQ, and then used a lot of Innovative Touch. When I was sitting at IQ11 with Innovative Touch active, each Hasty Touch added a crap load of quality. For progress, at first I used SH II + Ingen1 + Rapid Syn II x 3. Then I used Trained Hand, and finished up with 2x CS III.
This was my stats... I was using HQ tempura.
http://i.imgur.com/Ed60JDJ.jpg

How about one with NONE of the cross skills, like someone just leveled up one crafter to 70. What rotations would each class have?