I agree, RNG sucks. The number of times I've had crafts NQ when the quality was 98% almost made me stop crafting altogether.
I notice a few posts in the thread about "making crafting difficult is bad" or "I like crafting to be easy" or "leveling crafting is hard enough". Speaking about crafting as an overall.
What I believe hardcore crafters want is simply a little challenge at endgame, a few crafts that feel satisfying and test you, after all those hours of grind and leveling and gathering and melds and climbing to the top. It doesn't have to be riddled with rng. Leveling doesn't have to change. Heck, current lv80 crafts don't even need to change much. But 2-4 star best-in-the-game crafts shouldn't be something you can faceroll out in a days gathering with cheap melds, cheap food and NQ mats.
We'd like just a small handful of crafts to demand you really meld, work to gather your mats and better have your rotations right. Something you can feel a little pride in having made.
We don't want to make Satasha hardcore, make the MSQ super hard, make normal trials into EX. We just want the option of a Savage, everything below it is fine.
What they need to do, is have a skill handicap for each masterbook recipe.
One recipe you can't use steady hand. Find an alternative skillset such as observe > Focused touch/synth
Another one you can't use manipulation. Use an alternative such as master's mend
Another one you can't use comfort zone. Alternative will be trick's of the trade.
Basically something that makes you approach each recipe differently. Didn't the Ixal beast tribes have some sort of handicap? Can't remember if it was skill or stat...
Let the progression crafting be as easy as is so that people can train their skills and level crafters.
I feel this will cater to all types of crafters.
Both sound ideas, but because of the crafter population who can make these vs the demand, would you feel that these could be healthy compromises:
- In order to buy a mastercraft book, you need to do a craft challenge
and / or
- The initial craft of each master item will have a challenge applied to it, after your first successful HQ craft, it becomes a basic craft we're used to. Anyone can NQ them, but in order to unlock the HQ variant, you need to beat the challenge.
You don't have a "crafting rotation to get right" as long as you can look it up on the web and macro it. What you describe is not challenging at all. Merely time intense.
BORING!
I never felt pride in having dealt with a time based grind in any video game, there is nothing to be proud about that.
Quite the contrary: I typically felt stupid for putting up with it, esp if the DEVs nerf it to hell 3 months later.
the new two star recipes require a bit of work, no single button macros here.