Worth investing in alt? (For other specialisms)

If your primary concern is being able to effectively turn a profit and make gil by crafting, then it likely isn't worth it for you, unless you're such a prolific crafter that you are singlehandedly meeting your entire server's demand for crafted goods under your chosen three specializations.
However if you're more about self-sufficiency than profitability, and you'd rather put yourself in a situation where you can easily get every craftable item that you'd want even without having a massive stockpile of gil, it can be very worth the time and effort you'll put into it.

If you want to make more gil: Just craft more.
If you want to never even need gil: Make some alts, and cover every specialization yourself.

I say this all the time:

Nobody looks twice at the guy who levels every single battle class in the game to 60, but the moment someone suggests leveling 1 alt to omnicraft everyone thinks he's crazy.

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Originally Posted by PROBOUND

I say this all the time:

Nobody looks twice at the guy who levels every single battle class in the game to 60, but the moment someone suggests leveling 1 alt to omnicraft everyone thinks he's crazy.

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Leveling alt characters is an entirely different thing than leveling other classes, regardless of Department. Also,

1) No one thinks leveling every DoH and DoL class to 60 is crazy.
2) I don't know many people who leveled a battle-class alt to 60, on the same server anyway.
3) Your first L60 class provides numerous advantages for leveling your other battle classes, but it can be a pain for one of your characters help another - you can't even mail things between them.

That said, I have three characters, two of which are L60 omnicrafters and have L60 battle classes, and the other of which is only up to Level 54 or so in DoM/DoH. My wife has done the same, although her "alt-alt" is further along. But no ones called us crazy. Because of that, anyway.

P.S. my alts are C'mel Silverbane and Sharlotte Silverbane

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Originally Posted by Silverbane

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You probably missed the 100+ threads of people complaining about needing alts/specializations to omincraft in the past year then?

At the end of the day, my point is that if OP is trying to take crafting seriously and be 100% self sufficient, leveling an alt should be his priority. I apologize if my analogy derailed you from that.

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Originally Posted by PROBOUND

You probably missed the 100+ threads of people complaining about needing alts/specializations to omincraft in the past year then?

At the end of the day, my point is that if OP is trying to take crafting seriously and be 100% self sufficient, leveling an alt should be his priority. I apologize if my analogy derailed you from that.

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The complaints stemmed from crafting having a restriction when there is barely any restriction on doing all battle classes on the same character. At most, your alts will be slightly less geared due to weekly currency lockout, which really isn't a big deal overall.

But I do see your point. I would still say just purchasing other spec items or having someone craft for you is much more profitable than leveling and re-gearing/re-melding a second character.

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Originally Posted by PROBOUND

You probably missed the 100+ threads of people complaining about needing alts/specializations to omincraft in the past year then?

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No, I probably didn't. You must have missed the de-specialling of most recipes that SE provides after one or two patch cycles.

I don't have an alt-alt because of specialization - my wife and my mains and alts cover that with room to spare. I have an alt-alt to overcome certain present and probable-future per-character limitations.

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Originally Posted by Silverbane

No, I probably didn't. You must have missed the de-specialling of most recipes that SE provides after one or two patch cycles.

I don't have an alt-alt because of specialization - my wife and my mains and alts cover that with room to spare. I have an alt-alt to overcome certain present and probable-future per-character limitations.

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What kind of current per-character limitations exist that don't correspond to weekly lockouts / crafter specializations?

I have 1 alt to cover the 2 specs that my friend and I don't have on our mains. The amount of money I have saved from making my own Luminous Fibers -- no regrets. It only cost me time to get my alt up to speed (I have airships, moogles, and SBing to get materia), which I have enough of to justify her.

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Originally Posted by Sayboar

What kind of current per-character limitations exist that don't correspond to weekly lockouts / crafter specializations?

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- Beast tribes (9 Grade IV crafting materia, or 36 Grade IV combat materia, is better than the 3/12 you can manage on a single character)

- Leve allowances (not tremendously useful currently, but would have been helpful in the days of Lucis tools)

- Extra maps, if you can be bothered to level DoL classes more than once

- If you're really dedicated and have DoL leveled on multiple characters, you can hit timed gathering nodes twice each cycle, or have max GP to hit two nodes that pop at the same time

- One-off rewards, like the Grade V DoH/DoL materia you get from the Moogle quests

- If you're farming uncapped tomestones to buy items that are transferable between characters (like Eikon materials), you get a full set of roulette bonuses every day for each character you have

- Doubles or triples the amount of inventory space you have (for tradable items) as long as you have a way to pass items back and forth


I doubt that anyone ever makes full use of everything that alt(s) enable you to do, but there are a lot of possibilities that open up once you have an extra character or two.

If your goal is just more specialists I would first consider the fact that the restrictions on specialists may change significantly in 4.0 with the increase of the level cap and/or addition of new scrips.

Also ask yourself, are you using crafting red scrips for anything atm ? If the answer is no, then you can use red scrips to start stock piling souls of the crafter. Eventually you'll have enough of these saved where you can change specialists whenever you need to. Also consider the pattern that SE has been following where every new specialist recipe that is added becomes non specialist in the next subsequent patch. In other words, you don't need specialists if you just wait.