Are you happy with the current state of crafting?

Not remotely. I have another, less combat-focused alt much more progressed than my main here, but the only thing I honestly found at all enjoyable about crafting was leveling them all together so that they can complement each other. Once leveling was complete, as a system, it seemed rather bland to me. (Heck, even the leveling was still... pretty bland.) Don't get me wrong; the resource management especially when not so well geared is an enjoyable little mini-game, but it never feels much like crafting to me, or at least leaves far too many lucrative aspects of the idea untouched and untapped. I feel like I would have much preferred if the open crafting concept of 1.x had actually been a thing in itself to be built on rather than just an obfuscation of underlying, still-rigid recipes, over the straightforward but bare-bone purely vertical, rigid-recipe system we have presently.

I'd like to see some of the stronger abilities brought more and line, and to see more variance in the best possible rotation based on preempt-able factors such as durability or item type, and reactionary factors such as the quality of progress thus far. I'd love to see a crafting table addition, FC workshops that allow you to draw from programmable dynamic-rights-based access to FC and personal retainer storage or the like for QoL. I'd like to see guild integration and more frequent guild tasks beyond mere leves and provisioning. But most of all I want to see more items craftable, and a greater range within those crafts. And I'd love to see staggered vertical / semi-horizontal progression, whereby one can master specific materials, and recipes made far more flexible, but with perhaps secondary stat effects.

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Originally Posted by BoazJochin

I wish that they would have more specialty recipes. This would make having a specialist worthwhile. I am lvl 70 crafter and I do craft a lot for gill. I just don't see a point in how I can make every end game gear. I think it should be kept to the specialists to encourage people to go one way or the other.

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I feel the opposite. I enjoy the idea of Omni-crafting, mastering all the crafts and being self-sufficient if you put the effort in. Especially in a game which advertises being able to level every class.

I don't like the idea of being locked to only ever optimizing 3 crafters. The thought of being a max geared, max melded, max level carpenter and unable to make endgame carpenter gear for example isn't an appealing one.

I just think it's too easy in general. If your specialists could fairly comfortably make gear but your non-specialists required the best gear, rotations, hq mats and melds, then it could be ok. Currently you can macro everything in sub-optimal melds and vendor food.

I feel the same. Personally, I only maxed/omni 4-star'd my crafting with SB but the feat felt really disappointing. I tried doing it in HW, but it was a challenge and my availability couldn't match it so I only managed to omni 3-star my gatherers. But now? While I'm grateful to have been able to reach the top tier, it's like...wow where's the difficulty. I fully expected the 3 and 4 star stuff to have crafts that were as difficult as the Ala Mhigan sets which I was super proud to have been able to work towards and craft with my own hands. But then the onishi set came down and I was able to make three pieces of the crafting set on day 1 (without buying stormsaps via AH, was tryna minimize spending here). I was shocked like wow, that's it? I didn't even have to use the MaMa rotation. I was fine using a rotation I used for basic materials.

That being said, I feel like they did this on purpose to get more people into crafting and then, by extension, drown the AH in crafted gear and naturally force drop the prices placed on that gear. Not sure how it worked on smaller servers but I know it crashed the market on legacy servers with high populations. Everyone was making the stuff because it was easy leading to everyone selling it leading to market inflation and lower prices and of course lower profit for us who could've sold these hard to make rare items for millions just like in ARR and HW. That's also part of their "ease of access" for other players who otherwise don't have money but my thing is...the incentive of crafting is to a) make money and b) be self sufficient. We can still make money but not as much as before because of the inflation and ease of access and now the best way to get a lot in one go is to do PVE content so the incentive to continue crafting is starting to go down for people who both craft and enjoy battle content. Especially if this ease of access continues into Shadowbringers. Which I really hope it doesn't.

And speaking of Shadowbringers, here's to hoping that this supposed Ishgard reconstruction crafting end game meme is actually some serious content for us when 5.0 drops.

I kind of wish you could custom tailor things more. Right now every equipment craft is just HQ or vendor. My favorite craft systems have included a great deal of lateral customization in the end product which in turn allowed you to craft -very- specific things for specific people.

This in turn made resource hunting enjoyable, as the very specific things required resources with very specific properties. Entire gameplay sessions could be solely about finding said resources, and in turn made aesthetically bland worlds much more relevant than the hand crafted lovely set pieces that FF14 puts forth. The world was relevant because Iron with the properties you wanted wasn't A) Locked into specific nodes in specific regions and B) Might not even be available at the time.

Don't want to survey yourself? Well good news - Someone else could

FF14 and other games like it treat resources as checklist items. FF14's crafting has never been much more than WOW (my own personal earliest reference) crafting with extra steps. It is a level of intimacy between crafter, item, and client that these more modern systems quite clearly lack. The crafting mini game itself is okay, but trivialized heavily by stats and the dirge of people on the open forums providing advice, macros, and stat requirements for certain approaches.

There is a certain magic to being able to bring in a truck load of resources, dump them into your crafting station, lock the door, tell the world to !@#% off for a few hours, and just see what you can make.

FF14 in its current iteration and direction will never provide that.

I have played many MMO's in the past - EQ, EQ2, WOW, LOTR, Eve Online, a few others. FFXIV has one of the better crafting systems in some ways, but it is pretty mediocre in others. At first glance I was pretty impressed, but as I moved my crafters along and leveled them up - well, not so much. The small number of items that can be made, with little variation except appearance and the same basic stats +a percent of the last one. EQ2 for just one example has recipes for over 600 tables alone, plus another 100+ quested and rare dungeon or raid drops. Not suggesting that VVXIV go that far - with over 5000 furniture recipes it was getting a bit ridiculous. On the other hand crafting in WOW was a sick joke, not worth the effort.

I agree with all the previous sentiments about crafting in SB erring too much on the easy side (loved the Ala Mhigan tool bump), but I understand them being more cautious after the whole Favor debacle in HW.
My wishlist for DoH would be to have a series of "tool progressions" sorta like how there was in ARR. Keep the other gear craftable for everyone, but require difficult untradable tokens to be made by the player to "upgrade" their tools. It doesn't need to be exactly the same as how we obtained Lucis tools in ARR, but some form of progression that is tied to an individual player's effort and not circumvented by the market board. Some form of DoH "relic tools", I suppose.

I love the system in the game, but the inventory management is well... the worst in any game I've ever seen.
Storing crap on multiple retainers in hard to search and access ways (you need to load each retainer individually EACH SESSION to know what they have). Its embarrassing for this game to handle its inventory so much worse than games 10+ years older than it does.

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Originally Posted by deadman1204

I love the system in the game, but the inventory management is well... the worst in any game I've ever seen.
Storing crap on multiple retainers in hard to search and access ways (you need to load each retainer individually EACH SESSION to know what they have). Its embarrassing for this game to handle its inventory so much worse than games 10+ years older than it does.

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We need a inventory like GW2 has with the amount we have by now, but then they won't sell retainer subs as much anymore which i call slightly greedy on them to make you pay a sub for inventory space instead of straight upgrades you buy to unlock at best.

I was just thinking...

What if crafting became about our skills forcing conditions rather than RNG hoping we happen to get Good/Excellent proc?

Like if we had stuff like "Condition becomes Good/Excellent after X steps" with X being a value that scales down with our crafting skills (Rather than up to ridiculous levels as with Makers Mark) potentially with caveats (Such as the Excellent variant having reduced action success while working towards it) as well as skills that can take additional steps off the value (Sort of like the reverse of how we buff the stacks of Inner Quiet)?

So as to reduce RNG but still keep gearing up as a way to improve crafting capabilities (Also, make us not end up having to Makers Mark for 200+ steps in future content >.>)

Nope not with all the rng. When says have 90% chance not failing and fail 5 times in a row that's way to much rng. Don't even want know how hard 5.0 recipes is going to be.

I do enjoy crafting otherwise I wouldn't do it. There are some things about it that are frustrating and tedious. Mostly with the RNG and inventory bloat. Things like Reclaim costing so much CP only to fail at 90% after you spent hours acquiring the mats. Scrip farming causing burnout. The shear number of crystals needed for crafts, which is only going to get worse in ShB. The seemingly increased failure rates with difficult crafts and how much it sets you back, just to name a few.

Another thing that ruffles the feathers a bit is that after all the leveling and gearing up we do, we can't really contribute to restoration of Doma. I suppose you can craft mats and items and donate those, but due to shard and crystal costs it makes it a bit counter productive to your own crafting needs. It would enjoy it more if we had a more hands-on effect to these efforts, and feel it would be another great way to be rewarded scrips.

The benefits though, are well worth the struggles and steep uphill climbs to get there. Being able to self support new combat jobs I level, decorating my home, helping new players with gear upgrades, and I absolutely love cooking in this game. One of my favorite past times is gathering the ingredients I need to make food. I don't mass gather/craft food items for this very reason. Though I do wish there were more tabletop meals, and I actually get kind of jealous of how easy it is the craft such yummy food.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

I was just thinking...

What if crafting became about our skills forcing conditions rather than RNG hoping we happen to get Good/Excellent proc?

Like if we had stuff like "Condition becomes Good/Excellent after X steps" with X being a value that scales down with our crafting skills (Rather than up to ridiculous levels as with Makers Mark) potentially with caveats (Such as the Excellent variant having reduced action success while working towards it) as well as skills that can take additional steps off the value (Sort of like the reverse of how we buff the stacks of Inner Quiet)?

So as to reduce RNG but still keep gearing up as a way to improve crafting capabilities (Also, make us not end up having to Makers Mark for 200+ steps in future content >.>)

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Probably going to sound like a stupid question, but... why have RNG at all? Are there decisions that truly can only be triggered through RNG, no matter what design changes were made to the crafting skill arsenal itself?

As for the final craft, make it such that it quality must reach X to HQ; otherwise, it NQs -- that's it. Each component before that final product (i.e. initial and intermediate steps) retains its exact quality and durability going into forward, using dedicated crafting storage for that express purpose (and, ofc, the big of inventory QoL), and you're free to remake those parts as many times as you like (to a maximum of X in the dedicated storage before the worst is simplified into merely NQ or HQ). Allow for more crafting of components on the way up, with more control and a more vivid sense of difficulty.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Probably going to sound like a stupid question, but... why have RNG at all? Are there decisions that truly can only be triggered through RNG, no matter what design changes were made to the crafting skill arsenal itself?

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*Shrugs*

I have no idea honestly.

Hence why I like the fact that they finally added a 100% chance Quality increase (Albeit, annoying to use because you have to set up with a step of waiting... Which, on a side note, why does it cost CP to DO NOTHING?)

As well as suggesting ways to remove the RNG from the conditions of crafts.

I mean, the only notable thing from RNG is gating powerful skills behind RNG so as to not just outperform other more consistent skills.

That and, with currently available CP and Durability regeneration skills, a lack of RNG can quite easily lead into a situation where it's possible to infinitely sustain crafts, allowing anyone to easily HQ any item irregardless of their stats, with stat increases merely affecting the time it takes to complete said task.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Hence why I like the fact that they finally added a 100% chance Quality increase (Albeit, annoying to use because you have to set up with a step of waiting... Which, on a side note, why does it cost CP to DO NOTHING?)

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You're not doing nothing, though. You're buying a reroll. Since... RNG is a thing and resets each action.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

That and, with currently available CP and Durability regeneration skills, a lack of RNG can quite easily lead into a situation where it's possible to infinitely sustain crafts, allowing anyone to easily HQ any item irregardless of their stats, with stat increases merely affecting the time it takes to complete said task.

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Mutatis mutandis, though. RNG is present in the current version, so in imagining any system where RNG wouldn't be necessary, we can't assume all else would be the same. I'm just wondering what gameplay would be necessarily lost from losing RNG and could not be replaced without RNG in the replacing system.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

You're not doing nothing, though. You're buying a reroll. Since... RNG is a thing and resets each action.

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Technically, yeah. But literally the action is you just stopping and looking at your work.

Let me try doing that at my job and telling my boss "Hey, I AM working, I'm observing!" ;)

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Mutatis mutandis, though. RNG is present in the current version, so in imagining any system where RNG wouldn't be necessary, we can't assume all else would be the same. I'm just wondering what gameplay would be necessarily lost from losing RNG and could not be replaced without RNG in the replacing system.

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Yeah, it's just easier to gate these kinds of things behind RNG. Since you can then reward people for using riskier strategies, without the risk of accidentally making it completely free to craft something.

Without RNG, there's just a lot less design space to work with that wouldn't end up in a situation where it was just slapping stat breakpoints as "You must be this tall to make this item" beyond well, the actual minimum stats to actually start crafting said item. Thus then leading into more macro crafting because without the RNG literally every craft would boil down to a set rotation.

It's the general issue with the concept of active crafting (As opposed to passive crafting such as like WoW where you just press craft and the item is guaranteed and the only RNG comes in the form of certain materials being produced in random quantities such as 1-3 handfuls of bolts). In order to make it actually justifiable, you need to have some RNG element that causes you to need to react to what is happening, so you don't just blindly follow a set rotation and essentially just macro your way into simulating passive crafting set ups.

The main thing is just to balance out how much RNG there is and the effects that they provide. For example, 90% chance to not lose potentially hours of grinding materials serves no purpose other than being frustrating.