If crafting was still inaccessible and difficult like Heavensward Patches, you’d quit

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Originally Posted by Shibi

The RNG fail was a pain, but it was more fun overall. So, while I'd like to remove the RNG fail chance I'd add in a RNG mandated spell at points, something to completely remove crafting macros.

I'd likely craft more than I do now in easy mode (with maxed DOH/DOL), which is really just making stuff for me and my pocket tank to eat.

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I can see not wanting to have macros work on everything but having to craft 500+ potions by hand just sounds like absolute insanity.

Not only did I max my crafters back then, but I felt rewarded since it encouraged omnicrafters to be sought by players who didn't have the patience and quite more profitable than it is now.
Bots would have been a problem regardless, but you'd be dead wrong if you tried to argue against the fact current crafter/gatherer design isn't a lot more bot-friendly.

I actually feel less inclined to keep leveling my crafters and gatherers now. It really doesn't seem worth the time.

I don't mind macros though. I definitely miss when they weren't so simple to hit HQ with.

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Originally Posted by EgilTheStressedMage

Why the hell would I play XIV only to craft?

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You specifically? I don't know. But FF14 is full of diversity in terms of gameplay options. Some people play dungeons all day, some people play to glam, some play to be part of musical groups, some play to craft for the marketboard, there are people who play to be hired for whatever other players pay them for, some players eRP, there's a house decorating subculture, there are people who just play Mahjong, there are people who play gold saucer for the majority of the game, there are gatherer only, fishers only, crafters only, and the list keeps going on and on...

Not everyone who plays FF14 do so to eat primals for breakfast.

I crafted then and I still craft now and enjoy then and now. Nothing for me would change.

I'm a little bummed that market prices plummet within days now though. It's almost pointless rushing to level on a new xpac/patch now as within 24 hours prices just drop so fast.

I can post some Grade 6 Tincture of Strength (HQ) on the MB for 4k each and within 3 hours they are down to 2k each now. It's not even worth my time to sit and HQ a stack of them to sell.

I would also like to point out that I'm already seeing lvl 90 gather bots non-stop gathering the Aetherial Reduction nodes.

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Originally Posted by Hezzlocks

I only came in at the tail end of it and didn't really actually bother crafting much beyond leveling GSM up... but I would imagine it was "inaccessible" for difficulty reasons. Likely higher stat requirements for crafting, particularly for Master Recipes, and in particular cross-class abilities, which meant to be optimal from a crafting perspective (not even talking getting the materials here, purely the act of crafting) you needed to specifically level certain jobs up for important abilities. I forget what job had what, but I recall Careful Synthesis and Manipulation being two very important cross-class abilities you really wanted to have.

Nowadays every job gets everything, so you don't need to level every job if you don't want to be an omnicrafter and just want to be an alchemist or something. And I'm able to craft the latest master recipe stuff with minimal overmelding. Now the hardest thing to do is to do the bloody job quests so you can get Manipulation from the 70 quest, as well as a couple of nice to have traits.

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I prefer that, it doesn't make any sense having to level a different job to get essential abilities.

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Originally Posted by Driavna

Inaccessible is a strong word but during HW we had to deal with:

- Specialization was a thing, you could only had access to all recipes if you level multiple characters.

- Capped red scrips needed for important recipes.

- Basic materials, like leather, got a jump in the number needed to produce 1. At that time any material coming from a monster was harder to obtain.

- Desyn was way harder to level and the amount of points you could spread around were also limited.

- RNG materials like titanium ore.

- Basic recipes to level up required materials from timed nodes.

- Way less XP sources.

- First ILvL170 set was class specific, fun times getting all and melding all if you wanted to be an omnicrafter.

- A very obnoxious system to obtain certain materials I don't even remember now.

Probably more stuff I just forgot. Anyway, back then YoshiP mentioned not being happy with current crafting/gathering participation and since then has slowly become more and more accesible till today situation.

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This post brings up points on why OP is way too vague with asking "If crafting was still like HW", because some of them were vastly improved upon from patch 3.1 and on.

-While Specialization was a thing, recipes went from being Specialist all the time, to only being Specialist during the patch that they were added in, with fewer recipes being made Specialist-only over the course of the second half of HW.
-Capped red scrips being used for important recipes was only a pre-3.1 thing. Recipes after that were more focused on Diadem, Desynth/Beast Tribes, or uncapped Tomestones.
-While the first DoH set was class specific, they did make it far easier to gather the more annoying materials with patch 3.1. This was mainly done by tripling the amount of mats received from the Splendors Vendor.
-The obnoxious system, or rather the Favor system, was only used for recipes pre-3.1.

-Not on the quoted list, but there was also the case of crafted DoW/M gear being i180, while also using materials from the Favor system. This gear competed with the i170/i180 Law uncapped tomestone gear, which was purchased at i170 and upgraded to i180 with a low amount of Law tomestones. Pentamelding was still somewhat expensive at the time. The combination of all that + normal Gordias gear being i190 meant crafted DoW/M gear was DoA for the majority of the playerbase, turning crafting into "Crafters making DoH gear to sell to other crafters"

Patch 3.2 also set the trend to have DoW/M crafted gear be more accessible right away, while also competing with the normal raid gear (rather than being 10iLvls below it). Patch 3.3 then set the trend of always adding the new crafted DoH/L set (now used by all classes) one major patch prior to the addition of the next tier of DoW/M crafted gear, giving crafters/gatherers around 3.5-4 months to prepare.

Would I still be crafting with the pre-3.1 system? Probably, but I'd vastly prefer the post-3.1 improvements.

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Originally Posted by CrayonsAndPaint

Thread title limit wouldn’t let me add the ? at the end. I was wondering if crafting was still as difficult, rng heavy, and grindy like Heavensward, would you still be playing ffxiv?

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I wish crafting was much harder, much grindier, and was far more frustrating so there would be far fewer crafters and it would be even more profitable for me. I have been crafting since ARR.

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Originally Posted by CrayonsAndPaint

Thread title limit wouldn’t let me add the ? at the end. I was wondering if crafting was still as difficult, rng heavy, and grindy like Heavensward, would you still be playing ffxiv?

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I loved 1.0/2.0 crafting. It's a shame it has been reworked to cater to new audiences.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

It wasn't any harder than it is now... Still had to meld, still used macros. People just romanticize it.

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HW crafting was definitely harder than modern crafting.

The requirements were tighter and we had a far lower CP buffer than we do today. Some abilities (Whistle While You Work and related skills) were more complicated than anything we have now and others, including some of our most powerful abilities (Ingenuity, Maker's Mark), had effects you couldn't even make sense of just by reading the tooltip. HW crafting was all about optimally nesting buffs (Comfort Zone, Steady Hand, Manipulation, Innovation, Waste Not, Ingenuity, Great Strides) and abusing percentage-based progress abilities (Muscle Memory, Maker's Mark, Piece-by-Piece), both of which required a deeper understanding of game mechanics than anything you're going to do when you're making ilvl 580 gear.

This is the whole reason they added expert crafting, by the way.

Some people enjoy crafting. Others just want to make their own items without a lot of work or the expense of fully melding their gear.

Now we have a two-tiered crafting system. Baseline item crafting is pretty easy and accessible, while expert crafting provides a more dynamic and challenging minigame for players who want that.

I've always enjoyed crafting, both then and now. I played FFXI for years and compared to that it was a nice change just to be able to level crafters without dedicating my life and all my gil to the endeavor. It's definitely easier and faster now but to me it never seemed extreme to the point of being inaccessible.

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Originally Posted by Kakure

HW crafting was definitely harder than modern crafting.

The requirements were tighter and we had a far lower CP buffer than we do today. Some abilities (Whistle While You Work and related skills) were more complicated than anything we have now and others, including some of our most powerful abilities (Ingenuity, Maker's Mark), had effects you couldn't even make sense of just by reading the tooltip. HW crafting was all about optimally nesting buffs (Comfort Zone, Steady Hand, Manipulation, Innovation, Waste Not, Ingenuity, Great Strides) and abusing percentage-based progress abilities (Muscle Memory, Maker's Mark, Piece-by-Piece), both of which required a deeper understanding of game mechanics than anything you're going to do when you're making ilvl 580 gear.

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Not really. In the age of the internet with guides everywhere, even annoying mechanics are simplified.

I am terrible at crafting and I did fine in 3.0. Just looked up a guide, melded, and crafted away.

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Originally Posted by Driavna

- A very obnoxious system to obtain certain materials I don't even remember now.

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You spent your weekly capped scrips on favors, which was temporary access to hidden nodes, then gather as many items as you could before your time expired. The amount you collect is subject to RNG and it's basically just tokens that you exchange at a vendor for a small amount of actual usable materials.

Due to the caps and amount of time/effort required the market prices started out at like 1m+ gil for a single ingot on my world. They hadn't worked out game balance yet so the armor you made with those limited materials was even 10 item levels less than normal raid gear, 170 vs 180 iirc.

A lot of topics on the forums were saying crafting is dead around that time, and I was just like chill out guys, it's a game that updates often, they will ease things. They started making those mats drop in dungeons like Arboretum, then dropped scrip weekly cap and added all the mats to straight up purchase at spoils npcs.

No I wouldn't. For as many flaws as HW had with the crafting system it was something that encouraged a modicum of intractability and engagement with the system. Personally, I'd prefer to go back to those days, simply because of the longevity the system actually had, versus being fully geared in a couple of hours, and then farming sufficient amounts of materia within a 10 minute to 9 hour timespace, depending on the spectrum you fall on.

With crafting, personally, I feel like they have decided to counter their flaws and feedback in the initial system in ARR/HW and elected to go the complete opposite end of the spectrum with drastic oversimplification of their own system. They didn't need to do that. Simply just removing the weekly cap on items would have been sufficient enough.

Crafting is a general feature of this game its not ultimate savage which is aimed at specifc demigraph. ARR through Stormblood walled to many players. When such a thing happens with a major game feature devs scrap it or fix the feature to attract more players.
They are not going to raise the difficulty to a point thay players are driven away. You like challenge you have experts.

Bit of humor.
FF14 hardcore crafter: I grind my life out doing experts.

Eve online player: Hold my beer novice..

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Not really. In the age of the internet with guides everywhere, even annoying mechanics are simplified.

I am terrible at crafting and I did fine in 3.0. Just looked up a guide, melded, and crafted away.

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I mean, sure. I can complete any trust dungeon in the game by standing on top of Y'shtola and pressing one button over and over. Does that mean the EW dungeons are no more difficult than Sastasha?

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Originally Posted by Kakure

I mean, sure. I can complete any trust dungeon in the game by standing on top of Y'shtola and pressing one button over and over. Does that mean the EW dungeons are no more difficult than Sastasha?

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Crafting is generally a static thing with some procs tho. Even in heavensward it was. You just had to look for a good or excellent, and hit a button. It wasn't anywhere close to hard.

It was simply tedious.

"If you make a system burdensome and inaccessible with large gil sinks then a casual audience won't use it"

Crafting had never really interested me up until this expansion. Have been leveling crafting and gathering initially just because it's there to be leveled, and then for repairs and melding.

Honestly I don't think my renewed interest is going to last. I don't like how eventually no crafts ever present any fun. I think too little is happening during crafting. I don't mind all crafts tuned to be successful, that's how games like this should be. But the conditions and so on just doesn't matter and it's clear the gear is balanced so that everything can be macroed.

I don't like how every crafting job is the same. How every craft is also the same. Why can't there be differences like how combat jobs generally have a different gameplay feel?

For example, CUL skills could be a mini-game about controlling the temperature and handling, you get skills like turns, flips, stirs, with combos that raise or lower the temperature, etc. CRP skills could be about shaving and cutting, and you move a cursor and use skills to control how much you shave and cut off to match a goal pattern, with harder crafts having more complex patterns. WVR could be about stitching and you use the mouse to aim where the next stitch goes in while using skills to swap thread colors and thickness etc. BSM mini-game could mimic folding steel and hammering away the impurities indicated by a gradient map, with skills to control strength and temperature.

The mini-games for material crafts could be more standardized, for example for lumber, fabric, threads, salt, ingots, leather etc. it's all about cutting things to fit a pattern. And the final products of each crafter class would use the unique mini-game of that class. This way it's easy for people to still be self-sufficient with materials, but you have to learn and practice each class if you want to be a true omni-crafter.

I'd definitely prefer that than the current state of macros being the best way to do crafting.

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Originally Posted by Kakure

HW crafting was definitely harder than modern crafting.

The requirements were tighter and we had a far lower CP buffer than we do today. Some abilities (Whistle While You Work and related skills) were more complicated than anything we have now and others, including some of our most powerful abilities (Ingenuity, Maker's Mark), had effects you couldn't even make sense of just by reading the tooltip. HW crafting was all about optimally nesting buffs (Comfort Zone, Steady Hand, Manipulation, Innovation, Waste Not, Ingenuity, Great Strides) and abusing percentage-based progress abilities (Muscle Memory, Maker's Mark, Piece-by-Piece), both of which required a deeper understanding of game mechanics than anything you're going to do when you're making ilvl 580 gear.

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I disagree. The accessibility and ease of crafting rotations now can largely be attributed to a wider wealth of resources which weren't necessarily entirely accurate, and a stronger community with much higher collaboration than previously exhibited.

Barring some minor nuances with how ingenuity worked, and getting comfort zone to fit around the general rotation. The rotation itself was arguably never that complex to begin with. Almost entirely being attributed to the fact that RNG created a false sense of difficulty. When ultimately the logic derived from such RNG essentially boiled down to:

Ok your rotation requires 436CP. Yet your available CP is 456. For every chunk of 18CP you have remaining you can compensate a hasty touch with a precise touch or a basic touch.

Further, for each tricks of the trade proc you get, you can compensate a hasty touch with a precise touch or a basic touch. There is very little change with regards to the nesting of buffs barring the fact that now instead of ingenuity you're using veneration. Similarly you no longer have comfort zone nor steady hand. Which arguably for the former was just about optimising their uptime with regards to your step count and making sure that you utilised as many touches under steady hand. Not much unlike the utilization of innovation now. Except instead of the advantage being success rate, it is now efficiency.

Personally, I'm concluding that in terms of rotation design and execution there's just as many nuances now than before, and that the simplicity has always been key. With the large differential being success rates are basically tossed out of the window. Which the success rate itself has very little impact on the difficulty of something in the first place. Hasty Touch didn't slap as many times as you were hoping? Bad time bro, try again.

I agree. I said in an earlier comment that I prefer when stuff like crafting/gathering is grindier and more difficult, but I really don't think crafting and gathering should be like, high level content. Especially when I think it's something that really appeals to more casual players (speaking from experience playing on crystal lol). I do wish there was more high-difficulty high-reward stuff, like ishgard restoration ranking phases and stuff (though I'm hoping they'll add something similar in future endwalker patches, since I personally lived my life in the firmament in shb), but I'd also much rather the majority of the playerbase be able to enjoy content they find thematically appealing. Though I would say it's just generally difficult to make actually challenging crafting content in this game. Even expert crafts didn't really take any brainpower, you just had to manually craft instead of macro crafting. The only real difficult part was just the amount of expert crafts you had to make under a time limit to get saint of the firmament.

My only real gripe is that I do think the stat requirements for the current expert crafts are too low. They definitely feel too easy to 100% hq right now.

Crafting has never been hard, even back in the day. Only thing that was tedious was the initial leveling.

You had macros for crafting too, often you had to split it into two or three buttons.

It was "hard" in terms of the combination of research, time investment, gil investment, market knowledge, restrictions, limitations. Hard doesn't only mean it took skill, because crafting was never about skill, it's about calculation. If it was as easy as today, we'd have had more high end crafters back in the day. Also calling it "tedious" is completely subjective.

Nowadays, it's easy to buy a cheap set, mid or high tier meld it fairly cheap and plug in a generic macro. In the past, materia was extremely expensive and being a good crafter was about working with the stats you could afford and the markets within your scope. I used to make all my own macros, because the typical internet macro was for a set stat build that I didn't have and rotations could vary wildly with stats. I saved millions developing good macros for budget melds. We used to spend months in the crafter forums theory crafting and discovering new and more efficient macros. Macros today are very similar and the same Groundwork opener -> Prudent/Prep touches -> Brygots finisher with minor tweaks.

But yes, as I said before I don't think we need to go back to HW. Some of the design was awful. There could be a balance.

I was able to push crafted gear for 300-500K through the end of HW; a far cry from the current laughable state of things where prices tend to degrade into sub 100K values within a few weeks of a new patch releasing.

I do feel like the HW crafts took WAY too long, but other aspects such as gating crafts behind limited scrips or specialization felt like a necessary evil to create scarcity that is needed for a healthy economy.

uh no, I don't craft a whole lot so I wouldn't be that bothered.

If it was, i'd still be interested in it and doing everything in it. Its too hyper casual now that its wrecking the market.

Nope I loved crafting during that time. I hate how much they have nerfed crafting and gathering. It be like any person in world could craft anything without having to learn it or having to craft items by trial and error. They need to bring back crafting to like how it was in 2.0. How it is now crafting has no meaning to it if takes no skills to have any item.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

Nope I loved crafting during that time. I hate how much they have nerfed crafting and gathering. It be like any person in world could craft anything without having to learn it or having to craft items by trial and error. They need to bring back crafting to like how it was in 2.0. How it is now crafting has no meaning to it if takes no skills to have any item.

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2.0 Did not require skill just the right stats, good rotation and luck being on your side. Biggest difference between then and now rng has been almost completely removed. Beating rng does not make you good means your just lucky.

People talk like levelling a craft and getting the master recipe books were hard. GC turn in every day would have every crafter and gatherer max lvl in a couple weeks. They are also easy recipes or vendor buyable for a huge chunk of them as well. People not know about GC turn ins? Macros worked fine for non star recipes. The only annoying thing was specialist lock out.



The only gate to crafting and gathering of any difficulty still exists today. Overmelding you would need to serious stockpile to overmeld each new crafting set. Or have the gil to say "oh well whats another 100 broken materia."

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Crafting is generally a static thing with some procs tho. Even in heavensward it was. You just had to look for a good or excellent, and hit a button. It wasn't anywhere close to hard.

It was simply tedious.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Barring some minor nuances with how ingenuity worked, and getting comfort zone to fit around the general rotation. The rotation itself was arguably never that complex to begin with. Almost entirely being attributed to the fact that RNG created a false sense of difficulty...

Personally, I'm concluding that in terms of rotation design and execution there's just as many nuances now than before, and that the simplicity has always been key. With the large differential being success rates are basically tossed out of the window. Which the success rate itself has very little impact on the difficulty of something in the first place.

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Here's the original forum post outlining Rath's rotation, the most popular and widely used throughout Heavensward:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Gear?p=3188383.

This rotation is far more complicated than anything you'll see today. It is complicated enough that players created elaborate flow charts like this and this to help others make sense of it. It is also unbelievably elegant, by the by; this rotation effectively broke progress crafting and left SE no choice but to change our primary progress abilities in the next expansion (though they might have done that anyway).

I take the point that crafting has never been difficult per se, especially insofar as you can be successful just by copying someone else and/or writing up a macro. But I maintain that the underlying crafting system in Heavensward (I mean, someone had to actually figure it out how it works to write up a macro for everyone else to copy, right?) was quite a bit more complex than what we have now and that saying as much isn't just romanticizing the system of old.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

If it was as easy as today, we'd have had more high end crafters back in the day...

We used to spend months in the crafter forums theory crafting and discovering new and more efficient macros. Macros today are very similar and the same Groundwork opener -> Prudent/Prep touches -> Brygots finisher with minor tweaks.

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This is central to my own sense of the relative difficulty of Heavensward crafting. I would stand around Idyllshire watching people craft and I would see mistakes all the time. People would share rotations and there were always things you could change to optimize them. Aside from not using Trained Eye, I don't even know what it would look like for someone to craft wrong in Endwalker. Maybe following Manipulation with three non-durability-consuming actions or something.

Two-star level 90 crafting is like a multiple choice test where every choice is basically correct. Sure, there are some slight differences between rotations. One might use 4x Patient Touch to build stacks, another Patient Touch > 2x Basic/Standard/Advanced, and yet another 8x Prudent Touch without WN2. You might throw in a Delicate Synthesis or three. Or not. Some rotations are slightly more optimized than others, but it all works pretty well. You just kind of pick something that doesn't run too long and works with whatever food you happen to have left over from last expansion.