whats the point of crafting...

I'm really not happy about that either. I joined 1.0 knowing that I could quite realistically be a main job miner and that appealed greatly to me. When ARR was introduced, I had understood that you still needed to be at least 1 level 50 war or magic class, but that wasn't a big gripe. But as I play further and further into the endgame, it's becoming more and more apparent that crafting and gathering is not all all considered to be as important to the world our characters exist in, which is really depressing me.

Why introduce new crafting recipes if they are just going to be as useless as they are currently? That doesn't make any sense to me. Crafting needs to have some vital, key word: vital, role in endgame gear, or it's worthless. For example, crafted gear should be BiS in a few situations, and then dungeon gear can fill in the rest. There's no reason why dungeon gear needs to be the BiS for everything.

As a follow-up note, introducing furniture recipes is really a pretty laughable "fix"--if that's even what it's supposed to be. I didn't level all crafts to 50 to make furniture for some house I hardly care about. I leveled my crafts to ultimately improve my character with easy melds, spiritbond gear, and HQ accessories. Making gil is just another way for me to improve my character, and, to be honest, it's much more profitable to convert gear into materia than to craft gear.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

The problem with this logic is the simple fact that most people would be buying/making this gear in order to make it easier for them to participate in the game's toughest battles... not to skip doing them entirely.

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And the problem with that logic is that buying the gear beforehand would trivialize the content. And SE would have to prepare for that, so the content would have to be tuned even higher, since they'll expect you to gear yourself first. Again, crafters would be one or two steps behind the difficulty curve of said encounters.

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This would, in turn, lead to more players choosing to purchase gil, creating a vicious cycle that would feed further RMT abuse.

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How about a simple solution: Introduce top item level, craftable gear that requires Coil drops and is Bind on Pickup, i.e. only usable by the crafter himself?
It wouldn't hurt the balance in any way, but it would give a LOT of incentive to level crafters, especially since Allagan/Mythology gear cannot be dyed/customized in any way.
Simple, no?

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

Were the highest-item-level gear made craftable and available for purchase, it’s easy to foresee a problematic situation where RMT abusers would:

• Overrun instances for item farming (monopolizing materials)
• Buy high-item-level gear at excessive prices to drive up value (market manipulation)
• More persistently solicit RMT gil purchases from players (increased spamming)

This would, in turn, lead to more players choosing to purchase gil, creating a vicious cycle that would feed further RMT abuse.

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Couldn't all of this be avoided by giving any potential lv.70+ crafted gear an "untradable/unsellable" status?

I think it would be a great way to entice more people to invest their time into crafting and reward players that put in all the hours and effort of leveling the various crafting classes.

Perhaps the creation of crafting items for purchase with mythology tomes would also help even out this situation.

Atleast we know how se feels about crafting...smh wish i didnt waste all this time..

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Originally Posted by FyeyaHerald

I personally just want to see some sort of crafting mastery system implemented that forces players to, for the highest tier of crafts, only be able to do one profession.

Because currently, on my server, the players who have all crafting professions maxed have absolutely invalidated the markets and competition. There needs to be some forced interaction between crafters to make the community and markets actually function.

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I can't like this post enough. It's cool that folks can get all crafting classes way up there if they want to put in the effort, but I think there should be some kind of specialization system that promotes trading and competition.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

The problem with this logic is the simple fact that most people would be buying/making this gear in order to make it easier for them to participate in the game's toughest battles... not to skip doing them entirely.

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You mean just like we are doing now, but with tomes? You can easily get most BiS stuff from tomes for some jobs.

Beside, XI had tons of craftable items good in endgame and it wasn't a problem.

the way the game is heading toward makes gil worthless... unless they can focus more on supplement like foods, temporary effect on gear that done by enchantment and stuff

like, you have to eat food every game day or else your character may fumble and lose control occasionally. Boost the buff effects on potions, make enchantment to gear by paying crafters to enhance gear stats temporary (like last 3 or 4 real-time days I mean) that way, it can make crafting and gil more worthwhile for this game.

pay for cosmetics that can alter the appearances of your characters or gear you wear would be nice too, as the fact it won't have impact to battle systems.

Another idea for the implementation of higher level crafted gear would be to include crafting "job" classes obtainable by equipping a crystal earned by getting a warrior class to lv.50.

While making the specific classes recipes appear, it could also raise the crafters stats and restrict it's cross-class skills thus raising the difficulty bar in getting high-quality results.

'with untradable, unsellable results this would create quite a challenge for players that would otherwise only log on once a week to run through coil.

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However, we stand by our decision not to have the highest-level gear available for purchase. One of our primary reasons is that such a change would encourage RMT. Our team is working tirelessly to stamp out RMT entirely, closing thousands of accounts and seizing massive amounts of gil every week—this even in the game’s current state, where many believe that crafted items are in low demand.

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Solution: Make the gear untradable-on-craft. Thus only players who happen to craft the item itself can keep it. Similar to Rare/EX items in FF11 obtainable from NMs that was to fix sellable random NMs by RMT.

While the materials would be tradable, its result would not.

Another solution would be crafter dungeons to obtain the mats. Whichever way is chosen, the end result should be bound to the crafter when crafted, such that it cannot be traded (it can just be made Untradable instead of Bound - like many items are).

What I would like to see is gear that has a unique quality to them that goes beyond simple stats, these would be obtained by running content like dungeons. This gear might be job-specific and grant certain passive traits active at all times or latent traits granted when utilizing certain abilities to give an edge to the player who went out of their way to obtain these prestigious items.

Crafted gear could have similar item-Levels (with HQ's having almost similar stats), but lack any special passive or latent traits. The gap could then be bridged slightly through the use of materia to fill different roles while not being totally offensively and/or defensively inferior. This would make crafted gear an option without eliminating dungeons from the equation.

I think that coupling this with a certain degree of horizontal advancement would give content more meaning and grant players a way to diversify their gear sets. Certain materials could be obtainable through some new currency obtained through gathering and crafting content, just to get the ball rolling and deter RMT.

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Originally Posted by Faeye

3. Have recipes that require multiple classes to craft.

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I think we had that at the beginning of 1.0? I'm pretty sure we had it and it was scrapped. Too much work for people.

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Originally Posted by Kaizlu

I think we had that at the beginning of 1.0? I'm pretty sure we had it and it was scrapped. Too much work for people.

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We did! Didn't come up all the time but I do remember a particular Culinarian dish that required you also be a lvl15-ish Carpenter. Good times.

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Originally Posted by Kallera

I find it strange that crafters are hobbled in terms of gameplay progression because of the inability to control economic dishonesty, and the "need to keep demand on the AH low", while there are group selling dungeon and primal clears with impunity! Or is that the true economy of this game?

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I do find this situation quite hilarious. Players are gonna make their money exploiting other players somehow so in the end, the issue isn't circumvented at all, just shifted.

Some thoughts:

1. Allow crafters to further refine finished items similar to how ARPGs work. E.g. You have a base sword, but through further synthesis you refine it to focus on various stats (attack/doubleattack/haste/regens/ability boosting/etc). This could even apply to PvE drops to give crafters some added value, and help players individualise play styles to a degree. Refining synths would be done through a quasi trade/crafting window.

2. Housing WILL stagnate after a time. Think back to housing orientated games like SWG, where you will literally see thousands of furnishings being sold at minimal price. I suggest adding FC forts/keeps in addition to houses, also some form of PvP or PvE castle sieges where resources/crafted items are continually destroyed.

3. Add jobs to DOH, but restrict us to just 1 or 2 professions after level 50.

4. Make raid drops "bind to FC"

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

RMT Concerns

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What could be great here is if, instead, a more thorough commission system could be implemented in game.

The idea is, one player provides the components and a possible fee or item trade, allowing the crafter to craft the item and receive the fee/item(s) upon success, while allowing the result to go to the component provider. (Failure should be tied to the normal result.) Given how people are, you would probably need to put in separate fee/reward slots for normal and High Quality results. I don't know how complicated that would be to implement, but you've already got something VERY similar with the "Request Meld" option people have. This completely skirts around the problem of RMT farming for components if both key components and the end result are untradeable. Of course, it does absolutely nothing for people selling runs, but that seems to be something that's considered an unavoidable evil so far.

SE is doing a great job I'm happy I bought into FFXIV

Heard it from the man himself. If you're looking to craft your own high level gear, go play somewhere else. Well that's a nice kick in the crotch. Maybe I'll be able to craft ilvl 90 gear in 2.4 when it's useless.

It's actually funny how crafters are considered "classes" and require gear, materia and/or buff food, but produce only mediocre gear and consumables and have no place in endgame, just like in every other plain cloned MMO out there. Why bother then, just make crafting (and gathering, while you're at it) a skill you learn as a DoW/DoM and be done with it. No point in calling something a class if it doesn't serve any purpose.

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

If the same items were made craftable, some players might find it easier to save up their gil, robbing them of this motivation to undertake the game’s toughest battles.
As of Version 2.0-2.1, this position is held by the Allagan gear that may be won by completing the Binding Coil of Bahamut. With only the most skilled of adventurers able to complete this challenge, many others must settle for obtaining high-item-level gear via tomestones while biding their time, waiting for the difficulty of this battle to be eased.
Buy high-item-level gear at excessive prices to drive up value (market manipulation)
More persistently solicit RMT gil purchases from players (increased spamming)
This would, in turn, lead to more players choosing to purchase gil, creating a vicious cycle that would feed further RMT abuse.

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Because of this exactly is why the content we have now is getting boring.Players are finding that in order to get this said crafted gear have to spend upwards of 2mil gil for the whole HQ set otherwise the stats just don't match that of the Darklight. And that isn't with the materia that costs 40k+ each. This is because you have to use items that are only obtainable from spending 125 Tomestones of Philosophy a piece. By the time you get enough of the items you could easily have 2 or more of the Darklight gear.

About players not having motivation to tackle the toughest battles isn't about gear. Well sort of but mostly about difficulty causing groups to take only players that have exp in the dungeon which essentially means "Have you beaten it?". I understand that it is tough for a reason but the difficulty is too high because it was meant to be run with gear from Crystal Tower, not Darklight or crafted ILvl 70 equivalent. Myself and players like me have opted to capping every week versus doing coil because it is faster to cap than to find a group that will take inexperienced players.

While I see what you are saying, I believe you could solve the problem by adding for example in dungeons mining spots.
These mining spots would have rare material that is used to make gear better or equal to allagan.
Also you could make it unsellable and untradeable, So people would be forced to use the dungeons to obtain said item(material).

Why not introduce Abjurations like what they had in XI? You needed a crafter to make the Cursed Body / +1 and the Abjuration dropped off a boss and or bought from myth tomes... Voila Crafting and Raiding brought together in harmony. Would def give the FC crafters who aren't in a core raid group a chance to help the FC other than HEY GUYS I can make your NEXT 50's Relic Precursor!!!!

I'm sure other people have already said these but I'm feeling lazy to read right now:
1. Having multiple ways for us to obtain gear is not a bad thing, does anybody seriously care that much if someone "buys" their way into endgame? Even if you try to restrict it in various ways people will still do it in ways like selling Titan runs. Restricting gameplay because of this accomplishes absolutely nothing.
2. RMT will always be around regardless of what you do and you'll just have to accept it's an eternal cat-and-mouse game. It's also completely self-defeating to design your game obtusely specifically to inconvenience RMTs because it will almost always inconvenience legitimate players even more as well as defeat the whole purpose of fighting RMT in the first place ("RMT ruin the game, let's stop that by changing our design philosophy in a way that makes the game less fun!" What?)
3. XIV's crafting is one of the most unique things it has to offer when compared to other MMOs and I'm very disappointed that the dev team has decided to continue with the philosophy of making it largely useless other than for its own sake (crafting crafting gear to help others cap crafting so they can craft crafting gear for other crafters to cap their crafting) or for spending more points to create gear that's barely any better than you can just buy with those same points. In case any of you haven't kept up with it, base stats are generally ~6x what your secondary stats are worth so no amount of overmelding crit rate and determination is going to make your gryphonskins better than your myth or allegan pieces except in rare cases where they decided to saturate the higher ilevel with nothing but garbage stats like skill speed, even in these cases it was probably accidental and it really has nothing to do with why the design philosophy itself is flawed.

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Originally Posted by Xenobius

It's actually funny how crafters are considered "classes" and require gear, materia and/or buff food, but produce only mediocre gear and consumables and have no place in endgame, just like in every other plain cloned MMO out there. Why bother then, just make crafting (and gathering, while you're at it) a skill you learn as a DoW/DoM and be done with it. No point in calling something a class if it doesn't serve any purpose.

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But crafters can make the best crafting/gathering gear.
I agree it should interact with DoW/DoM more, but the fact that crafters mostly interact with other crafters/gathers lends itself to crafting/gathering being it's own thing outside of the battle classes.
So that doesn't really follow.


You're saying it doesn't deserve to be its own class because it's not serving the battle classes well yet finds its own niche within itself.
Um...what?

That said, I hope it does start being more useful for battle classes. Just saying, as it is...it really is its own thing. Not just a means to an end for the battle classes.

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Originally Posted by Teykos

What could be great here is if, instead, a more thorough commission system could be implemented in game.

The idea is, one player provides the components and a possible fee or item trade, allowing the crafter to craft the item and receive the fee/item(s) upon success, while allowing the result to go to the component provider. (Failure should be tied to the normal result.) Given how people are, you would probably need to put in separate fee/reward slots for normal and High Quality results. I don't know how complicated that would be to implement, but you've already got something VERY similar with the "Request Meld" option people have. This completely skirts around the problem of RMT farming for components if both key components and the end result are untradeable. Of course, it does absolutely nothing for people selling runs, but that seems to be something that's considered an unavoidable evil so far.

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Commissions would be a great addition.
GW2 had a market board where you could sell things at your own price or you look at requests where people say they'll pay a certain amount for X items.
Doing it even further to be like request meld would be great, but I would like something on a larger scale.

Maybe something like a job board where you can request items. If you take up the job, you might be able to trade it through a system similar to the request meld.
I don't know how hard it would be either, but hopefully you won't need to be standing next to the person for each job you take up. Though it'd be nice if there was some interaction between the client and crafter.

I think that's a great direction since crafting high end gear is pretty niche, might as well make it snazzy and streamlined or people just will continue not to bother.

While I can totally understand the reason for not allowing us to craft gear equivalent to the highest tier gear available, I do have some concerns here.

Materia - Is all but useless leveling up, as the main scenario is -very- easy and all content there in can be completed with minimal difficulty even in gear several levels below it. This needs to come into play much more in end game, allowing player to better spec their characters where they otherwise cannot.

Crafted iLvl 70 gear - The cost to craft this also seems disproportionately large (especially in the case of the DRG set, for instance, which requires far more of the tome materials than the other sets do). If you compare how much philosophy it takes to craft a piece of ilvl 70 gear, compared to how many pieces of DL you could obtain with those tomes, it seems hardly fair, especially since ilvl 70 is not the best in the game.

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Originally Posted by Mediave

While I can totally understand the reason for not allowing us to craft gear equivalent to the highest tier gear available, I do have some concerns here.

Materia - Is all but useless leveling up, as the main scenario is -very- easy and all content there in can be completed with minimal difficulty even in gear several levels below it. This needs to come into play much more in end game, allowing player to better spec their characters where they otherwise cannot.

Crafted iLvl 70 gear - The cost to craft this also seems disproportionately large (especially in the case of the DRG set, for instance, which requires far more of the tome materials than the other sets do). If you compare how much philosophy it takes to craft a piece of ilvl 70 gear, compared to how many pieces of DL you could obtain with those tomes, it seems hardly fair, especially since ilvl 70 is not the best in the game.

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Exactly This^^

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Originally Posted by Encarion

While I see what you are saying, I believe you could solve the problem by adding for example in dungeons mining spots.
These mining spots would have rare material that is used to make gear better or equal to allagan.
Also you could make it unsellable and untradeable, So people would be forced to use the dungeons to obtain said item(material).

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I like this idea, but as it stands, you can't change classes while in duty...

They should also make it spawn randomly, so that it's not a 100% chance for the node to spawn when you go in the dungeon - something like unspoiled nodes, except less predictable. This should create a good supply for them, and an income source for gatherers who are not up to par with crafting. Since I hit lv50 Miner last week, I am quite appalled to see that Astral Rock, Gold Sand and Volcanic Rock Salt, 3 items which you can only gather via unspoiled nodes as a Lv50 Miner, are only worth 35g, 30g or 40g a piece on my server.

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Originally Posted by Amiabelle

Heh yes, that saddened me, too. If it were up to me, one could start the game as any class they wanted and not be gated out of the creation classes. Why not be able to start as a crafter who gets (reluctantly) sucked into fighting? Why not have a way to experience the main story as a pure crafter/gatherer?

But those are issues for a different thread :).

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You mean like in 1.0, where you could choose between killing the enemy or discuss with him (parley mini-game)?

Yoshida, can you bring crafted ilevel 80 gear ingame, that would be with materia like ilevel 85 gear? It would be still weaker than ilevel90 gear

This doesn't seem that difficult of an issue to fix.

Just make iLVL 90 Dungeon gear the "Jobs" of armor while making the Crafted gear the "Classes" of armor.

The anoying part about the tombs for Ilvl 70 gear is that the darklight equivalent is cheaper and easier to obtain. While one can actually "Sell" the gear they craft the profit margin is next to none due to lack of utillity the gear presents without heavy melding. People would rather just slap their darklight on and not worry about melding, especially for a few items that require 2-3 crafted tomb items.

It's insane who would spend 3000+ tombs on a single item when they could gear their entire character for almost as much.

Keeping crafted gear weaker then end game dungeon gear is definitely the better idea. AKA: Work hard to....wear hard? O_o

Lowering tombs costs wont solve anything either. I understand crafted gear costs are ridic but the community is what controls those prices. The devs shouldn't have to adjust their specs because Joe, Moe, and Lo want 56240567204576 Gil for their crafted chest piece. Maybe if they had the player names on the Market Boards rather then the Retainers you could try PM'ing or emailing the player and do offers if you saw what you wanted.

What about instead of buying Darklight outright, you have to buy pieces and parts for Phil/Myth tomes. Then you have to take it to a crafter who uses these pieces and parts to make the armor? If you really want people to level crafting, make it so only the player can make it.

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Originally Posted by Supersun

This doesn't seem that difficult of an issue to fix.

Just make iLVL 90 Dungeon gear the "Jobs" of armor while making the Crafted gear the "Classes" of armor.

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This is also a good idea. Honestly there's no shortage of good ideas for them to fix this in a way so that crafting feels like it actually has an endgame or some kind of interaction with the top tier of battle play (And no shortage of bad ideas either I guess), the only real reason they wouldn't take any one of them is laziness.

I'd actually level crafting classes if you could make top-end gear only usable by the crafter. I was doing ARM, but it just felt so useless that I stopped, but if I could make myself some special gear/vanity gear, that's comparable to dungeon gear that would be best.
Give people something to work towards that isn't "grind for drops, grind for tomes".

Until there is a realistic level of demand for crafted goods (let's be honest.. primarily consumables) crafting in this game is little more than a time consuming hobby.
So long as consumables aren't worth bothering for and crafted gear continues to be a waste of time... the lack of demand will just get worse.

Thanks for confirming that crafting is pointless by design Yoshi P.

Crafted gear that is worth the effort should be:

Maximum available item level (90 for now);
Made from bind-on-pickup materials obtainable from Coil;
Bound to character upon creation/untradeable;
Customizeable, with both materia and dyes;
Unconditionally better than Allagan if HQ and slotted with proper materia;

...Or you can just forget about crafting and just sell tomes to naive people who think it's somehow "useful" and spend your money on consumables/repairs only.

I wouldn't say laziness. It is more a kind of being too protective to their product and some kind of stinginess.
Yoshida made the decision to not give the crafters the standing they had in 1.x. Was it a good one? In my honest oppinion it was the worst he could have done.
They reworked the crafting extraordinary good. The using of skills, just like a fight, was an excellent idea. But at this point the evolution stopped, suddenly. In fact we lost the ability to produce comparative items, be it because of high costs, missing damage or the focusing of one crafting class (only goldsmith can offer nearly comparable items, if melded properly). They drew a system with a potential no other modern game has atm, but let it stuck "one foot/meter" before the goal. The last step has to be done, and it has to be a good compromiss, nothing other seems to be expectable, as Yoshida "hinted".
Let us see what he offers us with the PVP things he mentioned and 2.1 in a whole.
"Only" housing crafting will not please me, and i ecpect others too.

Sure RMT has to be considered and is absolutly valid but we can't, we mustn't stand back 'cause of those suckers trying to diminish our game experiance! SE has to risk a bit and we, the community, has to report em every single time we see some.

I'm not keen on just 'settling' for housing crafting - as experienced in another game where furniture were prevalent (LOTRO), it's pretty much a waste of time decorating your home when you usually won't be receiving visitors. Sure, for the first two months you'd probably have a bunch of people coming and going but eventually everyone's just gonna be busy doing the same thing; dungeon runs, coiling and farming for other junk - and hardly stopping by at their own house/friend's.

"Looking ahead to Patch 2.2, crafters will be able to alter gear designs using a “template” system (official name TBD), giving them yet another role in creating desirable gear. " - This would be much more appropriate given that players are more likely to flaunt about in their appearances VS having static junk back home.

On that note; is that "template" system to override the "Vanity Slot"s that were being discussed in the forum and confirmed by a mod?

Why not alternate ilvls between crafted and dropped gear? As an example, iLVL60 crafted, iLVL 70 dropped/tome purchase, iLVL 80 crafted, ilvl90 dropped/tome purchase etc this might give a good enough gap, forcing people to purchase some gear to attempt the next level dungeon?, and perhaps after a big patch or 2 have said missing slots filled (by offerring craftable alternatives to iLVL gear that is droppable, and droppable gear for previously non droppable iLVL), and always having the highest/best gear be droppable/tome purchase, but at the same time requiring at least a few iLVL gears from the lower tear (craftable) to increase the proficiency of the player while working on getting the best gear from the hardest dungeon, while also not making it a must have requirement to attempt the highest dungeon as to not force people to feel pressured to purchase the best gear.