Crafting and Gathering need a QoL change asap.

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Originally Posted by Jimmymagic

Where was that said? Source please...

If true then that s awesome IMHO

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Famitsu did an interview with Yoshi-P at e3 and an unofficial translation can be found on reddit.

However, the translation I read didn't explicitly say "all skills" will be made cross-class. The direct quote[from the translation]:
"Because of some Byregot skills, you had to level crafters in a specific order so far. We decided to give these skill to all crafters. So from now on, you can start with any crafter of your choosing. Our aim wasn’t to balance the crafters, but to get to a point where you were able to start “Crafting” with any of the crafting classes."

Which could imply that some skills could still be class-restricted (like the elemental brands and abilities... which are rarely used in the first place) and would still need to be cross-classed for the crafters that don't learn the ability through leveling.

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Yep totally didn't out in effort getting to 51

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... lol. No, no you really didnt.

Gathering, especially at that level, is one of the single easiest things you can possibly do in this game. You can level to 50+ off ONLY items you will use in 95% of items you craft at level cap.

Similarily, you can level crafting off just doing ingots / lumber / thread / cloth. And cul/alc have mass production things as well (but significantly less useful).

And. if you feel like it, you can level everything to 70 without ever having to craft or gather a single thing. Which is stupid, but something you absolutely can do.

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Honestly, the only thing about crafting that bugs me is how long it takes to mass produce stackable items like materials and infusions that are needed in large quantities.

Being able to increase the yield on stackable items by using more mats

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Yes please.

The worst part of crafting sessions is realizing you need 750 lumber/ingot and that translating to over an hour of sitting afk.

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Only those who have been playing the game for years.
Newbies, HAH! Good luck, come back in 5 years.

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You can get every crafter and gatherer to 70 in a month of GC turnins, beast tribes and leves, without actually crafting anything.

Its not hard, it just takes more than minimal effort.

Crafting is probably one of the big reasons I play FF14 over WoW. Plenty of other reasons too, like the music, graphics and customization and so on, but starting out I loved crafting. It was such a huge change to come from WoW, where you simply click a button, rub your hands together and you're done and where the vast majority of crafted items are worthless, to this huge immersive side-game with 70 levels, thousands of useful items, indepth rotations, your own tools, crafting table, questlines. It was brilliant. It still is.

I love games that aren't afraid to add a little complexity and grind. There's nothing more satisfying than a long journey, figuring out things that aren't straightforward and finally reaching that end goal. I've thoroughly enjoyed every step and look forward to ShB.

So naturally people of the same opinion are going to be annoyed when others walk in and say "I don't like it, make it like WoW, I want gil".

It can certainly seem overwhelming at times OP, but if crafting/gathering isn't something you enjoy then you shouldn't feel obligated to max those classes out. Personally I found it all a bit overwhelming when I first started, but there's plenty of low stress (and low cost) ways to level them available. GC dailies give great experience and Beast Tribes are basically free exp since give you all the mats to work with. You can actually jump 5-6 levels at a time if you make a stack of items for repeatable leve turn ins and then you can sell the rest for a tidy profit! Heck, I've been able to level my gatherers just by being cheap and getting most of the mats myself.

If you want to get everything up it is going to take time dedicated to it, but break it down into manageable chunks. Find a small goals to work towards, but don't do it if you're not enjoying it. You can get great gear and stuff to sell with tombstones, coins, dungeon drops, ect. Do what's fun for you.

Craft leveling to 70 may be faster now than it was to level to 50 in ARR. I am a fan of GC turn-ins and ixal/moogle/namazu quests. The latter (and custom deliveries) are convenient since you don’t have to worry about materials.

I enjoyed the “game” part of crafting as well as the job quests, so I am not in favor of simplifying it to one job and one button. And crafting has been pretty useful in the past few patches, which is nice.

I don't agree with everything in the OP, but there are some issues with crafting and gathering in this game. For one, material requirements have been going up and up and up....but gatherer abilities haven't been adjusted nearly enough to compensate. So it can take an entire day or days just to get the materials you need to get a single stack of your basic supplies. When you make some of those hidden (like HW did on even basic mats) or timed that gets exponentially worse. if you want to increase your yield as a gatherer, it costs nearly your entire bar. And while they made a small adjustment of GP regen, it isn't enough when you need massive amounts of supplies. They very much need to adjust either gatherer yield or ability cost. Even some sort of proc that increases yield temporarily like with shards/crystals/clusters would be a small help.

Another issue I have with crafting is that it really comes down to spending massive amounts of gil on crafter materia to overmeld gear, work out a macro (or Google it) and that is considered endgame and hardcore. One of the most enjoyable crafting systems I've experienced was EverQuest II. In EQII, there were "events" that would happen that were either positive or negative. You needed to use the appropriate skill to react to them, either to avoid the negative outcome or cause the positive one. There was no pattern. You had to pay attention if you wanted to make a high quality item. It was still possible to put things on automatic and mass craft. But if you wanted to be considered a quality crafter, you needed to master the event system. When you can just macro the craft, there really isn't much more difference than the systems that have you put everything into a box and hit craft.

I do also think there's a decided barrier to entry for new crafters. I'm on omni on multiple characters. And while I drop some cash on an alt when I work up crafting, I level them the old fashioned way rather than just making leve kits to feed them. The characters can do leves once they can make their own materials. It's a matter of pride for me that they work their way up, but I'm a crafting mentor and I think it also helps me stay connected with the newbie experience. Pre-50 there there are issues when you don't have all your CC skills, or when you are only leveling one crafter. It sounds like ShB may be smoothing some of that out. I see anything that can streamline that process and even out that barrier to entry as only a good thing.

They also just need to overhaul fishing. The multiple bait system with no in-game way to track anything relating to which a fish prefers, time, or weather is really just ridiculous. The time and the weather restrictions cause the same issues that hidden and timed nodes cause for the other gathering classes. Fishing has massive amounts of frustrating RNG. It suffers from the same high ability cost that all gathering classes are plagued with. The one thing I can give it is that you don't need a rotation for collectibles. You just catch the HQ fish. But you also have absolutely no control or influence over whether you get that HQ fish, unlike with botany and mining. This has turned fishing into basically a non-class, outside of one or two fish desirable for aquariums or necessary in foods. There is very little it can bring to the table to make it able to compete on the same level as the other two gathering classes. Even spear-fishing was just putting a bandage on the problem without fixing the underlying issues with how the class functions.

Also, I imagine they're going to release a level skip potion for gatherers/crafters with ShB.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Also, I imagine they're going to release a level skip potion for gatherers/crafters with ShB.

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As much as I hate to admit it, you’re probably right. I’m strongly against jump potions for economically valuable jobs like those, but it seems with every expansion and patch even, Yoshida and the dev team are more focused on aspiring crafters than existing crafters.

In my opinion he should really give experienced crafters like myself a challenge every once in awhile, instead of ignoring us for an entire expansion. (4.0 - 4.5)

Can’t imagine how healers feel. They get nothing until 6.0

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Originally Posted by CookiesNCreams

Can’t imagine how healers feel. They get nothing until 6.0

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It's going to be really interesting to see what happens to queue times.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Also, I imagine they're going to release a level skip potion for gatherers/crafters with ShB.

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You're probably right, but I'm really hoping not. It's not a "I did it so you should have to as well" situation. Jump potions are a necessary evil as the game gets more and more expansions. The adventure side is something everyone has to do. And SE may find it hard to get new people in when they can't jump right into that adventure content in the new expansion.

Crafting and gathering are optional. There are some things they can do to streamline the newbie experience. But that isn't the same as full on jump potions. So I wouldn't consider jump potions for DoH and DoL a necessary evil in the same way adventuring potions are.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

You're probably right, but I'm really hoping not. It's not a "I did it so you should have to as well" situation. Jump potions are a necessary evil as the game gets more and more expansions. The adventure side is something everyone has to do. And SE may find it hard to get new people in when they can't jump right into that adventure content in the new expansion.

Crafting and gathering are optional. There are some things they can do to streamline the newbie experience. But that isn't the same as full on jump potions. So I wouldn't consider jump potions for DoH and DoL a necessary evil in the same way adventuring potions are.

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It can be a necessity if they decide that the market isn't healthy, due to low number of suppliers, due to DoL / DoH leveling being too much of a pain (and yeah making it faster / easier / more enjoyable would be optimal, but that would actually take effort). While I am conceptually against all kinds of jump potions, I think the DoL / DoH potions would do the least damage, as 1-50 DoH and basically 1-70 DoL is mostly pointless aside from the tedium and everything neccessary for your job can be learned in an hour tops.

If they are leveling the extra casual (or hardcore) way, they aren't supplying anything low level to the market anyways.

Indications from a recent interview is that this friday's Live Letter will announce changes that loosen reliance on cross-class skills, at least partially. He said essential skills such as Byregots would become role skills for DoH available to all classes.
So role skills instead of jump potions I would imagine.
This way if you do only want to level a couple of crafters, it's much easier.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens to queue times.

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Really interesting to see them not change in the slightest once the GNB/DNC hype does down?

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Originally Posted by CorbinDallas

Really interesting to see them not change in the slightest once the GNB/DNC hype does down?

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I wouldn't use the word interesting either. At worst healer and tank will divide the role needed rewards more equally? On Light it already seems to be a close 50-50 many times, but its possibly just due to the pre-expansion lul.

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Originally Posted by Lersayil

It can be a necessity if they decide that the market isn't healthy, due to low number of suppliers, due to DoL / DoH leveling being too much of a pain

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This doesnt seem like an issue to me for 2 reasons. The first, is that they implemented world visit. If the supply isnt there on my server i can hop next door and see the difference. The second is that an under-served market is one ripe to be tapped, and that sort of motivation can be more then enough to get some new people to pick up a class and profit. The people on here telling you that it doesnt need to take long arent lying. Using GC turnins, beast tribes, leves and collectables you can go from 0 to 70 in a crafting class in less then a week. Early access will be enough time for some people to get all 11 craft/gather classes from 70-80.

Getting crafters to 70 isn’t even the hard part. Once you’ve capped then the real work starts. The rabbit hole is deep.

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Originally Posted by Frizze

This doesnt seem like an issue to me for 2 reasons. The first, is that they implemented world visit. If the supply isnt there on my server i can hop next door and see the difference. The second is that an under-served market is one ripe to be tapped, and that sort of motivation can be more then enough to get some new people to pick up a class and profit. The people on here telling you that it doesnt need to take long arent lying. Using GC turnins, beast tribes, leves and collectables you can go from 0 to 70 in a crafting class in less then a week. Early access will be enough time for some people to get all 11 craft/gather classes from 70-80.

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We don't have numbers. They do. If they think crafting is underrepresented due to leveling then this might be a conclusion they come to. I am not arguing for it, just stating that its a valid, possible conclusion on their part.

As for the leveling time, you can 1-70 in a few days, but that requires a pretty decent gil investment on DoH. I think I can safely state that very few people level that way. Doing beast tribe + GC turn in + a few leves leaves you at 3-4 weeks per DoH. How do I know? I am doing it right now, 3 DoH to go.

Thats like an hour or two every day, basically producing nothing tangible aside from the xp, learning very little relevant to the job. Now, again, I am anti-skip potion, but I'd say most people and the economy would lose VERY little if a few people were to skip that grind.

I mean he is right! We should Make crafting easier, someone mentioned you just put materials into a window and BOOM HIGH QUALITY STUUFFF BABAY.

Next we shouldn't have to walk or fly or teleport, that so archaic, we need an auto run auto movement so much better.

Just like with crafting, screw battle rotations, let's make it this way. You have the right stats and boom you can press auto battle! Now you can run the latest savage and netflix!!

In fact why even do that? Let's download the game after paying money for it, you open the client and a giant flashy sign pops up seconds after you start that game that says " you win, your the bigglyest winner, bigger bestest hero ever"

Screw playing the game I just want instant gratification!

My bad I thought we where role playing who is more entitled.

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Originally Posted by Vitallian

SO all crafters are at 51. I'm about to give up this crap. It's so infuriating in this game to have to sit there and gather all of these things that you need. I don't mean running and gathering them either. CRAFTING in this game has officially got me at my limit of giving a damn about it. Mats locked behind timed nodes or "hidden", things being too expensive all the time, this is actual stupidity. Leveling any of this stuff takes ages and the FACT that you need to use something from basically every other damn class to make one thing is absolutely obnoxious.

I expect to take a lot of flak for this and I don't care. There's no point in lvling a crafter if it doesn't feel fun or rewarding and right now it absolutely doesn't. I've crafted in every game i've played MMO wise and no other game makes me want to jam a lego through my cerebral cortex more than this one.

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Sorry you don't like crafting or gathering. It's not for everyone. My husband doesn't do it, so he sticks with all the questing and dungeon crawling. And that's fine!

But saying it needs a QoL change "ASAP" because you don't enjoy it isn't fair. What do you want to see changed? What would you like added?

If I was to offer an actual QoL suggestion, perhaps they could make the Ixal turn-ins a bit easier for people who want to level a single crafting class. The game seems super unfriendly for those who don't want to omnicraft at early levels.

As for levelling 51+, there are plenty of daily beast tribes, weekly collectables, daily hand-ins and more to level crafters at a respectable pace (I personally feel these all make things far too easy, but that is a different story).

People shouldn't have to google a crafting rotation, this is a symptom of people not spending time to learn the class skills.

As for gathering items locked behind timed nodes, if you're going for the little tick in your crafting logs, there are not a huge volume of items locked behind these nodes. I've done literally everything in the main logs (furniture and master recipes aside) and I barely touched a botanist hidden node (I expect I will probably change my mind on this when I do carpenter furniture!!) and the most I spent at mining nodes were for darksteel ore, gold ore, adamantite ore and raw azurite (the latter 2 spawn every half hour). The only QoL tweak for gathering is maybe a 10-20% GP cost reduction and the increased frequency of ARR nodes.

On topic again:

In EverQuest, everything is one click and done.

You spend hours getting that Tongue of Zfhurghosfo for a combine? You better hope it doesn't fail when you --- oops, nevermind. You failed the combine and lost all materials. TOO BAD.

Yeah, I'll pass on that. Doing things to make sure you don't fail is awesome.

Crafting is an optional side activity, noone is required to do it if they don't want to.

It does require some QoL though, I agree. Personally I'd be happy if it used materials on my retainers and didn't require me to have them in my inventory. That's probably the biggest issue I have with the system. It's probably never going to happen since their back-end is crap, and something like that is probably not possible.

The job interdependence is probably my favorite aspect of it. Having to craft multiple items to make a final product is what differentiate this from other games. The mini game is fun, although it could be simplified a bit I think, there's too many abilities that are useless. I also dislike that 90% of the abilities are either shared or have an exact counterpart for each jobs, it would be more interesting if all jobs had different abilities and crafting with each was more "unique".

The last thing we need though is a one-click system like WoW. That's not even crafting.

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Originally Posted by JowyAtreides

If I was to offer an actual QoL suggestion, perhaps they could make the Ixal turn-ins a bit easier for people who want to level a single crafting class. The game seems super unfriendly for those who don't want to omnicraft at early levels.

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OMG just not having to swap to the Ixal gloves and go to a specific crafting area would make those turn ins so much better if I ever want to level an alt.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Also, I imagine they're going to release a level skip potion for gatherers/crafters with ShB.

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Sounds like a bots dream come true. Not to mention a goldmine in profit for Enix as all those bots buy skip potions and subs. Sadly I can fully see this happening.

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

On topic again:

In EverQuest, everything is one click and done.

You spend hours getting that Tongue of Zfhurghosfo for a combine? You better hope it doesn't fail when you --- oops, nevermind. You failed the combine and lost all materials. TOO BAD.

Yeah, I'll pass on that. Doing things to make sure you don't fail is awesome.

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COnsidering 80% if not more of crafters USE MACROS, it's the exact same thing. There are multitudes of guides that basically say "hey here's this macro and it works." which leads people to using it. Moot point.

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Originally Posted by Vitallian

COnsidering 80% if not more of crafters USE MACROS, it's the exact same thing. There are multitudes of guides that basically say "hey here's this macro and it works." which leads people to using it. Moot point.

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Iiiiiiiiif you think those two things are the same thing, congrats, you dont know what you're talking about.

I've never sat down in 14 and gone "this combine has a base 37% chance to fail and lose a month worth of time". Crafting those kinds of things in 14 is generally impossible to fail since they arent hq'able.

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Originally Posted by JowyAtreides

People shouldn't have to google a crafting rotation, this is a symptom of people not spending time to learn the class skills.

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I disagree. Some of the actions The class skills are often not really clear on how they work, especially to a noobie. And the RNG is a huge factor with many of them - too much of a factor I think. As far as the specialist skills - does anyone ever actually use them?

Some of the specialist skills are good if you arent melding correctly, or as a way to ignore HQ material needs early on in an expansion.

The problem with them is, if you can set up a rotation to work without specialist skills, you dont need the specialist skills.

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Originally Posted by Windsun33

I disagree. Some of the actions The class skills are often not really clear on how they work, especially to a noobie. And the RNG is a huge factor with many of them - too much of a factor I think. As far as the specialist skills - does anyone ever actually use them?

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People don't stumble on the rotations you find on google by sheer luck. They spend time learning the skills and have wasted tons of materials in failing rotation theories in order to find an optimum rotation, this is what everyone could do for themselves. If more people did this, we'd see a more sustainable gathering market too.

RNG in crafting can be good and bad. It usually depends on what side of the coin you land :P

As for specialist skills, I've personally never used one and I've only ever became a specialist once in order to craft a new weapon, locked behind the requirement that I liked the look of. My wife apparently used the GSM specialist skills before she levelled other classes.

Funny enough Yoshi confirmed some QoL and probably more are coming.

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Originally Posted by JowyAtreides

People don't stumble on the rotations you find on google by sheer luck. They spend time learning the skills and have wasted tons of materials in failing rotation theories in order to find an optimum rotation, this is what everyone could do for themselves. If more people did this, we'd see a more sustainable gathering market too.

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Not everyone can afford to do that.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Not everyone can afford to do that.

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Yes they can, it's called being self-sufficient. There is literally nothing stopping a single player (after the first couple of class quests) from doing this.

We could probably count on our hands the number of times we're actually REQUIRED to spend gil in this game... (airships at level 15 MSQ, ferries to/from Kugane/Gyr Abania)

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Originally Posted by JowyAtreides

Yes they can, it's called being self-sufficient. There is literally nothing stopping a single player (after the first couple of class quests) from doing this.

We could probably count on our hands the number of times we're actually REQUIRED to spend gil in this game... (airships at level 15 MSQ, ferries to/from Kugane/Gyr Abania)

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And how many hours would that take?
Why should crafting be gated purely for those who either have no job or only want to gather/craft?
When do I have time to actually play the game as DoW/M?

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Originally Posted by JowyAtreides

Yes they can, it's called being self-sufficient. There is literally nothing stopping a single player (after the first couple of class quests) from doing this.

We could probably count on our hands the number of times we're actually REQUIRED to spend gil in this game... (airships at level 15 MSQ, ferries to/from Kugane/Gyr Abania)

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Don't just think gil. There is a time / opportunity cost associated. If the game required everyone to experiment out optimal crafting rotations for whatever they do for themselves, it would be a major turn-off for a lot of people.

Eyeballing semi-optimal crafting rotations isnt hard, but few would want to invest the time / money to come up with the stat specific, point perfect rotations most people macro.

Personally I'd argue it would make the market situation worse if anything.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

And how many hours would that take?
Why should crafting be gated purely for those who either have no job or only want to gather/craft?
When do I have time to actually play the game as DoW/M?

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FFXIV is a themepark MMORPG.

Currently, apart from the MSQ,everything else can be considered optional content.

Savage raiders put in the time to gear up,practice progression,optimise etc

Why should crafting/gathering be different?

If you want to be a crafter/gatherer minting the gil, you've to level your crafters/gatherers,manage your crafting/gathering mat supply and study Market Board trends.

In other words, grind.

Secondly, as has been repeated multiple times, the leveling process is not difficult.

Lastly, many omni crafters/gatherers have limited amounts of playtime but they somehow manage to squeeze in content like Eureka,Raiding,Hunts,POTD,HOH etc

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Originally Posted by Lersayil

...but few would want to invest the time / money to come up with the stat specific, point perfect rotations most people macro.

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And yet people have done, to the point of obsession IMO. Ran across a site a few days ago where one particular "super optimized" rotation was a 5 page macro. That is not for me, nor for 99% of us.

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Originally Posted by Driavna

Funny enough Yoshi confirmed some QoL and probably more are coming.

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Yes specifically what sounded like a reduction or removal of the cross class actions, basically so you don’t have to lvl every single crafter to actually do end game crafting hq stuff.

We’ll see exactly what it is, but that should help a bit with people getting overwhelmed with having to lvl 7 different crafters at once to have a chance.

But as an omni crafter/gatherer, it’s pretty cool. I’m a fan of how in depth it is. But I admit it’s a hell of a lot of work doing it all solo/ relying on you and only you to gather and craft every single mat from all the classes to make one item.

The biggest issue with crafting I feel is that it on one hand encourages you to do it solo cause you have to lvl multiple classes, but also wants you to work as a team to craft things.

But they seem to be fixing this so we’ll see. Could be good

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Originally Posted by Windsun33

And yet people have done, to the point of obsession IMO. Ran across a site a few days ago where one particular "super optimized" rotation was a 5 page macro. That is not for me, nor for 99% of us.

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Yeah, you generally move from MaMa to MuMe as soon as possible because using 3 button macros is preferred to the sheer nonsense that MaMa becomes, even when MaMa is more powerful (it's always more powerful).

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Originally Posted by Vitallian

COnsidering 80% if not more of crafters USE MACROS, it's the exact same thing. There are multitudes of guides that basically say "hey here's this macro and it works." which leads people to using it. Moot point.

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Actually it isn't the same. No where did I speak about macros.

In EverQuest there are no ways to raise your quality, or outfits to wear to raise crafting stats. Thre is maybe, one? or two tools you can buy to help. And that's about it. FF14 has all these tools that up your chance on making a great item withouth leaving it to RNG to lose everything.

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Originally Posted by Darkplanet

Yes specifically what sounded like a reduction or removal of the cross class actions.

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Yep, Live Letter has confirmed that Steady Hand 2 and Byregot's Blessing will be added to all crafting classes.

Non Omni Crafters are now more viable.

Also will be easier to HQ 5.0 recepies, if you have more HQ mats.