Printable View
For those of us (and that includes me) working on several crafts at once, are we wasting our time trying to be the master of all?
Are we going to get near 50 and hit some 'end game' brick wall where we need special rare items that require other people or some disproportioned effort that was different to normal crafting in order to progress?
I think I find crafting the most worthwhile feature at the moment and am concerned that I might be doing it for naught.
There is no brick wall beside the fact you may get suspended and have 99% of your Gil taken away if you try to sell anything worthwhile at level 50. Yes there're cross-craft dependency, but as long as you use the market boa....oh wait, risk of suspension yet again. Just tread carefully and avoid buying from "suspiciously named retainer" and don't get too attached to your Gil, that's the only advice I can give you if you so happen to be one of the unlucky people playing on a non-legacy server.
I'm not sure if I follow the question but if you level all crafting and gathering classes, you should be fully capable of getting them all to 50 without anyone else help.
The Level 50 gear for most of the classes does take special materials. These however can be bought from either RT for Tomestones of Philosophy or from other players via the market board.
Crafting is nice to have for leveling, it allows you to craft gear that can then be used for alts to avoid getting the same exact piece from a quest reward and take money instead. Other then that useless, end game gear doesn't have materia slots so no point in attaching materia with crafting.
Yes, there is a brick wall. I have everything but cooking at 50 and I'm now working on cooking (at least to 37 for an ability I've been told that I need).
The brick wall is green and has 2 stars. This is your 'end game' for crafting. How DoW and DoM have to spam dungeons to get their gear, yeah, SE has done the same thing for crafters. I could get mad about it, but I've decided to appreciate it as an end game of my very own :D
Basically, here's what I think you'll have to do.
Craft your AF for each craft. I don't think HQ's matter for this first round.
Craft a second set of AF for each craft, HQ is necessary as this will be your final gear.
Spiritbond the first AF so you have grade IV materia from it.
Meld the grade IV materia to your HQ AF so you have maximum craftsmanship, control and CP.
Then, you can more easily craft and HQ the double star recipes.
However, this is the part I'm dreading. Most of the double star recipes require crafting mats that can only be purchased via tomestones or from the market boards from people who have bought them with their tomestones. So, yeah, there's a brick wall for us.
Also, even the single star recipes require special mats. Most of these are gathered only by level 50 miner/botanist from the "Unspoiled Gathering Points" scattered across the realm. They appear once per game day and require level 50 gatherers and a lot of GP. So, if you have your gathering classes at 50 as well, or have a friend with them, you should be able to get these items easily.
For materia, I'm thinking of crafting a bunch of aetheryte rings, since they're item level 55 and should give me grade IV materia. Once I have the rings crafted, I'll hand them over to my husband to wear while he's dragoon. He can probably spiritbond them faster than me and just hand me the materia resulting from it.