Crafting changes since 2.0

Hey there. So I was one of the first level 50 carpenters and weavers on my server and I recently came back after quitting in October during 2.0 with full HQ crafting gear and pretty good melds. I was about 360/350 when I left, but coming back, I notice there are items that take 391/374 or something like that to craft, which seems near impossible to get.

What did I miss in terms of crafting upgrades? What has been released since 2.0 that is better than a fully melded HQ set? In looking at the prices, I'm guessing 6 million gil isn't even a decent amount anymore, as I assume inflation has had plenty of time to kick in since 2.0. For someone just coming back, what is the market geared toward now and how does one go about getting BiS in crafting gear again?

The i70 Main hand tools and the i70 Headgear is likely the reason u cant reach those caps. You need to complete the Master Crafter books in order to be able to obtain them. They are found by the NPC next to the Summoning Bell in Mor Dhona. Good luck.

Here's what you missed:

2.1 made philosophy tomes plentiful and introduced FC housing. Everyone started squirreling away their money for houses, significantly depressing the economy. The buying power of your six million gil probably jumped six-fold in early 2.1. This was offset somewhat by reduced repair costs, gil drops in dungeons, beast tribe dailies, and duty roulette (with a bonus of 4500 gil for needed roles).

SE had been touting FC housing as a panacea for a sluggish crafting economy. To no one's great surprise (except for SE, I suppose) no one made any money off the new housing items because any free company that could put together hundreds of million gil to buy a plot already had the means to craft their own.

The market eventually became flooded with philosophy tome items because everyone ran out of other stuff to spend their tomestones on. When I stopped playing a few months back, the crafting market was well on its way to bottoming out. I could spend 20k gil on materials to make a two-star item that that might sell for 30k gil, but eight other people were trying to sell the same thing and only one or two were going to sell each day... or I make the same amount of gil by healing a couple of dungeons in duty roulette.

Oh, they improved the droprate of tier IV materia too.

That pretty much brings us to 2.2 and SE's very indelicate efforts at game balance. You know, like a chainsaw.

Problem: Alchemy is useless.
Solution: Give alchemists all the new weapons and a new reagent - Terminus Putty - that is required for every single high level craft.

Problem: Every level 50 crafter can HQ everything 100% of the time from NQ components.
Solution: A tedious two-tiered upgrade system and three-star items that require fully melded gear to craft. After that, you'll need (mostly) HQ components and most of the level 50 crafting affinities if you want to HQ.

Problem: Gathering is too easy. Few people even bother to meld their gathering gear.
Solution: A lengthy and tedious upgrade system and three-star nodes that require fully melded gear to gather.

Problem: They added new dungeons in 2.1, but everyone just ran Wanderer's Palace and Amdapor Keep for easy tomestones.
Solution: Reduce max-grade (previously mythology, now soldiery) tomestone drops by 60-80% everywhere except the three new instances.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Anyway, most of the old BiS gear is still BiS. Almost all of the difference between the old stat maximums and the new stat maximums comes from the new mainhand weapons. To craft three-star gear you need fully melded class pieces for the hands, chest, legs, and feet; fully melded accessories; the new mainhand and headpiece; and four control on the offhand. That leaves you three or four offhand overmelds to make up for any suboptimum melds on the rest of your gear.

On the plus side, your six million gil is probably worth more than it was before you stopped playing. Prices on the new gear were grossly inflated in the first week of the patch, but the prices of everything else -- Fleece and Iron Ore and Fire Crystals and minions and so on -- should all be less than you remember them. As with 2.0 crafted gear, the new three-star stuff is all pretty trivial to make except for the mythology tomestone items, which will ultimately determine their price.

Awesome post, Kakure, thank you. That is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. So it looks like the best methods for making gil have moved away from crafting due to the overabundance of max-level crafters with maxed out equipment and toward the DoM/DoW side of things with duty roulette, and the new retainer ventures things, which someone in my FC apparently had bring back an item worth 250k last night.

The market crash was pretty much inevitable, and is one of the things that pushed me to leaving. I was having fun with the economy as an early crafter, but once the profit margin on things started to bottom out to almost nothing, I took my ball and went home, so to speak. I tried a couple other games, but nothing gives me that feeling of being immersed in a world like XI and XIV, so I came back.

I noticed there are still some small profits to be made in some of the same things that were often overlooked in 2.0. HQ Vintage gear is usually good for 2-3x what you spend on mats to make it and sells a few times a day. Anyway, thanks for the post! I'm going to get to work on my DoM/DoW and get into endgame and hang onto my gil instead of getting back into the market and crafting.