What's up with...

Artisan/Forager gear and off-hands?

Let me explain.

The old ilvl55 crafting off-hands at hq have 107 craftsmanship and 61 control. The artisan off-hands at nq have 123 craftsmanship and 69 control. So even if I fail to hq them they're still an improvement. The same is true of gathering off-hands.

Now, with the new artisan/forager gear, the stats of them at nq is actually worse than the hq of the ilvl 55 gear. So if you fail to hq these, not only do you end up with worse gear than what you're most likely wearing, you've lost like a million gil worth of mats. (i've never crafted 4 star stuff so i could be wrong on price.)

So is it that the gear is just so off, or is it that the off-hands are that good?

The offhands are actually way better than the gear in every way. You need the Artisan offhands to reach 4 star minumums. You don't need a single piece of the clothes to reach minimums. You only gain +9 control over normal i55 gear with Artisan clothes (fully max melded). As for the gatherer offhands, they're optional (still extremely good) since even cheap food will allow you to reach gathering minimums for Platinum Ore and Ebony Log nodes.

You can still reach the stat caps by melding more materia than HQ requires to reach the same stats that HQ would give you for the clothes. It's just a matter of more money spent on melds that's all.

So you think it's intentional?

Just seems weird to me that the 4 star crafts would be less beneficial than the 3 star ones.

The reason the offhands are so much better is because they are i70 and the gear is only i60. You absolutely do not want an NQ offhand though, since no amount of extra melding is going to come close to making up the difference in stats lost by using NQ (you already need to nearly fully meld the HQ offhand to hit 4-star caps), and you won't be doing 4-star with an NQ offhand without some serious buffing. NQ'ing the i60 gear isn't that big of deal since they have 3 free slots and it's not much harder to make up the stat loss on NQ with extra/higher materia.

Ah ok, I guess I didn't realize the ilvl difference.