Allow materials touchups or improve hq rates.

As the game settles in, hq 2 and 3s are becoming the new area of focus. However, we must spend hours of time synthing hundreds of the best materials to make hq presynthesis items. Iron ingots, for example: these represent one final lucky stroke in probably hundreds of hq3 iron turned into nigh worthless nq iron nuggets, hq nuggets getting turned into npc fodder nq ingots. All for one iron ingot+3.

First is the time burden. Me and two other goldsmithers can't keep up with brass ingot+3 synths for aeolians because it's just so freaking painful, long as every synth is bold, and boring.

Second is the material burn. Ridiculous amounts of "trash" synthesis is made when we attempt these things. No one wants iron ingots. No one wants nq weapon heads. No one wants +1s. +2s are "we'll settle for that because I'm tired of waiting" and it'll just probably be NQ anyway."

With a 150 quality final product I figure I have a 35% chance of hq1 and like 5% chance of hq2. It is nowhere near that rate for material synths.

Therefore I think hq rates of material synths, or quality floors, be increased and/ or implemented. For example: with 300 quality you are guaranteed +1 result. With 400, +2. With 500, plus three.

I fully agree with the statements above. I spent some time attempting to create some final HQ items, one which had 4 ingrediants. After spending hours attempting to get a HQ version of 1 of the 4 ingrediants, I eventually just gave up. I have much better things to do with my time, then waste it trying to get a HQ material for a final item synth, when most likely the final item synth will just end up being NQ also.

Ex. I can easily get between 175 - 225 Quality just from a low rank NQ material, such as 4 silver ore. You would expect that you could get a HQ1 result of Silver Nugget +1 fairly often, but that is not the case. One day I processed over 40 synths just to get 1 stack of +1 nuggets. I also Mine my own ore, so I have a good supply of HQ ore. I did 8 synths with silver ore +3, getting 400 - 500 quality and of those 8 it only resulted in 1 Silver nuggets +2 and 1 Silver Nugget +1, the rest were NQ, which is just depressing.

I agree that Touch Up should be extended to materials also.

There should also be an increasing chance of HQ results based on the players rank in comparison to the rank of the material/item attempting to be synthed. This 'rank bonus' should be applied on top of the quality achieved on the synth itself. That way those players who have taken the time to get a high rank crafting job could enjoy a higher rate of success when creating the lower rank materials.
FF11 had a much better balance in this area. I had a 100 Alchemy in FF11 and could easily get HQ results on low level materials and items. It was very enjoyable and rewarding after all the work and expense it took to get to 100.

For now I'm just gong to continue to focuse on ranking up vs. trying to make the HQ items, as it's just too frustrating when most of the time you get a NQ result anyway.