Crafting for yourself only viability

Just looking for some feedback from more experienced crafters. It seems once one gets to around level 10 crafting its no longer possible (or extremely slow) to level exclusively from guideleves.

If a person only wanted to craft to make their own gear, with no concern for making money or crafting just for the "joy of it"... at which point would it be cheaper to just buy gear in the Market Wards than grind crafting just to make a single gear set?

Thanks!

I've been wondering this myself. Especially since I want to play classes supported by such a wide variety of DoHs.

I think the best thing they can do is change crafting leves to five level ranges instead of 20 and give static leves in those ranges. Say there's always two of a possibly four when accepting leves. Nothing is more frustrating than having zero leves available for your level range.

Since there's no real economy in this game, it does just seem like a personal choice -- grind leves for Gil to just buy items or grind crafts for the pleasure of saying "I made it myself."

I thought materia would change things, but it seems people aren't willing to risk even a second melding unless they can make the equipment themselves.

Issues with the crafting/gathering leve system:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Can-I-Have-it

Somewhere around level 15-20, crafting by leves becomes extremely slow, and in no way are you better off crafting your own gear just for the fun of it. You will bore yourself to tears before making useful things. You have to either be really dedicated to crafting - as in crafting way more than doing battle classes - or just don't do it. Or do it little by little, and try not to think about how little progress you're making.

I may be a little biased because I'm trying to level 7 crafts simultaneously, but I spend 90% of my time in game crafting, and my 2 gathering and 2 battle classes are higher than my crafts. >.>

You all are crazy if you think crafting leves are not worth it. They are insane SP and no doubt the fastest way to rank up. Slowly the SP from local leves is shifted from the items being crafted to the reward upon completion. Getting from 48 to 50 on local leves is insanely fast. I did 150k sp on locals in a few hours. Back in the day when locals had no EXP reward at the end is when they were completely useless to skill up on. In those days you were happy if you got 15k-20k sp in a hour. Now you can do 10k sp in about 10 minutes or less on rank 40-50 leves. Now I must admit I have not done locals from 1-50 because for the majority of the games life they were utterly useless. So I am unsure how good they are before 45. However, there is no doubt in my mind 45-50 is quickest with locals. Especially now that you can save up to 99 locals. I would imagine you could easily do 45-50 in one sitting doing saved up locals. The only issue is transportation. Unless you have a mule that can freely teleport you I can see how locals start to decline in sp/hr.

Khaz the main issue I can see you running into while trying to progress with locals is that your previous locals will be giving you less sp and their reward at the end is not great yet. In this case you cant just grind locals for the completion reward at a decent rate because you do not have the proper rank to unlock the next tier of locals. If this is the case then you should probably look for a grind synth to unlock the next step of locals.

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Originally Posted by tragic

You all are crazy if you think crafting leves are not worth it. They are insane SP and no doubt the fastest way to rank up. Slowly the SP from local leves is shifted from the items being crafted to the reward upon completion. Getting from 48 to 50 on local leves is insanely fast. I did 150k sp on locals in a few hours. Back in the day when locals had no EXP reward at the end is when they were completely useless to skill up on. In those days you were happy if you got 15k-20k sp in a hour. Now you can do 10k sp in about 10 minutes or less on rank 40-50 leves. Now I must admit I have not done locals from 1-50 because for the majority of the games life they were utterly useless. So I am unsure how good they are before 45. However, there is no doubt in my mind 45-50 is quickest with locals. Especially now that you can save up to 99 locals. I would imagine you could easily do 45-50 in one sitting doing saved up locals. The only issue is transportation. Unless you have a mule that can freely teleport you I can see how locals start to decline in sp/hr.

Khaz the main issue I can see you running into while trying to progress with locals is that your previous locals will be giving you less sp and their reward at the end is not great yet. In this case you cant just grind locals for the completion reward at a decent rate because you do not have the proper rank to unlock the next tier of locals. If this is the case then you should probably look for a grind synth to unlock the next step of locals.

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how much is the bonus on locals at 45? i only saw 3k bonus from the ones available at 35. does the quality report greatly effect the end result amount?

It really didnt seem that good to do it. At low levels its definitely weak though. Also didnt seem that there were many level 40 reccomended leves when you hit 35, usually 1 or 2 per town.

At R48 I was getting 3-4 R40-50 local leves ranging with sp reward of 3000-4500. I averaged 4,000 sp for leve completion over 35ish leves. So was hasty handing 3-4 locals at a time and teleporting to turn in. One of the leves only required 2 synths that was easy to hasty hands. There was one leve the required 5 items and was hard to hasty hands. It is those kind of leves that eat into your sp/hr. Also, make sure you are at the city with the crafting guild so you have more locals to do. Im not sure which rank unlocks all the locals I think it may be 45. Even if you only have one R40 because of low rank you wont be able to hasty hand it but you will get good sp from each item. So even though it takes more time I think it will be better sp.

Perhaps locals suck at the low ranks, but those lower ranks are the easiest and fastest because you can do synth 10 ranks above you. Getting to 40 use to be really quick. Now with the crafting and gathering changes im not so sure what the grind synths are anymore. What I do know for sure is that rank 48-50 is fastest with local leves. With my experience I am willing to extrapolate that 45-50 is most likely fastest with local leves. Ill do some testing with cooking to see how it is to rank up a low rank craft with locals.

Another thing you can do at lower rank to take advantage of the leve system is to go to the city without the guild. Typically you will only have one R40 leve. That leve should be at the npc in the city. Because it is the only local leve available to you then you will always get it again when you complete it. Grind this way until you can unlock more R40s and the R45s and eventually the 50s.

I don't know about the very high ranks, but I can say as a level 30 armourer, using a level 35 leves and an engineer's manual gives me just over 1,000 sp per synth on some leves and just over 900 sp per synth on other level 35 leves. Bonus of around 1,500sp... I think! Not sure on that one. But getting 1k per synth with 6 sets of mats with the 900sp per synth with 7 & 5 sets of mats... lets just say the movement from level 30 armourer to leve 31 armourer was pretty quick. :) Engineer's Manuals are definitely worth it, and the leves are definitely worth it.

I have never crafted by leves, i like manually better. It has been upped extremely, normal lowlevel synths can give around 600 exp each. Goin from 1-20 shouldnt be a problem anymore.