iLevel 70 crafted gear ridiculously expensive
So everyone knows the mats required to craft 2 star gear is more expensive than just buying Darklight, but I haven't seen a comprehensive cost comparison. So here it is; items that are especially expensive compared to the Darklight gear for the slot are bolded, except the accessories which don't have comparable stats so may arguable be worth it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...Xc&usp=sharing
As you can see not only are most crafted items many times more expensive than the Darklight equivalent, it's not even consistent across the board and some classes get shafted especially hard. For example DRG have to pay 1875 more tombstones or 6x as much as the Darklight equivalent for the belt, and 2550 more tombstones or 4x as much for the Darklight equivalent for the pants. The total difference for the entire set is 7740 more tombstones over the Darklight set; assuming 1 CM run every 40 minutes, it takes 52 straight hours of grinding to make up the difference.
This severely hampers the usefulness of crafting classes in the end game; crafted gear for 2 to 6 times the cost of Darklight equivalents is just not viable, even if they can be materia melded which can cost almost as much as the gear itself depending on melding luck. Maybe if iLevel 90 gear didn't exist and melded iLevel 70 gear is BiS there would be some purpose to getting the best gear in the game, but as it is there's no point to grinding 7740 more philosophy tombs for the opportunity to meld gear that's slightly better than Darklight but still inferior to Allagan/AF+1.
Crafting and gathering are supposed to have major roles in this game, and it's part of what makes this game more interesting than other MMOs; SE, please give them a purpose in the end game.