Crafting isn't fun because materia isn't fun

This is a story of how many elements in the game synergize to ensure a game play experience that is not fun.

There are a number of problems with crafting currently:

1) Materia. In order to craft effectively at a high level, you MUST have materia in your gear. A lot of it. You basically need to maximize all stats, and use food on top of that, in order to craft the best gear. Why is this a problem? A few reasons, that mostly come out of this one reason:

1a) Blind luck. Materia is all about blind luck. It's a bad system in every sense of the word. Why? Many reasons:

- You wear subpar gear to accumulate spiritbond. This means you are either fighting random monsters (which isn't fun - mobs of your level aren't challenging, which is why FATEs aren't interesting - nothing requires thought or strategy, just mindless grind through mobs) or going through dungeons (which will possibly annoy the other members of the party, since you are by definition doing less damage/taking more damage than you would if you were wearing your best gear).
- Which materia you get is totally random. Maybe you get good materia. Maybe you get junk. Ok, it's not TOTALLY random, but it's random enough.
- After attempting to get the materia you want via spiritbond, which will take a VERY LONG TIME, you now have to meld it all onto the gear. The chances of success are EXTREMELY POOR, which means if you actually spiritbond and meld all your own materia, this process will take a mind boggling length of time for next to no reward (we'll get to that point later).
- If you buy the materia instead, it costs A LOT, because of how long the process is, and the luck involved. This would be fine, if there was anything driving the economy. If you could make and sell something for good profit. But really, there are two key ways to make money: sell materia, or sell Coil/EX primal wins. Um, yay? Really the game needs rare items that can only be won in difficult and/or limited content. Right now the main crafting materials come from spending myth on them. The actual gathered/crafting items aren't worth much of anything, which is because they are so ridiculously easy to get (unlike in, say, FFXI, where gathering items was dangerous, because monsters might kill you as you try to gather in dangerous areas).

2) Not worth it. Even once you spend the insane amount of gil or time it takes to be able to craft the "best" things, they are useless. By design, crafted items are weaker than dungeon drops, so they will always be inferior, and never in demand. There's basically no reason to craft, and yet the cost of entry is ludicrously high.

3) No rarity. Nothing in the game is rare, except apparently certain minions/mounts/mirrors of the whorl, which have insanely low 1% drop rates. Even that is just blind luck, and not locked behind any kind of a skill barrier. Due to no rarity, supply is through the roof, and demand is pretty low. Anything that is worth anything, quickly devalues due to rapidly climbing supply, since everything is readily available, and easily obtained by doing things people would do anyway no matter what.

4) Too grindy. Everything takes forever. Going to gather stuff, sitting there and crafting everything. This was made super apparent when crafting for the new class tools you need the HQ 2 star stuff for after getting the master recipes. Even with having everything on hand that you need and having macros that craft everything HQ nearly 100%, it takes several hours to get just one of the tools done. And what do you have to show for putting forward all that effort? Not really much of anything. It's just busy work. The game needs less busy work, and more fun. For serious.

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Today I decided that crafting is so incredibly tedious, with nothing of value to show for it, that I decided I'm going to dump the thousands of crafting materials I have. Just sell it all. All the materia, all the materials, everything. It's seriously not fun. Not even a little bit. And serves no purpose. We really need to go back to the drawing board on this one.

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So, what can we do better?

1) Abolish or overhaul the materia system. There are several things that could be done here:

1a) Instead of making materia a permanent fusion to a piece of gear, making it always able to attach at a 100% meld rate. The trade-off for this should be that materia has "durability", and once it hits 0%, it breaks, and must be replaced. Ideally, materia would be able to be put in and taken out of gear easily.

1b) Eliminate the spiritbonding process. There's no real upshot to having people wear subpar gear to SB it then break it apart. It's literally just busy work. Instead, make materia a reward from BCNM-style fights, dungeons, or really anything other than breaking apart old gear. Maybe it sounded cool, the idea of breaking old gear that used to be good but now you don't need it, but the reality is you craft junk gear and wear it instead of your current gear.

1c) Make all gear able to be slotted with materia. Crafted gear, dungeon drops, everything. No one uses crafted gear, because it's by definition subpar, so materia should be able to go into all gear. You could use materia to create interesting effects, instead of just a way to min/max the gear with stats to your liking. I'd actually rather see materia have cool effects or abilities than add to stats, anyway.

2) Make crafted gear at least somewhat relevant, somehow. If crafted gear is never any good, no one will care about it, as it's totally unnecessary and not even useful. In 2.2, for example, you're basically given free iLVL 100 gear just for doing super easy dungeons each week. And crafted gear is even worse than that, yet it takes way more effort to get crafted gear. It would make way more sense if crafted gear was the absolute best gear APART from the very more difficult dungeons, so there was a reason to get it: to help you get that best gear. Or at least some gear pieces could be good, or at least on par, with the "freebies". So, if for example, the current crafted gear was iLVL 100 instead of iLVL 90, it would be at least somewhat relevant until you started clearing Coil and getting iLVL 110 stuff.

3) Make crafted materials come from a less universal location. In FFXI, a lot of good materials came from raid content, BCNMs, NMs, etc. In FFXIV, it just comes from spending myth. So EVERYONE has access to the best crafting materials. It just takes time. Instead, we need it to take some skill. Like if we had BCNM style content that you had to purchase your way in with beastman currency, and then had to clear an at least somewhat challenging encounter to get the crafting material. This, more than anything, would really drive the economy in a positive direction.

crafting gear is useless ? my i90 sch has full hq with some cheap matera and i got crit 530, det 340 i am able to heal with whm or sch on turn7 np and do 4:45m runs for brayfox as a healer. I saw a healer that has high alagan body and i98 but has just crit 460 and det 260. so i think the crafted gear with matera here is being over looked for pure item level which is bull.

about changing how matera is used, you got to be realistic , do you know what kind of impact this will have on development and the actuall players. for development this can't be done without heavy code changes to the game which will slow down new content that can be added as well as important quality of life features that the community actually needs.

also if they make it so easy for you to craft those 3 star get ur main hand, then the whole crafting system would be a joke realy. you need those cross class skills, matera and u need to be there to craft it, not afk crafting. how is that bad?

I don't want this game to turn into XI. Please, please no. I rather like having a life and social activities with family and friends. Crafting is fun to me because I enjoy scrolling over all my items and seeing Ari Amariyo at the bottom. It's not much, but I do get a sense of pride knowing that I can be self-sufficient. :3

Penta melded Cashmere robe of healing...? Not subpar. And yes, melding is a crapshoot sometimes, but the payoff is some awesome equips that sells for millions on my server. Last I checked, Vanya over melded was about 6 mil...

I couldn't agree more to the OP. I try to get ONE of my crafters to be able to do the Master recipies. Since four weeks I try to add a Control +3 Materia to my offhand. It is the last slot and I have a whoppin' 7% chance for success. Guess what? Nothing in four weeks, all Materia lost and if you get one Control Materia out of 10 you bind, you are lucky.

Character progression came to a halt because of a very low chance. What I would like to see is a GROWING chance after a fail and if it is only 1%. See it this way: a character tries to insert something and fails. He has maybe learned something from the failure and uses his expertise on the next try.

The way Materia insertion is actually handled favors rich players and/or Gil buyers. If you are like me and try to produce the Materia on your own, you can wait till 2999 to have your crafter up to par with the highest recipies. Very discouraging to rely on abnormal low chances. The entire crafting system should not rely on a full pentameld set, that's the main problem. Normally if you have the best crafting gear and used the existing 100% chance Materia slots WITHOUT overmelding, it should be enough. Rest should be luxury and make things easier, it shouldn't be mandatory.

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Originally Posted by TomTom1968

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Yes! I'm stuck in a similar situation as you! It was horrible when I realised how long I would have to SB to get materia to pentameld on a DoH gear that will most definitely be replaced when the level cap is raised. At least there's progression when materia are used in the zodiac weapon. ><

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Originally Posted by TomTom1968

I couldn't agree more to the OP. I try to get ONE of my crafters to be able to do the Master recipies. Since four weeks I try to add a Control +3 Materia to my offhand. It is the last slot and I have a whoppin' 7% chance for success. Guess what? Nothing in four weeks, all Materia lost and if you get one Control Materia out of 10 you bind, you are lucky.

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you don't even need that extra 3 control. if you followed the proper guides on how to meld and what to use, u can end up with 8 extra control and 8 extra craft

When I started with it there were no guides lol and that's part of my problem because I did not make the optimal choice. Doing everything from scratch is no option (I would rather glue my eyeballs to a table) so I need almost all forbidden slots to be fully melded to get there. It was hard enough to be able to make 2 star recepies in HQ 100%, I did not expect SE to raise these requirements even more, my fault I know. I thought crafting is something casual for inbetween, to have fun and to entertain you. But it is not, Master recepies are like Coil for DOH - but without Echo lol!

The suggestions won't work, or so at least I think :

1a) If the "Gilsink" works this way, no one will be bothered to attach materia at all. Adding durability to each materia means more data load and materia can no longer stacks because it has its separate durability.

1b) Removing the entire spiritbonding process means crafters loses job, no one will craft anymore. crafted gears will no longer significant and if materia is rewarded through anything, the price will eventually drops alot and ruin the economy because people will be grinding it.

1c) crafted gears with materia slot right have an advantage over dungeon drops which allows it to be partially customizable to user preference so at a certain cost it can match or be better than a higher level dungeon gear. Same as 1b, having dungeon gear with materia slots = no one will buy crafted gears = no one will craft anymore.

2) They are relevant right now, what I mentioned in 1c. Some players are not capable to down hard content to get to the best gears so crafted gears are a good replacement for whatever they can't get their hands on. Also some endgame capable players even use it to cover up the substat lost that a higher ilvl gear didn't provide.

3) This has a good and bad outcome. Good that it gives player more ways and things to do to get the materials than just myth farm, bad is depending on the drop rate, it either ruin the economy or frustrates the player.

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Originally Posted by starLivitation

crafting gear is useless ? my i90 sch has full hq with some cheap matera and i got crit 530, det 340 i am able to heal with whm or sch on turn7 np and do 4:45m runs for brayfox as a healer. I saw a healer that has high alagan body and i98 but has just crit 460 and det 260. so i think the crafted gear with matera here is being over looked for pure item level which is bull.

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Doesn't matter. Your mind and vit are shit then. Mind >>>> Crit, Det

Holy wall of text Batman!

But yeah, i can understand your pain a little, although i don't agree with your fixes. I don't particularly like the fact that I lose the materia i spent 20 minutes (yes, look again, 20 minutes) spiritbonding. If you're spiritbonding effectivley, it doesn't take long. I can always go and get more. Heck, I spent 3 hours spiritbonding the other day, had 25 nice shiny lvl 3 materia to show for it. Even a couple 4's.

The craft/control gate is there for a reason. You really want to get to those crafts? You'll overcome it. I've made some mistakes along the way, had to restart on all my gear, spent more money than i should, lost more materia than i should. But, i enjoy it, it's a challenge. Not many players in my server can call themselves "master crafters" and hold the "provider/builder of the realm" titles. So yeah, i want it.

Just to be clear though, I AM still stuck at 350 Craft/something control, so yeah, i know your pain.

I don't think the materia system needs to be abolished entirely. But I do agree the overmelding requirements for high-end crafting is an extremely un-fun experience. No one enjoys high-stakes lottery with the RNG, especially when you risk big losses for so little gain.

Instead, I think the problem could be better mitigated by adding new tiers of crafting gear. There would be a more enjoyable sense of progression through visual gear upgrades. And while the upgrades could still be expensively gated through a mechanism similar to the Artisan item turn-ins, you would at least have a more direct control over your progress to get there.