Making crafting relevant to end game content and gear?

First note, this is long, so I had to break it into multiple posts. Sorry about that (stupid 1000 character limit)

OBJECTIVE
Propose a modification to crafting that would enable crafters, who spend countless dozens of hours grinding crafting stuff, to participate in end game content similar to adventurers who spend countless dozens of hours grinding hunts and dungeons.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF REALITY
For any system change to be viable, it would have to create the same or similar limitations on crafters as is currently present on adventurers to acquiring top level gear. Failure to do so would create an unhealthy balance in the economy and game.

As an example, see what happened when Nexus weapons suddenly became as or more powerful than top tier raid weapons. Overnight we went from people farming Coil to people creating dozens of ATMA parties and running hunts for Alexandrite and Myth for scrolls.

ADVENTURER LIMITATIONS
Adventurers are currently limited from growing progression by 3 primary mechanisms

1 - Weekly Tome Caps
Adventurers are limited to obtaining a specific amount of tomes each week which in turn limits the amount of new top tier gear they can purchase to improve their characters. As an example, they are limited to 450 Poetics Tomes each week right now.

These items are not as good as items from #3, but can be as good or better than #2

2 - Weekly Drops
Adventures can only receive 1 drop per week from an instance that is repeatable that week. A great example of this was Syrcus Tower before the most recent patch.

These items are not as good as #3, are usually equal to or better than #1, but can be worse than #1 on occasion.

3 - Weekly Attempts
Adventurers can only run and complete and attempt to get a drop from the highest end instances once per week. Currently this applies to Coil.

CRAFTING PROPOSAL
To start, I believe crafters should be able to craft gear that is equivalent to that which you can receive from trading in top tier tomes (currently Poetics) and from high end raid content (currently final phase of Coil).

1 - Weekly Crafting Tomes
The concept here is that for every top tier item you make you would obtain tomes like you adventurers currently acquire tomes from raiding and other content.

Similar to adventurer tomes, these tomes would have a cap each week. In other words, you could only receive 450 per week. Each item you craft would probably only generate 3 tomes with maybe some extremely difficult items giving 5 and housing items giving 1. The low tomes per craft helps to offset the time spent in actual crafting so that people can't easily cap tomes within an hour each week. In other words, like raiding, if you want to cap tomes each week you have to plan for at least 10 - 20 hours of content.

Making HQ items might result in a 1 - 2 tome bonus per craft so people just don't farm NQ to cap tomes.

These tomes would be spendable on new items that can only be crafted. As an example, you might have a iLvl120 Chest Piece you can craft that takes 380 Crafting Tomes to make, along with multiple other mats.

If you fail to synth the item successfully, you keep the tomes, but lose all other mats. This is to ensure you can get items with the tomes earned each week, but there is a penalty to screwing up your crafting of it.

Items created this way would be bind on create. In other words, you cannot sell them or trade them to other players. It is your item permanently.

2 - Weekly Random Craft
This one is bound to piss off a few people, but I like to think it is a creative solution to the problem.

Basically, in place of random drops from places like Syrcus Tower, take whatever the high level crafting requirements are (currently 586 Progress and roughly 6000 Quality) and allow crafters to craft a random item at that difficulty with any crafting class once every 15 minutes.

Upon successful HQ completion of a craft, you will be presented with a random high end crating item. To make things simple, you could have it be an item from the list available in #1, or you could have it be items that are 5 iLvls lower.

The crafter can only accept 1 random item produced this way each week.

The crafting of these items takes no materials, not even shards/crystals/clusters. All you have to pay is time, effort, and some repair costs on your gear.

Failing to craft an item HQ will result in no "drop", but still impose a 15 minute wait till next craft attempt.

As an added bonus, this provides a great mechanism for crafters to experiment with rotations without risking materials.

3 - Weekly Attempts
This is the one I had the hardest time thinking of a solution to cover. This is where you can get the OMG awesome gear that is comparable to gear you would get from Coil.

The way I envision this is having a progressive crafting challenge similar to progressive difficulty in passing Coil waves.

RULES
1) You can only attempt a craft for this once every 90 minutes.

2) If you complete a craft successfully, an item will drop. If the item is for your highest iLvl combat class, you will have a 75% chance of acquiring it on roll. If it is for any other class, you only have a 10% chance. (reflecting the odds of getting the drop and subsequent roll on a piece of loot in Coil)

3) Once you complete 1 craft, whether you get an item or not, you cannot do that craft again this week.

4) After completing a craft, you will open up the next challenge for the week. This will repeat until you complete all 4 challenges.

5) Gear drops for this will be identical to gear dropped from highest raid content for the week.

6) If you clear a phase of the raid, you cannot get gear from that phase of crafting in that week. Same goes the other way, if you clear a challenge in crafting, whether or not you got gear, when you run the raid that week you will not be able to roll on the gear that drops.

So, how does this work?
I like to think of it a bit like a series of crafting challenges that will test the limits of even the best crafters.

We are just at the start of 2.4, so this is what I would expect to see as possible challenges.

One thing you will notice is that in the challenges, using Reclaim does not result in a use of a chance. The reasoning behind this is that it is similar to repeat attempts in Coil. As long as you can keep it together, you can keep trying for an hour and a half. But if you get bad luck or are too risky or stupid, you lose.

TIER 1
Really Difficult Craft with HQ mandatory.

801 Difficulty
8000 Quality
3 chances to craft per 90 minutes. A chance ends when you fail or succeed. Successfully reclaim does not use up a chance.

Obviously this basically matches the items needed for acquiring Master Book 2s.

The reason why I like this one is that most people only get 20% chance at these items right now for HQ. With 5 chances, you are likely to not progress for a while. Whereas, if you have all the new gear fully melded and creative rotations, you can probably clear this after 2 or 3 attempts each week at most.

TIER 2
This is basically an Augmented 3 star armor, but with a twist...

455 Progress
3800 Quality
No Byregot's Blessing Available
3 chances to craft per 90 minutes. A chance ends when you fail or succeed. Successfully reclaim does not use up a chance.

So the idea around this one is it takes people outside their comfort zone (no pun intended). It makes you try new strategies to craft and see what you can do to complete the item successfully with HQ.

TIER 3
Next is basically a 4 star item, but with more challenge.

586 Progress
7000 Quality
No comfort zone
Must 100% quality to HQ
3 chances to craft per 90 minutes. A chance ends when you fail or succeed. Successfully reclaim does not use up a chance.

Not even sure if this is possible right now without a crap ton of luck or a BB on an excellent, so not sure this is even a good challenge. But the idea for tier 3 is just make something really hard to craft that is built around the main crafting skills you already use.

TIER 4
Ok, I am going off the deep end here a bit. I am sure others might have better ideas, but it is really hard to create challenges like this for one person. Hence the next section below.

- Presented with a cycle of 20 items that need crafting (items are fixed and in fixed order)
- All items must be completed HQ
- There is a time limit for making each item, thereby requiring the crafter to really know their rotations, where their skills are, what order to do them in, and everything
- NO Macros allowed
- Some items limit your CP allowed
- Some items limit craftsmanship
- Some items limit control
- Some limit more than 1 or all 3 stats.
10 Chances per run with 3 hour reset. Reclaim skill is not available.

The core concept here is similar to a hard raid fight. You are presented with an unknown risk and you have to dive in and do it. Don't respond fast enough, fail. Don't use the right skills at the right time, fail. Over commit, fail.

Due to the 10 chances per run with 3 hour reset, I imagine lots of people would not clear this for weeks or months. That is ok though. It is about learning and going.

ONE LAST THING
In the ideal world, they would take this even further. They would make the crafting tier challenges require groups of crafters working together, cycling through a couple of challenges, each in their own class, and all having to be successful to complete. Once complete, an item would drop and people would roll on it like Coil.

This would have a few of awesome potential results

1) Encourage crafters to work with other crafter and to share skills and knowledge

2) Make crafting more social

3) Add more potential for variety in content for crafters and unique experiences

4) Enable some post-max crafting level story potential as these group crafting quests could have plot around them like Coil does.

PSA: You can edit your original post to add text and get around the 1000 character limit.

This is needlessly complicated. Just make crafting mats purchasable with the "high-end" tomestone (currently poetics, limited to 450 per week). These mats are untradeable. Add a "request to craft" feature so you can request other people to craft the gear for you (using your mats) and offer a reward, just like melding. The gear produced is i120, untradeable, has materia slots. If you don't HQ it, it'll be worse than the poetics Ironworks gear. Can't be upgraded to i130 ever, the only option is melding.

This is how to make crafting relevant to end-game.

So there are lots of problems with your ideas

To start with you seem to be assuming that people either craft or do dungeons. Some people do both so they would have an edge with your system. You do address this in your weekly item concept but not in tomes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by genedefect

CRAFTING PROPOSAL
1 - Weekly Crafting Tomes
The low tomes per craft helps to offset the time spent in actual crafting so that people can't easily cap tomes within an hour each week. In other words, like raiding, if you want to cap tomes each week you have to plan for at least 10 - 20 hours of content.

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You can cap tomes with a max of 6 hours of play time (ex roulette x 6 = 480 tome if my math is correct it might be 7 runs still under 6 hours) not 10-20 hours like you seem to think.

But the biggest issue is that this still doesn't make crafting relevant to end game. It makes it so crafters can get more gear but doesn't make them more wanted since you can't trade the gear. All this would do is create more crafters so that the hardcore raiders can get gear faster.

From everything I've seen and heard comes down to SE's excuse being RMT's being the reason crafting is pretty irrelevant. Of course its not true but simply their laziness to create a system that doesn't really benefit RMT such as making raid craft drops untradeable and a *Request a craft* like the melding thing. But then it comes down to if the crafter fails then what? Lost your mats for your could of been awesome item? The truth is that SE is all about adventurers and the rest are just *meh* as far as they are concerned. They only want gathering and crafting to be a side thing to pass time and a money sink for most who aren't hardcore in that. I'd personally though love it if they made adventurers dependent and needing crafters to an extent. After all, crafters now already have some dependencies on adventurers.

The current crafting system is good, as an isolated part of the game, however there are mechanics that are not used very wisely by the production team.

e.g.
GC craft turn ins: these (still) give yu a (poor) amount of GC seals. Why are we still left handing in L48 crap? This could have easily been expanded i.e crafted i55 hand ins from the other page and raise the GC seals/your tome idea
Ixali craft turn ins: NO OAKKNOTS?

Personally, my FC do Coil runs only to MB the crafting materials for a Larger house, if I want these materials to craft I will have to do a DF run with a random party and hope I get lucky when I roll. Saying that, MB mechanics tradeable/untradeable seem to ALWAYS dictate where crafting goes: EHCATL SEALANT (even though it technically still is not going anywhere and is a huge question mark for the production team who after a year of being live, still HAVE NO IDEA how to truly bring DoH into the rest of the game)

I liked how in ffxi during 75 cap to uncurse high end (crafted) raid gear you needed raid drops. Later on during salvage era you needed a combination of items, including crafted items to unlock the top gear. There was also a lot more for situational gear, where as this game has none. So, situational gear included crafted, raid, and other gear sets.