what's the point of specialist recipe?

Never ending wonderful story.

They implemented specialist and now have to stick to it because they can't or won't admit they F'ed up

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Originally Posted by Arthur_Rivendell

Why do you have time and money to develop this kind of system that have no benefits to crafters but pointless limitation? I never used those specialist skills.

Why don't you use those people and resource to make a better relic weapon grind? What is the point of farming Alex Normal? Kill time?
Why do you think that you should be the god to balance the wealth while not market? Whats wrong for crafters to earn gil from market? Rich is evil?

Why you guys always try to limit and annoy ppl while not give them fun?

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https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/12...29-Translation

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FFXIV has adopted the Armoury system which is quite different from other MMORPGs in that it allows one player to be anything. However, for crafters up until patch 2.5, rather than the system allowing you to be any of them, to a large extent for more hardcore crafters it required you to be all of them. If you worked on it steadily over time, it wasn't too challenging to grow each crafting class to level 50; however, since it's an MMORPG, we thought that we should slow some things down. However, as we started adding in higher difficulty recipes, such as the ones that require special books to learn, it got to an extreme situation where you had to have full equipment and everything leveled up. So while this was rewarding economically, we recognized that it was a tough situation for players who just wanted to have some fun while making products to sell. So we want to go back to the original plan that it's something to do at your own pace; that's the policy at the heart of our updates with specialists.

Although there won't be a specialist system for gathering, the advantages and disadvantages of gatherer are related to the maximum number of items you can collect, so everyone would go after the same items creating a surplus. As a result, it gets to a point where it's difficult to gather any items that crafters can use to make items useful for battle content. To increase the value of crafted items and implement a system for materia, we need to create some differences between individual gatherers. We don't want gil alone to be able to create a strong player, but it's also not good for balance if only battle content drops are the strongest, so we want to work on adjusting this balance gradually.

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They implemented Specializations in an attempt to make endgame crafting viable for players who only wanted to level up one crafting profession.

Specializations went almost entirely unused, because they were very weak and were nowhere near powerful enough to allow single-class crafters to craft at an acceptable level.

Then they forgot that they wanted to make single-class endgame crafting viable, and decided that the real goal was instead to make sure that people were using specializations.

And instead of simply making Specialization good enough that people would want to use Specialist skills even as fully leveled/geared omnicrafters, they decided it would be easier if all the new recipes were just arbitrarily locked behind specialization.

So now single-class crafters are back at square one where they can't really do anything, the time investment for omnicrafting has more than tripled because you have to level up three different characters to cover all specializations (and make all of those characters into omnicrafters because you still need all those level 50 skills), and all the people who used to enjoy crafting but aren't dedicated enough to level up multiple omnicrafters have been not-so-politely informed that the time and money they spent bringing 5/8 crafting classes up to par were pretty much all for nothing.

The problem with the specialist skills is that they are all situational. High level crafters would rather spend millions of gil and months of time getting their gear good enough that they can mash a few macros and turn out a HQ product from scratch. The specialist abilities don't work well in macros, therefore they are ignored.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

The problem with the specialist skills is that they are all situational. High level crafters would rather spend millions of gil and months of time getting their gear good enough that they can mash a few macros and turn out a HQ product from scratch. The specialist abilities don't work well in macros, therefore they are ignored.

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Honestly? No, they're just too weak in general compared to the cross-class skills, especially with the decreased occurrence of goods in high level crafts and the fact that the specialist skills are entirely dependent on goods...

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Originally Posted by Catwho

The problem with the specialist skills is that they are all situational. High level crafters would rather spend millions of gil and months of time getting their gear good enough that they can mash a few macros and turn out a HQ product from scratch. The specialist abilities don't work well in macros, therefore they are ignored.

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As someone who is capable of HQing 2-star items and makes everything but his Red Scrip crafts manually, I can say that this is actually not the case. The specialist actions are all but useless at the highest level crafts, where they are most needed. In all my time manually crafting, I have never once desired using any of them in high-end crafts. The only ones even remotely useful is Byregot's Miracle (if you don't have Byregot's Blessing), and Innovative Touch if you're desperate enough to take that risk and can't use/don't have innovation. WWYW and Satisfaction have an extremely low chance of even breaking even on the CP costs, which renders them a waste and thus useless. Due to this, Nymeia's Wheel is also rendered useless. Both of these are caused by the drastically reduced chances of getting Good quality turns on higher level crafts, starting at level 51 and reducing in chance every so often up until the lowest chance at 60 2-star. Trained Hand is almost literally useless, as it is almost never worth the CP cost even if you DON'T count the costs of having WWYW active needed to use it. Lastly, Heart of the <Class> is a joke which costs too much CP to ever be worth it unless you got 3/3 of the possible Good turns out of it and used them all on TotT from alchemy to gain 15 CP as an end result.

The specialist actions are just truly terrible.

So...
They made specializations to help non omni crafters, but failed at that...

And now are just forcing specializations on people with locked recipies..?

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Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi

So...
They made specializations to help non omni crafters, but failed at that...

And now are just forcing specializations on people with locked recipies..?

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Pretty much. They either failed and don't want to admit it, so they tried to force the feature to be popular by locking recipes behind it, or they forgot why they made the specializations feature to begin with. Or their reasons were never to help non-omnicrafters to begin with, and they used that as an excuse to hinder omnicrafting.

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Originally Posted by Vandril

Pretty much. They either failed and don't want to admit it, so they tried to force the feature to be popular by locking recipes behind it, or they forgot why they made the specializations feature to begin with. Or their reasons were never to help non-omnicrafters to begin with, and they used that as an excuse to hinder omnicrafting.

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Doesn't sound very pleasant...

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Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi

So...
They made specializations to help non omni crafters, but failed at that...

And now are just forcing specializations on people with locked recipies..?

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Bingo, you got it!

It's great isn't it?

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Originally Posted by Vandril

Pretty much. They either failed and don't want to admit it, so they tried to force the feature to be popular by locking recipes behind it, or they forgot why they made the specializations feature to begin with. Or their reasons were never to help non-omnicrafters to begin with, and they used that as an excuse to hinder omnicrafting.

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This too, I believe it's a bit of both honestly. They sat down and thought "how can we help one class people be okay at crafting without screwing those that put in all that effort" and then they forgot what they were doing somewhere and made it like it is.

Then to warrant the system, and not offend the lunch break meeting group that came up with it, they added exclusive dibs on it, followed by digging the cesspit deeper by making relic recipes too.

No benefit?

I dunno, the millions of gil sitting on my retainer from selling specialist recipes seems to disagree with that. It keeps prices high so crafters can make more gil due to limited competition.

The least they could have done was allow a free respec on specializations once they added the recipes to the game. I chose to be a leatherworker specialist as soon as I hit level 55, just to see what the system was like. It seemed to be rather pointless, so I only chose other specializations to get those crystals out of my inventory. I believe I chose blacksmith purely on the assumption that the skills might make crafting offhand tools a little easier, if they did a repeat of 2.5.

Now I'm wasting red scripts to change my specializations to things that actually involve items I want. They basically asked us to pick a card, and only told us the significance of the choice 6 months later.

Something something omni crafter bullshit.

Because you're supposed to make friends in this game. It's a multiplayer game. I'm sorry that if you can't do that, but that's a personal problem, not a game design one.

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Originally Posted by Immut

Because you're supposed to make friends in this game. It's a multiplayer game. I'm sorry that if you can't do that, but that's a personal problem, not a game design one.

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I was going to say what you just said now lol

Like he said this a multiplayer game, it is a game to you accomplish things with others and help each other. Even relic can be worked together and you don't spent a single gil buying the items HQ if you work together to each one gather 1 of those mats and then some of them craft for everyone.

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Originally Posted by Immut

Because you're supposed to make friends in this game. It's a multiplayer game. I'm sorry that if you can't do that, but that's a personal problem, not a game design one.

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Yes. That's why many people don't like the specialist system. Certainly.

It isn't because it directly contradicts previous design decisions and current mechanics in the game that support leveling every craft and using them all. And it certainly isn't because the specialist system doesn't even remotely achieve SE's purported goals, and yet they're ignoring that fact entirely and pretending all is well. It's most definitely not because the specialist system introduced an obvious recipe bias in favor of ARM/LTW/WVR/GSM, where as the rest received minimal recipes, some only receiving materials only used by other specialist classes.

No, it can't be any of those glaring flaws in the system. We just have no friends.

That's it. You caught us.

I was under the impression that people hate the specialist recipes because specialist in itself didn't do what it was supposed to. That is to help players out who aren't omnicrafting actually make the better items at the qualities they want. Instead, it became a gate for content. Not to mention the specialist abilities suck.

actually many master crafters anticipated the need to stock up on crafter souls over buy the blue crafter gear and they are going to make a tone.... wish I was smart enough to do that too... only have 5 spare crafter souls sitting on retainer...

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Originally Posted by Immut

Because you're supposed to make friends in this game.

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So why does the duty finder exist...? Shouldn't you just make friends to run dungeons instead?

Heck, why are quests and FATEs easily solo-able? For the most part, the game does not exactly encourage you to "make friends", until you're suddenly hit by a brick wall that can't be overcome without them.

Desynth cap makes even less sense. How does that support the "you can do anything" armory?

If they actually cared about what they claim, they would have made specialists work like jobs. lv30 unlock, lowers your cc skill cap, more/better abilities along the way to let them HQ reliably. As for recipes, give them a specialist bonus for matching an affinity recipe instead of locking the recipes behind the spec. 15% reduced progress/quality requirements or something. Keep it as a way of competing with omnis, not punishing them for no reason.

I would like to thank you Arthur since you have been buying all the mats that are quite hard to come by and take a while to gather I have made more friends since favors came out and instead of buying it of market we are mainly trading with each other. It's a great feeling to be able to work with other end game crafters and help each other do what we love - crafting. It's not too late for you to make friends you are not the only end game crafter on Zodiark there are quite few.

I like the specialist recipes, it allows me to interact with other crafters from my FC and we are able to give anima items to our FC mates.

Atte: another crafter from Zodiark. Kisses <3

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Originally Posted by Arthur_Rivendell

As for my old DOH friends or competitors? lol, they all AFK. In fact, they are only a few hardcore crafters in Zodiark at now, no more than ten. I don't believe hardcore crafters can become friends.
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that depends , im sorry but the way you play this of course this whole specialist recipe thing gets annoying ,
you know me and half of those crafters you talk about are my friends and we are perfectly fine covering each others weaknesses with specialists.
if you rather be rich than to make friends, don't blame this on the game , one of the biggest points of this specialist system is encouraging players (crafters) to create a friendly community
and of course basically sitting on summoning bell and undercutting all other crafters every 1-5 minute and buying all the supplies on market to force players/crafters hands + selling items 10 times their worth is not actually creating a friendly community , and for the sake of what? gill?

specialist recipes are the only thing that keep some people from completely taking over the market since they have nothing else to do but being online
that is one of the biggest issues of market in FFXIV , the winner is the one who stays online the most. if they do it like Guild wars 2 and charge player with tax every time they list the item , it avoids this sort of mess , but im getting out of topic , specialist recipes are best i found more crafter friends since 3.1 than i did in past year and a half!

I hope specialist system will not only stay, but becomes even deeper. It is a good idea and great refreshment for the market. it enforces socialization and thats why most of the people are playing MMORPGs!

Saying that crafting specializations will cause "another Dalamud" is exaggregating of dinosaur proportions, lol.


- Master Crafter Thalen

"The point." Is to discourage one man bands in a MMO.

It doesn't prevent omni crafter but it does deter it enough to allow more crafter overall into the markets and encourage cooperation withing the game.

I'm ok with this.

The big issue is locking recipes like this reduces competition to the point the finished materials become too expensive for the average player. Just look at the prices of the relic turn ins on many servers. When you factor in the fact that you need 4 each of the 4 different HQ items the total bill is insane. I feel very sorry for the people that have no crafters at all.

(Exodus prices: Kingcake 348000 + each for HQ, Adamantite Fransca: 634000+ each for HQ, Titanium Alloy Mirror: 900000+ each for HQ, Dispelling Arrow: 446000 + each for HQ. so total bill if you buy the finish products: 9,312,000 or more depending on if the cheapest are gone when you try to buy. This is a bit out of range for many players since many could not even afford 4 mil + for a house if any were available.)

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Originally Posted by Vasala

The big issue is locking recipes like this reduces competition to the point the finished materials become too expensive for the average player. Just look at the prices of the relic turn ins on many servers. When you factor in the fact that you need 4 each of the 4 different HQ items the total bill is insane. I feel very sorry for the people that have no crafters at all.

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That's an issue with gil inflation not the crafter. Many player have inordinate amounts of gil with nothing to spend it on.

The crafter only change what people are willing to spend and obviously more than enough people can afford their products to keep the market sasiated.

The materials are expensive because its new and many people are willing to buy it at that price, not because of specialists. In few weeks / months, they are going to be way way cheaper. Thats how it always was with all the recipes, just look at Thavnarian stuff, which is not gated behind specialists.

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Originally Posted by Immut

Because you're supposed to make friends in this game.

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Funny. So just because I'm an omnicrafter who likes to do stuff by myself means I have no friends?
Many of the friends I made dislike crafting and I loved helping them out by providing them with gear/materials they needed.
The Idea of specialist skills to help people out that don't have the dedication/time to level up 8 classes (11 with the gatherers) is great but locking out people with specialist recipes is a god awful decision.

It doesn't really do anything to alleviate the situation for people that don't want to craft either, it just means players like Silica can't necessarily help out their friends anymore. Don't have the specialty in something that's a really nice glamour or important to progression? Too bad go ask your friends. Oh, they don't either? Too bad, go buy it on the Market Board suffering from major inflation. Seriously, gil is worth less than Zimbabwe Dollars were.

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Originally Posted by Silica-chan

Funny. So just because I'm an omnicrafter who likes to do stuff by myself.

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The real problem is that the game never should have been like this with crafting in the first place they set people allowing them to be a solo entity throughout the entire game right until the very end and even then group participation was only encouraged in PVE content (Even then your a solo entity in terms of your participation in most fights team coordination and synergies are minimal at best)

It's part of the philosophy of the Realm Reborn concept, the game has been very "Anti-community" from then on with little to no encouragement to play together making things such as Free Companies for the longest time nothing but a glorified linkshell (Even to this day the benefits of being in a company are slim). Sadly this built player expectations to what you see above "I want to do it ALL by myself". It's not a healthy concept for a genre with the term multiplayer in it's name to go around discouraging any player interaction.

We have lost alot for the sake of convenience. Crafting isn't the only place we have lost dearly for the streamlining they required to rope in the target crowd they needed for 2.0, they are taking some steps in the right direction IMHO, but like all things they took an idea meant to be new content and just kind of botched the whole implementation. I agree specialization as it stand is somewhat silly but the concept of not being able to be a one man supply shop and needing to specialize in a specific market is in entirely sound reasoning especially when you look at the state of the games economic crisis brought on by this whole.

"I can do it all myself" mentality.

Making players specialize in specific crafts can do nothing but good but the implementation needs more work and REAL focus from the developers not this "Just add a few recipes and useless skills in the mix and call it a day"

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Originally Posted by Jynx

The real problem is that the game never should have been like this with crafting in the first place they set people allowing them to be a solo entity throughout the entire game right until the very end and even then group participation was only encouraged in PVE content (Even then your a solo entity in terms of your participation in most fights team coordination and synergies are minimal at best)

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It's not just in gathering/craft it's also in battle classes that being solo hurts the game. You only need 3-7 other people to clear content associated with the DF if one sticks to OWC (open world content) there is no reason to have a core group of friends. A vast issue is the crafting gear is subpar in terms of overall performance and item life, yes the can be melded, but compared to raid/relic/primal gear they're far from able to hold their own. This has turned gather/crafter classes into nothing but glorified housing item specialist.

Then here comes a patch and crafters/gathering is relevant for 3 months and drops off again back into the corner of the game. Another reason crafting in this game is so bad is the need to go up ALL the time. If we didn't have such a model to follow each and every patch then crafting could become highly sought out as the way to go with horizontal item progression. But sadly this game is determined to make everything obsolete almost immediately.

So how does the game set up for such constant consistency? Throws us a soul crystal that doesn't even add anything to our stat pool but gives us horrible skills that no one in their mind would use. Make it even worse? Throw some items into that specialty that are currently hot items that 95% of this population needs! But wait! You can only pick 3 classes and now you can only help 25% of the population! Better get your friends involved with crafting if you want to matter for the next 3 months! But that doesn't work because of how screwed up this game is from the roots up.

Even if you think that forcing player interaction is a good idea to introduce to crafting, specialist-only recipes don't accomplish that goal. The only thing anyone has to do in order to remain a perfectly self-sufficient omnicrafter is to make two alts and have access to one panel of an FC chest to pass items back and forth. It's just an extra layer of grind and inconvenience (for my money, not even the worst layer of grind and inconvenience that's been added to crafting since Heavensward launched).

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Originally Posted by Silica-chan

Funny. So just because I'm an omnicrafter who likes to do stuff by myself means I have no friends?

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At the start of 1.0, with the original recipes, crafting everything yourself was a time sink because of all the mats that was needed to craft a gear.
If the market wards were better at launch of 1.0 nobody would have tried to craft everything himself. But how the market wards were at launch it became neccessary because searching in the market wards for specific items was a bigger time sink.

So yes, to be a crafter was originaly mean to be part of the economy where crafters craft mats and sell to other crafters or to spend time to craft 10 mats (and those also needed a lot of mats before crafting those mats) yourself before you even can start to craft a robe.

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Originally Posted by Crater

Even if you think that forcing player interaction is a good idea to introduce to crafting, specialist-only recipes don't accomplish that goal. The only thing anyone has to do in order to remain a perfectly self-sufficient omnicrafter is to make two alts and have access to one panel of an FC chest to pass items back and forth. It's just an extra layer of grind and inconvenience (for my money, not even the worst layer of grind and inconvenience that's been added to crafting since Heavensward launched).

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by the time someone manage to make 2 alts lvl them to 50 with enough story progression to access ishgard and lvl crafters to 60 then gearing both of them up to have enough stat for the latest recipe (considering red scrips weekly farm and stuff),new recipes will be completely useless and cheap ^ i don't see how one can do it without taking months , unless they have nothing else to do but play even then it takes long time ;/

I really do not see why there is so much complaining about specialist system, I have not had a single problem since it started and I definitely made so many new friends, I love the idea that you can't do everything yourself but you can do most of it and it definitely encourages people making new friendships and alliances. In my FC we all divided specialist roles so we can all support each other and I have met many end game crafting friends thanks to the system. In my opinion only people who moan about this are people who are not interested to make friends in game and people who want to dominate MB by themselves. This is MMO not a single player game and maybe if you all put some effort to make alliances instead of complaining to people who gave us probably the best crafting system I have seen would really help the community

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Originally Posted by Cerseil

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So crafting stuff for raider friends that have no interest in crafting which will help me with raid content is not social enough for an MMOt?
The MB explodes with the prices it's insane just because there is less cometition and the only ones suffering under this are the ones new to the game that don't have insane amounts of gil.
Another point why this is was poorly implementet is the fact that you still need to level almost all 8 classes up to 50+ because specialist skills s**k. Why force people to level everything to max by making the recipes super difficult so that those cross skills are required to get them done properly and then lock alot of crafts behind some new system.
If you want to encourage/force people to make friends then you have to take out the df aswell since you can just go in there solo.

Silica your points are not valid since A. No one with half a brain should be buying specialist mats for relic weapons straight at release as it takes weeks to grind and get it, only people who managed to get it I know of were people who had a strong FC standing behind them and who helped them grind all the raids and fates and that means FC also had crafters.I am sure as MMO player you know that everything is very expensive in the beginning but prices drop down, i really can't understand people who rushed to buy those relic items on first days knowing that grind was insane and those items were needed only at the end. Check the prices now they are going down and will be going down, and few people have PF asking for items to be made for them and quite few crafters who are not money hungry are contacting them and agreeing to help which again means this help to form connections. If you dont want to lvl all crafters be my guest I for once enjoyed doing it no one is forced to spend millions unless they are inpatient and no one is forced to level all crafters unless they want to craft well. I am even helping my FC members to deliver HQ items for leves so they lvl crafters fast there is always solution and lots of nice people around why is this I and many of my friends have no problem cause we are being social

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Originally Posted by Nylisa

by the time someone manage to make 2 alts lvl them to 50 with enough story progression to access ishgard and lvl crafters to 60 then gearing both of them up to have enough stat for the latest recipe (considering red scrips weekly farm and stuff),new recipes will be completely useless and cheap ^ i don't see how one can do it without taking months , unless they have nothing else to do but play even then it takes long time ;/

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Gearing the alts doesn't even take much more time than gearing a single character. To maximize crafting on one character, you already need to craft a full i170 set for all eight crafting professions; the only added requirement if you want to omnispecialize is that you need three sets of accessories instead of one.
In some respects, it actually takes less time, as you now have three weekly Red Scrip quotas if you choose to use them for certain i180 pieces (mainhand tools, body pieces).

The only actual time investments other than that are to actually level the characters up to Ishgard for Leves, and to actually level all their crafting professions to 50/60. And while that does take a lot of time, it's a one-time investment that only needs to be updated once per expansion, and requires fairly little actual effort on the part of the player, so long as they're willing to wait for Leve allowances to replenish.