I'm about to hit 8 70s and upgrade from my 3.x gear.
I have heard that maxing isn't needed for SB ** crafting, but what stats should I aim for?
Thanks!
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I'm about to hit 8 70s and upgrade from my 3.x gear.
I have heard that maxing isn't needed for SB ** crafting, but what stats should I aim for?
Thanks!
Congrats in advance! :)
If you just wanna do 2 star, then pretty much the minimal stats for the recipe is already sufficient. This is the most economical way.
But if you wanna plan for future patches, you can try to get a bit more stats on hand just in case. This is going to be expensive.
My suggestion? It comes down to whether you plan to do a good amount of 2 star crafting any time soon. If you do, then you should just aim for the minimal stats, and proceed to craft your 2 star recipes. If you plan to just sit around with all-70, and not craft much 2 star, then it's probably better to wait until later to decide on melds. This way, you won't finish a minimal melds, sit around and do nothing, and then bite your nails later when new recipes in future patches require higher stats.
The required stats for 2 star is 1320 craft and 1220 control.
If you go for the minimal stats, instead of the actual minimal 1320 craftsmanship listed on the recipe requirement, I suggest 1330 craftsmanship or higher. This is because some of the available 2 star recipes out there require a tad bit more craftsmanship than the actual minimum.
As for CP, it's quite important that you get as close to max as possible. Try your best to max out CP on every gear.
The remaining is just control, which you push as hard as you can according to your bank.
The above numbers are assuming you have used food to boost your stats. NQ tempura platter is one of the more popular ones which people use to boost craftsmanship and CP. It is available from a vendor at Kugane for about 2K gil. Alternatively, you may choose to use the old Seafood Stew HQ or Baked Onion Soup HQ. Those are all pretty good food to boost stats, and you need to take these into account before you do your melds. For instance, if you plan to use tempura, then you just need 1330 - 42 = 1288 craft after melding.
Very useful to see actual numbers, thanks. Is there a guide on actual gear and melds (and meld order) you can recommend? Just hit 69 CUL (specialist) last night, so in same boat as OP.
I would say try to hit 1320/1220/522 stat with Tempura Platter HQ. With 522 CP, you can use the rotation that give the best quality increase now.
I went with this set up:
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/138A0
1311 Craftmanship, 1225 Control, 462 CP before food.
With ~2k Quality going in I can 100% 2-stars with NORMAL Tempura
Planning on upgrading my MH weapons to the Yellow Script weapon since I don't NEED to meld it.
Code:Macro 1
/ac "Muscle Memory" <wait.3>
/ac "Comfort Zone" <wait.2>
/ac "Inner Quiet" <wait.2>
/ac "Steady Hand II" <wait.2>
/ac "Piece by Piece" <wait.3>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Manipulation II" <wait.2>
/ac "Steady Hand II" <wait.2>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Comfort Zone" <wait.2>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
Macro 2
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Steady Hand II" <wait.2>
/ac "Prudent Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Great Strides" <wait.2>
/ac "Innovation" <wait.2>
/ac "Ingenuity II" <wait.2>
/ac "Byregot's Blessing" <wait.3>
/ac "Careful Synthesis III" <wait.3>
/ac "Careful Synthesis III" <wait.3>
/ac "Careful Synthesis III" <wait.3>
/ac "Careful Synthesis III" <wait.3>
Thanks for the info and the ideas.
I am rather blown away at the ease of HQing L68 - 70 recipes while still in 3.x endgame gear. I suppose my next step, being all 70s now, is to make my gear and perhaps getting a few yellow scrip mainhands.
Just to add to what was already said, but if you can hit control of around 1264, and max CP then you should have no issue with HQ'n with NQ mats regardless of the circumstance. This I don't necessarily recommend given how late we are into the patch, and how crafting has turned out thus far.
Personally I'm not a massive fan of getting the yellow scrip main hands, unless you don't mind spending that additional piece of time HQ'n some base materials., but rather using the HQ crafted tools all around.
Though majority of people tend to stick around to using the HQ Tempura Platter which is really good food, I still prefer the Seafood Stew given the control, and I use the macro specified in this thread - With my melds it does allow for 100% on all NQ materials. Mostly bare minimum melds with a few Grade V overmelds on control, and non-specialist crafts have Control V melded on the tools in the 100% slot.
That being said it may just be worthwhile melding to minimum stats according to your specialists, as it's quite possible we will see a new set of gear in 4.1 cycle. Which will require a tonne of melding to be done anyway, and given how 'well' 2* items sell :) I can tell you the bare-bare minimum you want to aim for upon using food is around 1320/1220/499.
Also, take my congratulations for reaching God(dess) of the Hand.
This kind of highlights one of the problems with the progress phase we use. I'm in 290 and have 420 CP 1347 craft, 1114 control with food and I tried 4 star 60. (long and short, I need 9 IQ stacks to 100% with my stats - My rotation gets me 7) All I got was 86% NQ Junk. That's the stuff your 60 set was designed to make. The way we gear right now is 4 star set to 4 star set because that set needs to be able to make leaps that cancel out all the gear in the following expansion. Once they give the template for 4 star 70 you will be geared to 80.
You have me very lost... You said you're in i290 gear, so that means you're level 70... You have 1347 craft, 1114 control and 420 CP, so that's not too bad for a level 70. Maybe will have trouble with the Storm Blood 2 star items, but definitely more than enough for any level 68 or lower recipes. I supposed "4 star 60" refers to Heavensward 4 star level 60 items, so they would be much lower recipe level than 68. So you should have plenty of stats for it... You said you rotation is only IQ7, but with you stats, should be able to reach IQ9 at least without much problems (and without too much RNG involved). Are you not using any CP food at all? Would you like to tell me the rotation you used? Perhaps I can help out?
4 star 60 is comparable to no star 68-70. That was the point I was trying to make. When we get 4 star 70 it will be a no star 78-80 level recipe, we will need to do it with over meld 70 though. It's why people can level from expansion end game to expansion end game and never gear.
My rotation is active, I refuse to macro but
Comfort Zone,
Inner Quiet
Steady Hand II
Waste Not
Basic Touch x 4 (precise when it Procs - It usually does but on star recipes usable Good procs are very rare)
Careful Synthesis III
Masters Mend
Steady Hand II
Basic Touch x 2 (Precise again if it Proc's)
Great Strides
Innovation
Byregot's Blesssing
Careful Synthesis III
That's a 7 to 10 IQ rotation (depending on precise proc) on 40 Dura and ends there. It works on 70 and 80 dura too but you need to throw in more Careful Synthesis at the end. I use different foods on different classes. Steamed Grouper if it's not specialist, Tempura if it is. Grouper only gets me to 420 and it isn't enough to activate specialist 3 stack starts but it gives huge Craftsmanship bonus. I've tried Persimmon Sushi and no chance, not even close.
Again, my main throttle is I refuse to macro and remembering long rotations requires repeated use. I just don't have the mats to build a rotation on trial and error.
With the example 60, I got my HQ. I just had to use a different food. Seafood Stew I believe, when it went to 100%
I can understand your refusal to use macros. May I suggest the following rotation?
https://i.imgur.com/sT3aH1B.png
I have entered your stats above, and assuming the use of NQ tempura... It's really just for the CP. Don't really need the extra craftsmanship, as you still have 25 durab left after the above rotation is performed anyway. So you could potentially use like 6x CS II to replace the 3x CS III (and it'll save some CP too).
If you're level 66 or above, it's definitely better to use Manipulation II and Prudent Touch rather than sticking to the old Waste Not or Master's Mend II [MM2] (Master's Mend [MM] is actually the least CP-efficient skill for durab recovery, I would suggest not to use it unless you're overpowering a recipe with stats).
You're right that the quality bar of a 4 star lvl 60 item is as long as the quality bar of a no star lvl 70 item (13187 quality). But the progress bar of the 4 star 60 is only comparable to that of a level 63 recipe (1968 progress for level 63 recipe, instead of 2952 for level 70 recipe). Although, Heavensward items have only 70 durab instead of 80 durab. So that does contribute to some extra difficulty. (level 63 recipes have 10439 quality to push only)
I see where the confusion is. With no food, my stats are 1211, 1114, 400. (Those are no meld stats for HQ 290 - All I have are some CP melds right now)
The 1347 came from HQ steamed Grouper. (HQ steamed Grouper gives you 136 Craft and 20 CP) I've tested all 3 HQ foods at 70. Tempura Platter, Warriors Stew and Steamed Grouper and keep stacks of each. As well as old stacks of Seafood Stew and Baked Onion soup.
I still think your Rotation would work with or without that extra craft from food. That's a 10 IQ BB and would very likely get a 70 1 star to 100% quality. We can't just look at the face value of the star recipes though. We seem to take substantial penalty when doing them.
If you look at the Steamed Grouper, it has a 2952 Difficulty. The Persimmon Sushi is only 3149. That's really not that much on paper but there is a deception there because it's a whole other game. Without Ingenuity II it's pretty much impossible to finish. They use a different math with star stuff.
Indeed, star recipes do use a different math. The difficulty of an ARR 4 star recipe is identical to that of a level 53 recipe in Heavensward. Where as the difficulty of a HW 4 star recipe is the same as level 63 recipes in StormBlood (with the exception of the quality part as mentioned above). Thus, instead of using a level 60 recipe's math, the HW 4 star Scintillant Ring of Fending uses the math of a level 63 recipe for the calculation of difficulty.
However, since you're level 70, even though the 4 star lvl 60 recipe is using lvl 63 recipe math, it's still vastly below your current level. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Ingen2 lowers the current recipe level by 3 or 5(?). Turning a level 63 recipe into level 60 or 58 should make no difference for a level 70 crafter. Thus, the impact of Ingen2 should be very minimal in this case.
In contrast, when you were a level 60 in Heavensward, crafting a 4 star 60 item (~=level 63 recipe) would be ridiculously difficult. Hence, you're right it would have been nearly impossible to push progress without Ingen2 (although we did resolve this back then with Rath's rotation, and managed to get away without using Ingen2).
Nevertheless, I remember a recent patch has changed this slightly... (was it 4.0 or 4.05?). When we craft a recipe higher level than our crafting class, instead of having a huge penalty on progress, SE has now buffed progress for us, but implemented a huge penalty on quality instead. Thus, we can now complete the item with relative ease, but it'd be ridiculously difficult to HQ it. This effect can be seen in some recently proposed SB 2 star rotations, which some people put in Ingen1 into their rotations when they push quality. The effect would have been quite minimal in the past, but now it is actually significant.
This might seem so based on what we see but no, I can zombie craft NQ to HQ for 63, even 65 and will HQ with 7 stacks and that's just not the case for the HW 4 stars. Those recipes reflected 68+ for me in terms of results and actions ratios. Even now at 70 they seem to have an entrenched difficulty associated to them. I also get a feeling the 11 stack standard is going to be done away with when we get 70 4 star. We got a 3rd Byregot skill that uses half stacks of inner quiet. Combine that with the new manipulation skill, it is telling me they expect us to get to 11, drop it back and rebuild.