Crafting "Practice Dummies"

I think this would be a great addition to the game. Dummies that we can practice crafting on to optimize rotations. I know we currently use third-party resources to do this, but it should be in the game. Thoughts?

I'd say stick with simulators. If they had, or developed their own simulators/training dummies which are native to the game then it'd defeat the purpose of actually crafting.

I like the idea. Maybe it can be a recipe we temporarily learn that costs scrips to activate?

It wouldn't be hard to implement. Just have "practice" recipes that are the same difficult as real recipes have an npc that gives you mats like the beast tribe quests. Then just make the final product item be something that has no value, cant be traded/sold, etc. That you just throw away afterwards.

A toggleable "practice mode" for crafts which produces no items, gives no exp, but consumes no materials is something I've thought would be a useful feature for a long time. It seems crazy that crafters rely on third-party simulators to create their rotations without worrying about whether they are about to destroy several hundred thousand gil worth of materials in the process.

It would simply be a toggle ability like Collectables Synthesis, you turn it on and can then attempt to make any item in your crafting log without materials, only you don't get the item or any exp for success.

Decent idea.

I'd say a system like the beast tribes would work best. You're given materials to make replica items of no value with equal difficulty to 1, 2 and 3 star crafts. I don't think it should cost scrips or lots of gil as this defeats the purpose of being an ingame alternative to third party websites, which are free.

Plenty of crafters actually have no idea third party websites exist, it would be a good way for them to learn.

A hidden crafter tribe, similar to the Stone, Sky, Sea area for PvE.

That's what Culinarian is for. ;)

I like the idea but too bad it will never see the light of day. I file this wonderful idea under the tackle box.
Two expansion on and lv50 gathering nodes still do not have any type of log representation to help people remember when to get them. DoH/L has always been an afterthought for this game.
The most recent in-game timer that was implemented is a POS too.

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Originally Posted by ChameleonMS

I like the idea but too bad it will never see the light of day. I file this wonderful idea under the tackle box.
Two expansion on and lv50 gathering nodes still do not have any type of log representation to help people remember when to get them. DoH/L has always been an afterthought for this game.
The most recent in-game timer that was implemented is a POS too.

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Have to disagree that DoH/L are afterthoughts in this game. FFXIV easily has the most in-depth, immersive, and unique crafting systems of any MMO ever made. That said, this is simply a QoL suggestion to make the best crafting system out there even more better.

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Originally Posted by Thatusernameistaken

Have to disagree that DoH/L are afterthoughts in this game. FFXIV easily has the most in-depth, immersive, and unique crafting systems of any MMO ever made. That said, this is simply a QoL suggestion to make the best crafting system out there even more better.

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*that you played.

While I won't argue the usefulness of such a feature, the anxiety attributed to the potential loss of time, gil, and hard earned mats is kind of what endgame crafting is about. It's why Reclaim will never ever be at a 100% return rate, because the devs want that element of consequence there. The actual possibility of failure. And the only true way to penalize a crafter is the loss of mats and shards/crystals/clusters. It's what hits us in the gut, and tells us we might want to reconsider our approach.

So no. I couldn't disagree more with this request.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

While I won't argue the usefulness of such a feature, the anxiety attributed to the potential loss of time, gil, and hard earned mats is kind of what endgame crafting is about. It's why Reclaim will never ever be at a 100% return rate, because the devs want that element of consequence there. The actual possibility of failure. And the only true way to penalize a crafter is the loss of mats and shards/crystals/clusters. It's what hits us in the gut, and tells us we might want to reconsider our approach.

So no. I couldn't disagree more with this request.

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A valid point. I suppose it is part of the reason I spend so much time crafting in this game and have such an appreciation for it.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

While I won't argue the usefulness of such a feature, the anxiety attributed to the potential loss of time, gil, and hard earned mats is kind of what endgame crafting is about. It's why Reclaim will never ever be at a 100% return rate, because the devs want that element of consequence there. The actual possibility of failure. And the only true way to penalize a crafter is the loss of mats and shards/crystals/clusters. It's what hits us in the gut, and tells us we might want to reconsider our approach.

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But in practice everyone just uses simulators to avoid this. I'm definitely not going to risk hundreds of thousands of gil or hours of time spent gathering up materials on the possibility that I'll fail just because "that's what crafting is all about". If anything it just scares people away from trying to progress crafting to begin with. The possibility of failure still exists in forms like, not being attentive while crafting, or taking a risk on a HQ chance under 100%, or needing condition procs to guarantee success due to low stats.

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Originally Posted by Zetsumei_Tsunarashi

It wouldn't be hard to implement. Just have "practice" recipes that are the same difficult as real recipes have an npc that gives you mats like the beast tribe quests. Then just make the final product item be something that has no value, cant be traded/sold, etc. That you just throw away afterwards.

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It's EXACTLY what SE did with recipes like Sewing Needle (2**).

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Originally Posted by Gemina

While I won't argue the usefulness of such a feature, the anxiety attributed to the potential loss of time, gil, and hard earned mats is kind of what endgame crafting is about. It's why Reclaim will never ever be at a 100% return rate, because the devs want that element of consequence there. The actual possibility of failure. And the only true way to penalize a crafter is the loss of mats and shards/crystals/clusters. It's what hits us in the gut, and tells us we might want to reconsider our approach.

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I would bet gil that the number of successful endgame crafters who have never used a sim or pre-made macro is sub-1%. You simply don't risk huge amounts of gil and time throwing out random rotations on gear for fun and hope it works. If that's what crafting is intended to be, it's missed the mark and I'm glad it has.

Crafting still has that loss-anxiety, you have it while leveling where you do experiment on the fly. You have it if you macro and there's the possibility a poor will land on Brygots. You have it if you manual craft and forget any detail on food/cross class skills or misclick anything. Every endgame crafter has botched expensive crafts on their journey.

For me, endgame crafting is taking all the data available and working out the absolute optimal rotations for my purpose. Working with the stats you have to figure out the most cheap, efficient, reliable rotation using every ability available. It's what makes it fun for me and sims are what make that possible.

You shouldn’t need a sim for you to reliably design a viable approach, especially as SB has been designed to be more intuitive as you don’t need to consider statistics anymore when determining skill priority. With enough practice (on materials, etc), you’ll get to the point where you can get a very good idea of what you need to do just by looking at the required quality and progress requirements. Yes, even if the game had crafts that gave you progress/quality requirements from a more or less random pool, you should be able to ace them (designers should not include requirements that cannot be done with the min required stats). If you’re unable to effectively design on the fly, can you say you have truly mastered crafting?

Case in point: When the i320 crafter gear was first released (first time we saw 28.5k quality crafts and our stats were far worse than what we had for 3* and 4*!), a lot of players found them challenging to 100% using full HQ mats, never-mind starting with i290 gear and all NQ mats. If you understood the crafting process, all NQ runs should not have been difficult. You would already have known that your Byregot’s blessing finisher gave you 11k quality from previous 2* crafts and could easily determine what you needed to do to come up with the other 17.5k. The trick was simply to get your IQ stacks as high as possible before firing off a barrage of at least 9 ingenuity 2 buffed touches; around 25% of the time, you could manage 13 ingen 2 buffed touches. You also got enough CP for an average of 16 touches. You don’t need a simulator to figure that out.

I managed 86% on my first blind run and moved my results to 90-100% (100% around 60% of the time but I never did optimize it before upgrading) with some refinements. Imagine if the game forced you to craft from all NQ with stats capped at the i290 gear…..

The truth is that those crafts were very easy to HQ even at min requirements and all NQ mats if you had a solid grasp of crafting mechanics but very hard to HQ if you didn’t. They would have served as an excellent and fair skill check if the game forced you to craft under those conditions. But given the way the game is balanced (lots of HQ mats, major over-gearing), most players will never learn, which is a shame.

Back in ARR, sims were counterproductive to your learning as the idea was (and still is if you truly want to master crafting) to design a crafting methodology (on the fly prioritization, optimization, adjustments to changes in the situation etc). If the i320s were considered difficult at 0 starting quality and i290 gear, it’s no wonder crafters did poorly on ARR’s master 2 tokens. That’s what was satisfying about ARR crafting. The balance created divisions in player proficiency and you were rewarded with excellent results only if you took the time to truly master the system.

Experimentation and "on the fly" adjustments aren't exactly economical when you're working with materials potentially worth hundreds of thousands. It's difficult to even work out how much progress/quality your actions are even going to give since it's affected not only by stats but by the level of the craft. Stuff like Ingenuity 2 certainly isn't going to tell you how much it's helping before you use it, and at that point you're committed to the craft, whether or not you've left yourself in a position where finishing it is even possible. Furthermore, most people aren't really going to consider a 60% chance of getting 100% HQ as acceptable, particularly since even 95% HQ in this game feels a lot closer to 50% than it does to 100. Even highly optimized rotations (or "methodologies") which end up with 0 durability and less than 5CP usually can't hit 100% HQ on max level crafts starting at 0 quality, without relying on procs and/or actions with sub-100% success rates. If what you're suggesting is that you can successfully craft anything in HQ from NQ materials as long as you're willing to do try multiple times until you get sufficiently lucky, well, DUH! You can obviously do that, but you'll be doing so at a massive loss if you're buying materials. The reason why people use sims and rotations is because reliability is extremely important in high level crafting, because if you don't value reliability you're going to end up wasting loads and loads of time.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

*that you played.

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It's true that it's a subjective matter, but it's a pretty widely shared opinion that FFXIV has the best crafting system in all of MMOs.

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Originally Posted by MN_14

You shouldn’t need a sim for you to reliably design a viable approach, especially as SB has been designed to be more intuitive as you don’t need to consider statistics anymore when determining skill priority. With enough practice (on materials, etc), you’ll get to the point where you can get a very good idea of what you need to do just by looking at the required quality and progress requirements. Yes, even if the game had crafts that gave you progress/quality requirements from a more or less random pool, you should be able to ace them (designers should not include requirements that cannot be done with the min required stats). If you’re unable to effectively design on the fly, can you say you have truly mastered crafting?

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Not sure what you mean by this.

I can design "viable" rotations on the fly just fine. I'm at the stage where I do all my gear crafting manual and just pull the rotation out of my head and 100% hq, I know exactly what Brygots will give me at 9, 10 and 11 stacks Inner Quiet on each craft, how much CP I need to leave for a finisher, whether Innovation is better than that good proc or not and so on. If I misclick something or forget a specialist stone I can improvise with high success rate. So I'm not sure where the idea that sims are counter-productive to learning comes from. All the information I've had available has improved my learning. It's like studying a subject with books and research compared to randomly poking at it until something makes sense.

SB crafting is fairly accessible, but it's certainly got complexity if you want to go beyond viable and create the most efficient, economical rotations possible. Almost every ability has a use somewhere in some endgame rotation. Sure you can 60% HQ a normal piece with Makers Mark and a bit of sense and the same old rotation, but if you want to figure out how to HQ a non-specialist piece 100% reliably without markers mark, with cheap food, with your own given stats, you need to research it. And the second is far more valuable to a serious crafter.

To be clear, I’m not against the idea of creating efficient rotations when you have already mastered the system and the game allows you to gear for it. SB allows you to over-gear for even the latest crafts making everything very macro friendly from all NQ mats. Unfortunately, this also means that anyone can copy someone’s macro and craft as effectively.

I believe that there is an over-reliance on the web-based simulator as the be all and end all learning tool. It’s not a great tool if you have to craft under conditions where you really had to utilize procs for good results/freehand craft (unless you incorporate a million what if scenarios). Hence, that’s the reason why macros gave subpar results back in ARR (unless you consider reclaiming 1/3 of the time to be acceptable…). That said, a crafter’s striking dummy would be highly useful as a learning tool for freehand crafting and I’d vote for it.

In the case of the i320s as I mentioned previously, at the min requirements, no matter how much you tweak a rotation using the simulator, you’re not going to get the greatest results because you’re not incorporating all of the CP required to HQ it effectively (earned through procs, etc). Effective static rotations only became possible once you obtained the new gear. If a crafter relied on the simulator and the game forced you to craft the latest tiered crafts under similar conditions, a crafter who relied on simulators would never learn it correctly. ARR master 2 tokens and 4* was kind of like that to a certain extent.

SB is tuned toward mass market crafts. While I think there is a place for both mass market and high-end crafts (where you have to freehand them for high HQ rates), if the majority of players copy a macro, there probably won’t be high end crafts again other than ones that require rare drops (high end only due to scarcity).

In the end, I think it boils down to opinion too. I don’t find creating efficient rotations when way above the min requirements to be very satisfying. Yes, you could produce crafts a bit more efficiently than the next crafter’s rotation/macro, but the difference isn’t great. On my server right now, some crafts are being sold at a 30% profit only (based on raw mat prices) and supply still exceeds demand. If there were also crafts with similar difficulty to the i320 Doh/Dol gear on release and forced you to craft from all NQ and min requirements, I think you’ll find that you’ll quickly outproduce the player who hasn’t learned how to freehand them. It’s what happened back in ARR and even HW.

You also can’t treat anything under 100% as a failure. Especially, in ARR where it was impossible to guarantee an HQ, a solid crafting methodology works fine. Even with my i320 example, if it’s impossible to guarantee an HQ but you’re getting 100% sixty percent of the time, 90-95%, 35% of the time, and 5% eighty percent of the time, at the end of the day, it’s an overall 95% yield and you’ll on average only get 1 NQ per 19 HQs. It’s not going to make a dent especially as crafters (majority in ARR and HW from my experience although that could be server dependent), will either be producing very slowly or producing NQ after NQ.

What I find fun is a craft where it’s impossible to guarantee 100% and you have to constantly think. There also has to be logic and strategy behind your approach (it can’t be random or simply hammering out x number of touches). I was quite surprised that although the i320 2* crafter gear was easy even with all NQs and i290 gear, I found them more fun than anything in HW due to the vast pool of abilities at your disposal. I think interesting crafts can be created using the SB system, but we generally won’t see them.

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Originally Posted by MN_14

What I find fun is a craft where it’s impossible to guarantee 100% and you have to constantly think. There also has to be logic and strategy behind your approach (it can’t be random or simply hammering out x number of touches). I was quite surprised that although the i320 2* crafter gear was easy even with all NQs and i290 gear, I found them more fun than anything in HW due to the vast pool of abilities at your disposal. I think interesting crafts can be created using the SB system, but we generally won’t see them.

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I do agree, while I'm fine with some accessible crafts, I wouldn't mind a few crafts like this at all. Another thread brought up ideas like glowing glamour tools for crafters or other such vanity items and making things like these very difficult crafts that take everything you have and some good use of things like tricks on top, could give us something to actually challenge us, not to mention a nice way to display your craft mastery.

I found SB lacking in challenge once they back-tracked on the difficulty for 320 gear. In the same way an experienced raider enjoys things like Ultimate as a long-term goal, crafters could do with something to push us to our limits.

To be honest, while I understand the overall mechanics of crafting, I have a very difficult time coming up with my own rotations. I have tried to every tier so far and it just leads to a lot of frustration. While I can usually adjust to situations mid-craft (I don't macro craft so occasionally I make mistakes in the button presses) and end up finishing the craft, trying to start from scratch is overwhelming. So I usually use someone else's rotation and make adjustments to it (moving touches around based on procs, etc). I don't think crafters who use other people's rotations are inferior or worse at crafting, and it's frustrating to see that sentiment repeated.

As crafting stands right now, it's very linear and simple. You fill up both bars and you either get an HQ or you don't. While there's potentially a huge amount of ways one could get to that point, how important really is it to have an original rotation that you came up with yourself? As someone who gathers their own materials and can make a large amount of gil on crafting items I don't even need to HQ, I don't have to worry about the costs of food or tea beyond anything but the time spent, so I'm not worried about coming up with a tealess rotation or a rotation that uses cheaper food. All I do in the game anymore is craft, gather, and decorate, so it's not like I was going to spend that time in game I was gathering doing something else.

I've seen recommendations for prestige kind of crafts like Liam mentioned above and I think they're a good idea for vanity. While I do wish Stormblood crafting was a little more difficult (I really enjoyed HW endgame crafting as it did challenge me to think more and craft more actively) I can see why they made it simpler. Even now a lot of people still don't want to craft even with zero RNG 100% rotations. It's also worth considering what kind of crafts end up being more difficult. It makes sense for an armor piece to be the one where you have to think and plan more, but having to fully focus when I'm mass producing a bunch of mid-level materials can easily become tiresome and boring. Right now though SE has made them both roughly the same difficulty in the amount of engagement required, which I'd like to see change.

Endgame crafting should inherently come with some manner of risk at some point in the process, which is why I'm not sure I agree with the implementation of practice dummy items. But it is true people use simulators to bypass this, which means the risk has to come just from the crafting process itself, and in HW that was mostly Hasty Touch RNG.