Patient touch and steady hands

I noticed that Patient touch has a huge failure chance when using it, even with steady hands 2, so I decided to test it

So here's the set up. Level 70 armorer with 4/5 HQ Onishi. Crafting Titanium Sollerets of fending (Ilevel 133 level 55 craft). I chose it because it's no where near difficult to affect success rate and I had tons of mats for it.

On the first craft, using Steady hands 2 and patient touch I failed 3 out of 4 times using it. I repeated this, crafting 45 sollerets. The results were interesting.

Of the 120 times I used Patient touch (always having steady hands 2 up) I failed 64 times. That's almost a 45% success rate. Steady hands 2 gives a 30% increase to success and patient touch has a 50% success rate. So a total of 80% chance of success right?

I would like to chock this up to RNG and low sample rate but I'm not so sure about that.
The problem I have with the low sample rate claim is that no one can have a large enough sample size to be reliable. You would have to craft hundreds of thousands of items to have a sample size that couldn't be called "Too small". If that is the case then the listed success rates aren't what you can expect as an individual crafter even through years of playing. So the success rate should be considered 50% unless you can achieve a 100% chance of success. You either fail or succeed unless you eliminate the chance of failure. But that's not the point of this so back to the issue at hand.

I plan on doing more testing and increasing the sample size to 1000 uses and see if that affects the numbers but I would like to hear from other crafters and see if they have similar results.

I have 2 of them as start part of my rotation and from my experience their fail rate is not as bad as in your sample. Admittedly I haven't done actual record keeping so I can't back that with numbers. But I've never get the feeling they fail more often than work and I use them practically for everything. (The optimality of that is not a question here, I know it might not be the best rotation but can't be bothered to chance it)

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Originally Posted by Sida

I have 2 of them as start part of my rotation and from my experience their fail rate is not as bad as in your sample. Admittedly I haven't done actual record keeping so I can't back that with numbers. But I've never get the feeling they fail more often than work and I use them practically for everything. (The optimality of that is not a question here, I know it might not be the best rotation but can't be bothered to chance it)

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Yea it's not the most optimal of skills but I'm just curious if it's bugged and not gaining the benefit of steady hands 2. So I've decided to Change the game plan to 5000 uses of Patient touch with steady hands two up. Comparing that to 5000 uses of hasty touch with steady hands 2. Brought in two more people to help (crafting that many items takes forever if you're alone and more people eliminates the "It's just you" variable). Should give a decent baseline comparison. Expecting a 2 to 4% variance due to RNG between the two but we'll see. Right now we're almost half way through the process. Will update again when there is something to report.

who the heck uses patient touch. prudent touch ftw lol

After thorough testing including adding 4 people to help finish the job faster we finally have the results.
Included in the testing were 2 level 70 armorers in all level 70 gear. A level 70 BSM with all level 70 Gear and 2 level 70 GSM in all level 70 gear. The crafter's average item levels were between 320 to 340.

The armorers were crafting level 50 cobalt plate belts, the BSM crafted level 49 cobalt baselards, The GSMs both crafted level 50 rubelite earrings. Chosen for ease of creation and minimum amount of material needed, increasing desynth chances of getting mats back to reduce cost.
Item difficulty should not have played any role.

Results were as follows:
5017 uses of Steady Hands 2 + Hasty touch: 1158 failures, 3859 successes.
5023 uses of Steady hands 2 + Patient touch: 1928 failures, 3095 successes.

Both have (supposedly) an 80% chance to succeed when paired with steady hands 2. However, if you do the math Hasty touch comes to roughly 76.8% success rate.
Patient touch on the other hand had about a 61.6% success rate.

Make of it what you will but I think there is an issue with patient touch not gaining the benefit of steady hands 2 and this begs the question; Are other skills not benefiting from it? This would explain how you can fail 17 times consecutively with a supposed 90% chance of success. Regurgitate the small sample size argument if you want to, my personal take on it is the tool tip success chance should reflect what one crafter could expect crafting hundreds of items not based on what millions of crafters creating billions of items should expect. You can use the small sample size argument against any side. I personally have crafted enough items during this that if I never craft another item before I keel over it will still be too soon.

I'd be curious to see the individual results for the crafters on question. Not meaning to undermine your conclusion but I'm interested to see if there was, or how much there was variation.

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Originally Posted by Adren

After thorough testing including adding 4 people to help finish the job faster we finally have the results.
Included in the testing were 2 level 70 armorers in all level 70 gear. A level 70 BSM with all level 70 Gear and 2 level 70 GSM in all level 70 gear. The crafter's average item levels were between 320 to 340.

The armorers were crafting level 50 cobalt plate belts, the BSM crafted level 49 cobalt baselards, The GSMs both crafted level 50 rubelite earrings. Chosen for ease of creation and minimum amount of material needed, increasing desynth chances of getting mats back to reduce cost.
Item difficulty should not have played any role.

Results were as follows:
5017 uses of Steady Hands 2 + Hasty touch: 1158 failures, 3859 successes.
5023 uses of Steady hands 2 + Patient touch: 1928 failures, 3095 successes.

Both have (supposedly) an 80% chance to succeed when paired with steady hands 2. However, if you do the math Hasty touch comes to roughly 76.8% success rate.
Patient touch on the other hand had about a 61.6% success rate.

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While five thousand is a smaller sample size than the millions that take place server wide, it certainly seems like a large enough sample that you should be seeing results closer than 61.6%. I think this would be enough evidence to justify a bug report asking SE to look into the issue. I'd recommend posting your suspicion, how you and your friends tested it, and the results you got to the In-Game Bugs forum.

(p.s. If you do submit it there, be sure to use the bug reporting template described in the "Welcome to the 'In-Game Bugs' Forum!" sticky post. You can put "not applicable" on fields that don't pertain to the issue, but if you don't list things according to the template fields, they won't accept the report to look into it.)

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

who the heck uses patient touch. prudent touch ftw lol

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It's used in non-specialist cheap food rotations for making HQ 3 and 4 star ingots/lumber/ect.

I personally haven't had any problems with Patient myself in the last few hundred crafts, it has felt like it hits around the 80% success mark. However 5000 is a large enough sample to at least have it investigated.

This classic song seems weirdly on topic, here...

https://youtu.be/dbk29JZdl5A

I wonder if Steady Touch isn't broken myself. I have a level 30ish all craft character that has been frustrating me with the number of failures I get and did a little testing of my own before coming to the forums. In my case, I made 138 Growth Formula Betas on my low 30 ALC. I have level appropriate HQ gear averaging ilvl 27. I tracked 1000 uses of the combo Basic Touch (70%) + Steady Hand (10%) for an 80% chance of success raising quality. Roughly about 6 to 9 uses per Beta depending on the number of good/excellent conditions manifested. Of that 1000 uses, only 486 were successful. That's a roughly 49% chance when it should be closer to 80%. :(

Edit: Forgot to mention I'm also using Pea Soup for the added CP and took into account the guaranteed fail fest you get when gear hits 10 and 0% condition or 100% spirit bond. Those I subtracted from the overall total.

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Originally Posted by Taelyn

Steady Hand (10%)

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Steady Hand is actually supposed to be +20%, which makes your results even worse.

Your data isn't really related to the issue the OP brought up, however, but it could be worth looking into separately.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

While five thousand is a smaller sample size than the millions that take place server wide, it certainly seems like a large enough sample that you should be seeing results closer than 61.6%. I think this would be enough evidence to justify a bug report asking SE to look into the issue. I'd recommend posting your suspicion, how you and your friends tested it, and the results you got to the In-Game Bugs forum.

(p.s. If you do submit it there, be sure to use the bug reporting template described in the "Welcome to the 'In-Game Bugs' Forum!" sticky post. You can put "not applicable" on fields that don't pertain to the issue, but if you don't list things according to the template fields, they won't accept the report to look into it.)

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The issue I have with bug reporting when it comes to the crafting system % of success is, at least in my personal experience of playing since beta, you will always get the same reply. It's working as intended. Which has led me to assume it was intended to be this bad. In other words it's almost completely pointless to submit a bug report alone. Only when SE has thousands of bug reports will they take it seriously and unfortunately you can't get more then 4 people to agree on what color the sky is much less what is or is not broken.

An example of how bad this game's crafting system is, earlier today I tried making 4 Kudzu cloth at level 65 weaver in all HQ level 65 Gear fully melded, using all HQ ingredients and I couldn't even finish one craft because of failures. At 90% chance of success I failed 14 times in the first craft. The second I succeeded once and failed every other time. The third I failed 4 times at 80% and 7 times at 90%. The last attempt I tried just using rapid synth just to make a normal quality item and failed every time with steady hands 2 up. It's broken. The only reply you will ever get from SE is it's working as intended.

You will also not get anyone to admit its broken no matter what evidence you bring to their attention you will always see someone post a "Oh no someone is talking bad about ff14! Keyboard warriors unite!" post in defense of SE.

Wouldn't really surprise me if there's more to the equation than simply adding up the success chance and rolling rng. I've long suspected that Good/Excellent conditions may be influencing the rng side of the equation to produce fewer Touch successes.

But, in any case, that's really the important part of why a bug report on it won't really get anywhere. Without seeing the code ourselves, no way of knowing what else may be at play.

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Originally Posted by Adren

The issue I have with bug reporting when it comes to the crafting system % of success is, at least in my personal experience of playing since beta, you will always get the same reply. It's working as intended.

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That's certainly the common reply, but most of the time the reported problem is just that someone thinks they seem to fail a lot, even though they either haven't measured how often it is, or have done so through maybe a half dozen crafts or something. You and your friends tracked it quite a bit longer than what we see in most threads like this. I don't know if it's enough longer to actually make a difference in how SE would look into it, though.