New crafting skills in ShB - Prep Touch & Delicate Syn are better than they seem!
Hi all, I haven't seen any discussion threads here on the official forum yet regarding the following new skills, so I figured I'll create this new thread.
I was sure people on Reddit would have figured everything out about these skills already, so I briefly googled, and went to one Reddit thread there. The OP and a number of people who responded were pretty disappointed at the new skills, which I was very surprised, since the new skills are really amazing in my opinion. In fact, someone there obviously had the wrong impression that Prep Touch gives only 1 IQ stack, which was quickly corrected there. So I guess people just haven't really dug deep into the topic yet?
Hence, I would like to give my personal opinion here about the usefulness of these skills, and ask for your comments and advice.
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Preparatory Touch (36 CP) (PrpT) (lvl 71)
Increase quality at greater cost to durability.
Additional Effect: Increases Inner Quiet stack by one (up to 11)
Efficiency: 200%
Success Rate: 70%
Durability Cost: 20
Same as all the similar actions we have studied before, the “additional IQ stack” means it increases IQ stack by 2. However, the skill costs 20 durab and 36 CP. Thus, in the end, the effect of Prep Touch (PrpT) is identical to using 2x Basic Touch (18 CP, 100% efficiency, 70% success rate). So why introduce this skill into the game? Well, for 3 good reasons -- (1) Shorter macros: We have been suffering a lot regarding the need of using too many lines in our macros to HQ our items. PrpT effectively reduces the number of Basic Touches we use in a macro, allowing much shorter macros to be build (2) Better utilization of conditions: In manual crafting, it becomes a strong skill to use during an “Excellent” or “Good” condition. When using 2 consecutive Basic Touches, you can only catch the favorable condition once, since you can never have 2 “Goods” one after another (and after Excellent is always Poor). As illustrated below, you can see how a PrpT under Good is equal to having TWO Basic Touches under Good. In fact, if you land it on an Excellent, the 200% efficiency of PrpT will be quadrupled, resulting in 800% efficiency. (3) More steps of Steady Hand / Ingenuity left: As illustrated below, even though 1x PrpT is similar to 2x Basic Touches, it is still a single action… it only counts as one step. When under the effect of Steady Hand (I / II) or Ingenuity (I / II), it saves a lot of steps so you can use the remaining steps of the buff(s) for other actions or simply more touches.
https://i.imgur.com/sbZVTa8.png
Mini figure illustrating the advantage of a PrpT over 2x Basic Touches. Orange spaces indicate the steps which are covered by SH2. The string of 4x Basic Touches gave a total of 450% efficiency, whereas the two PrpT gave a total of 500%. The amount of CP spent, durab decrease and IQ stack accumulation are exactly the same between the two scenarios. But the one using PrpT gave more quality and leaves more steps of SH2 available after the touches.
Rapid Synthesis III (24 CP) (RS3) (lvl 72)
Increase progress at greater cost to durability.
Efficiency decreases significantly when durability is below 20.
Efficiency: 600%
Success Rate: 60%
Durability Cost: 20
This the strongest synthesis action to-date. Just like how one PrpT is similar to two Basic Touches, one Rapid Syn III (RS3) is similar to two Rapid Syn II (300% efficiency, 60% success rate), as it consumes 20 durab. And just like PrpT, it is a single action that counts as a one step. But the biggest difference here is the 60% success rate. Under Steady Hand II (SH2), it has only a 90% success rate, which means it sometimes fail. When it fails, you lose 20 durab and 24 CP for nothing. That is a big deal when we are crafting items of the highest difficulty. Thus, we should avoid using this skill when making really valuable items. To me, this skill has been wonderful for making NQ ingots and lumbers (40 durab items) when I was leveling my classes. When I was below level 80, quicksyn results in a huge loss of raw mats due to frequent failures. What I liked to do, was to just pop SH2, Manip2 and then RS3. If it fails, durab drops to 20, and then rises to 25. Then I can just follow up with another RS3. Even if it fails a second time, my durab will drop to 5, and then rises back to 10. I will then just use Master’s Mend (92 CP) and then try a third time on RS3. If I didn’t use Manip2, then durab will stay at 20 after a RS3 failure, then I don’t have the luxury to use it again right away, because if it fails the second time, durab will hit zero.
Delicate Synthesis (32 CP) (DS) (lvl 76)
Increase both progress and quality.
Efficiency: 100%
Success Rate: 100%
This is one of my new favorite skills! You’d think: “Hey, what it does is just a Basic Touch + a Basic Syn. Isn’t that rather expensive for 32 CP?” Hell no! Firstly, you’re massively saving durability and saving steps from buffs. Secondly, the beauty of this skill comes from its 100% success rate. This means this skill can function independent of SH2, and this is a big deal. Back in Stormblood, one of our common practices was to do the Ingen, SH2, Prudent Touch spam combo, and one of the most annoying thing is that the Ingen always falls off before SH2, so you may have one PrudT having no Ingen buff. Furthermore, it was also a common practice to activate Ingen (or Ingen2) near the end to buff the Byregot’s Blessing, and then leave behind a few more Ingen steps for progress. Now, both problems are resolved together. You can simple do an Ingen, Delicate Syn spam, and both touch and synthesis will be buffed by the Ingen, effectively saving you another Ingen.
Intensive Synthesis (12 CP) (IS) (lvl 78)
Increases progress.
Efficiency: 300%
Success Rate: 80%
Available only when material condition is Good or Excellent.
This is a condition-restricted skill. Thus, it is more likely to be used in manual crafting than macros. Its effect is exactly the same as RS2 (300% efficiency progress, 60% success rate) but with 20% more success rate. So it is 100% secure under SH or SH2. Inten Syn (IS) is basically a replacement for RS2 when a Good or Excellent procs. This skill can be quite useful when you’re massively making NQ ingots/lumbers with SH2 + RS2 spam… and when a Good procs, you just hit Intensive Syn instead of RS2. But apart from this, the condition-restriction really renders the skill relatively useless when planning a rotation. Most of the times, we won’t plan a rotation involving RS2 as that is unreliable, and we won’t plan a rotation with IS either as it is condition-dependent. In fact, when a Good or Excellent procs, it is more likely that you would want to use that favorable condition for quality instead of progress.
Reuse (60 CP) (lvl 74)
Grants Reusing. Chance to become available upon reaching maximum item quality.
Reusing Effect: A portion of ingredients used to synthesize the item are returned to your inventory when synthesis is complete
From what people say, the chance of it being active appears to be around 20-30%. This skill serves two major functions. (1) Saving mats while leveling: It encourages people to max out quality during crafting (especially when leveling), giving them a chance to recover some mats in the process. (2) Exploitation of the Reuse/Recycle combo to earn a fortunate: When paired with Recycle (90% chance of recovering all materials when synthesis is botched), one can somewhat exploit this skill to create many, many products with a single expensive mat (usually will return the most valuable mat if Reuse is activated). Basically, when one crafts a very expensive item, such as a Nidhogg weapon, one can push the quality to max to induce the activation of Reuse. If Reuse procs, then just complete the progress, gets a finished product, and let the most expensive mat (such as the Nidhogg’s Scale) return. If Reuse doesn’t proc when quality is maxed, then don’t continue progress. Activate Recycle, and pray that all materials will return when you botch it (10% chance of losing everything). Usually, everything will be returned, and now you can repeat the whole process again to try proc the Reuse until succeeded. Using this method, one can likely create many, many Nidhogg weapons with a single scale.
Trained Eye (250 CP) (lvl 80)
Increases quality by 50%.
Available only on the first step. Recipe level must be at least 10 levels below yours.
Trained Instinct (250 CP) (lvl 80)
Increases quality by between 30 to 100%.
Available only on the first step. Recipe level must be at least 10 levels below yours.
These are the only skills in ShB that I’m disappointed about. They’re really quite useless. If an item is like ~60 levels below yours, then you probably just need to hit “Advanced Touch” (AT), and be done with it. If an item is like ~20 levels below yours, then you can easily push quality with the common double strides combo of “GS, SH, Innov, AT, GS, AT” under IQ (which I have set up my buttons to quickly do it with one hand). If the item is like 11 levels below you, and you use “Trained Eye”, yes you immediately completely 50% quality. But you actually still have 50% to work on. “Trained Instinct” is even worse. Sure, it may one-shot the item at 100%, but you may very well end up with only 30%. We all hate RNG in this game. Yet you have burned like half your CP with either of these skills. Honestly, maybe these skills can save you a little bit of time, but it seems to me that you’re leaving yourself more vulnerable to mistakes as well. Unless you’re massively crafting like 100 items which are like level 69 recipes, it really doesn’t save you too much time comparing with performing 1 to 2 simple double strides combos, which would otherwise be much safer and reliable.
SUMMARY OF THE NEW CRAFTING APPROACH:
Here is my vision of what's coming. The "new trend of crafting" (at the most difficult level) would be to first quickly build up IQ stacks with either PrpT or Precise Touch. PrpT has the advantage that it is more reliable, predictable and plannable comparing to Patient Touch and Precise Touch, while very quickly build up a high IQ stack (much faster than using Prudent Touch even though PrudT is already very efficient with CP). This can be done while Manip2 is active, to let durab falls by 10 per step, which means a combo that looks like this:
(assuming durab is below max from Muscle Memory)
"Manip2, SH2, PrpT, PrpT, PrpT"
After IQ is like ~5 to 7, then spam DS under Ingen:
"Ingen, DS, DS, DS, DS, DS"
What's good about Delicate Syn spam is that it is still very good to be used AFTER IQ hits 11. So if we encounter a craft sooooo difficult that IQ11 Byregot is not enough, we can actually do another round of Ingen+DS spam to further push BOTH progress and quality at IQ11. And we can keep doing this until progress is just a tad bit before completion.
Finally, we finish off with a standard Byregot finisher, and complete with a single CS3 or Observe+FocSyn.
Of course, these are just some theory crafting discussions. At the end, if we have to fall back on Prudent spam, I won't complain about it! :P
