Increasing Rarity of Crafting Ingredients and incorporating Expert Crafting

Not only make things a bit more challenging and more time consuming to make with some risk involved, but also massively increasing the potency of the items. Finally giving us the ability to craft Green / Blue / Purple consumables.

No longer will items be obtained from tokens / scrips, such as platinum fish, highland cabbage, and workbench resin. Instead these items will be obtained from certain monsters around the world (There are too many cool monster designs that go mostly ignored), raids / extreme / savage / ultimates , big fishing, and gathering.

I think it would be really cool to not only make Green combat gear as we are now, but to go beyond that and give us the option to make some legendary stuff through a grindy task. I know this may not appeal to many, but I think hardcore crafters may like such an idea.

I agree that crafting needs some form of difficulty but expert crafts are not the way. In my opinion there’s nothing “expert” about having to adapt on the fly, not to mention the absolute reliance on rng skills such as rapid synthesis will make crafting fun and engaging.

As for your idea about expanded rarity, imagine as a brand new crafter you have to make a set of HQ white gear, meld it to get ready to remake the exact same set but at a green rarity now, repeat for blue and purple rarity. It adds a lot of busywork asking for a brand new level 80 crafter to push through all of that if they haven’t been working on it from the beginning of the expansion.

In regards to battle gear using the same system, will it follow the same ilvl structure? Will it get added stats or extra guaranteed materia slots? Will it invalidate raiding, tome, or relic gear. If you can get top tier stats and gear via crafting without raiding or grinding out tomes then what’s the point? If my crafted gear puts me on par with savage raiders the only point to raiding would be achievements or mounts.

As far as consumables go the existence of higher rarity food or potions invalidates any lesser ones. Much like how a grade 3 tincture invalidates a grade 2. It would drive up the prices of grade 3s if there were multiple tiers and for the most part people would either get the top tier one or no potion at all. Honestly if there were multiple tiers of crafted items or gear, on top of having to deal with the rng of expert crafts, I’d probably drop crafting and gathering in its entirety. For me, expert crafts were not fun. If there was a condition forecast showing a few steps in advance I could plan around then I might have found it more enjoyable.

I agree that crafting needs some form of difficulty but expert crafts are not the way. In my opinion there’s nothing “expert” about having to adapt on the fly, not to mention the absolute reliance on rng skills such as rapid synthesis will make crafting fun and engaging.

I have no solution for this, other than a rework to the system to make it more challenging and a "meet stat requirement and copy / paste macro"

As for your idea about expanded rarity, imagine as a brand new crafter you have to make a set of HQ white gear, meld it to get ready to remake the exact same set but at a green rarity now, repeat for blue and purple rarity. It adds a lot of busywork asking for a brand new level 80 crafter to push through all of that if they haven’t been working on it from the beginning of the expansion.

My idea is that the difficulty won't be harder than the white gear, but instead the items will be harder to obtain. Such as items being available from certain dungeon chest like manor varnish and items being available from savage tier fights, that are of course tradeable if you don't like doing that kind of content.

In regards to battle gear using the same system, will it follow the same ilvl structure? Will it get added stats or extra guaranteed materia slots? Will it invalidate raiding, tome, or relic gear. If you can get top tier stats and gear via crafting without raiding or grinding out tomes then what’s the point? If my crafted gear puts me on par with savage raiders the only point to raiding would be achievements or mounts.

Hmmm, maybe these can be the same stats as raiding / relic gear, but have an equivalent of difficulty to obtain the items and to craft it (Crafting difficulty still in progress on how to make it more challenging) or probably make it top tier looking glam that's both class specific for combat classes and crafters / gatherers.

As far as consumables go the existence of higher rarity food or potions invalidates any lesser ones. Much like how a grade 3 tincture invalidates a grade 2. It would drive up the prices of grade 3s if there were multiple tiers and for the most part people would either get the top tier one or no potion at all. Honestly if there were multiple tiers of crafted items or gear, on top of having to deal with the rng of expert crafts, I’d probably drop crafting and gathering in its entirety. For me, expert crafts were not fun. If there was a condition forecast showing a few steps in advance I could plan around then I might have found it more enjoyable.

The difficulty of crafting is still up the in the air, but having higher tiers of good wouldn't completely invalidate the lesser tiers due to supply and demand. Even when there's going to be an abundance of the higher tier food, the lesser tier would just naturally phase out just like older foods of prior patches.

It's kinda hard to make a crafting system which is both realistic and has good replay value, because "meet stat requirements and copy/paste macro" is more or less how crafting in real life works. You acquire the skills and tools, learn the steps for making an item, and then repeat those steps to make more copies.

Tying crafting and combat content together is controversial. Raiders want exclusive rewards, so crafted equipment has to be inferior to the top raid equipment. On the other hand crafters want to feel relevant too, so it can't be too much inferior. And since crafted gear has to be inferior, it makes no sense to put the materials in the top raids. The materials can't be bound so as to require players to complete the raid to obtain the gear, because not all raiders want to craft.

Scrip materials are already intended to make the process of obtaining them more complex. Instead of just going out and gathering the material or killing monsters, you have to gather a bunch of other materials, craft a collectable item, turn it in, and then get the material you need for what you actually want to craft. Custom deliveries are an effective shortcut for those who only occasionally craft things, but if you want to spend most of your time crafting you'll need to grind the normal turn-ins too.

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Originally Posted by Reyna_Balmore

Not only make things a bit more challenging and more time consuming to make with some risk involved, but also massively increasing the potency of the items. Finally giving us the ability to craft Green / Blue / Purple consumables.

No longer will items be obtained from tokens / scrips, such as platinum fish, highland cabbage, and workbench resin. Instead these items will be obtained from certain monsters around the world (There are too many cool monster designs that go mostly ignored), raids / extreme / savage / ultimates , big fishing, and gathering.

I think it would be really cool to not only make Green combat gear as we are now, but to go beyond that and give us the option to make some legendary stuff through a grindy task. I know this may not appeal to many, but I think hardcore crafters may like such an idea.

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So basically you just want to drive up the price of everything. The rarer the ingredients, the higher the price. Not everyone wants to pay 20 million gil for a weapon. Hell, you can get a medium house for that. It it's bad enough that us crafters are being forced to spend millions overmelding just to craft the new stuff. I've already overmelded by 460 set and I can't craft the new equipment until I overmeld again? Only to dump that gear next expansion? No. Crafting doesn't need to get anymore "difficult" than it already is.

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Originally Posted by Nabril

It it's bad enough that us crafters are being forced to spend millions overmelding just to craft the new stuff. I've already overmelded by 460 set and I can't craft the new equipment until I overmeld again?

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False. I've not spent a single gil on materia and I was able to macro-craft the i480 combat gear and hand-craft the new i490 crafter gear when the patch hit. Both give 100% HQ results from NQ raw materials. Once I'm done upgrading my gear to i490 I can probably macro-craft the i490 stuff too. My melds for the i460 items were VIII in the guaranteed slots, then VI+IV+IV for overmelds because those grades give an around 20% chance of success and are much easier to obtain than VII and VIII. In some cases I used even lower grades because of stat limits. For the i430 accessories I had VI in the guarandeed slot and some lower grade materias for overmelds. At the time there wasn't much use for yellow crafter scrips so using them on the IV and VI materias was a cheap way to get those melds. Grades I through III are available from the Ixal.

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Originally Posted by tdb

False. I've not spent a single gil on materia and I was able to macro-craft the i480 combat gear and hand-craft the new i490 crafter gear when the patch hit. Both give 100% HQ results from NQ raw materials. Once I'm done upgrading my gear to i490 I can probably macro-craft the i490 stuff too. My melds for the i460 items were VIII in the guaranteed slots, then VI+IV+IV for overmelds because those grades give an around 20% chance of success and are much easier to obtain than VII and VIII. In some cases I used even lower grades because of stat limits. For the i430 accessories I had VI in the guarandeed slot and some lower grade materias for overmelds. At the time there wasn't much use for yellow crafter scrips so using them on the IV and VI materias was a cheap way to get those melds. Grades I through III are available from the Ixal.

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I would agree with this to a certain degree. I spent maybe 1.2mil on materia and was able to meld up to req. for i480 crafts easily. Now yes I did spend a large chunk to just START crafting i480 Neo-Ishgard, but I made that back in an hour. I think it's all in how you look at it for crafting really. The stat requirements for the i490 was really me adding +65 craftsmanship and +45 control, and +18CP. Then I was off to the races with only 2 pieces of new i490 crafting set being used. Didn't even have to change my macros. Then I made an ENTIRE Gathering left side for myself. And then made Crafting LEFT and RIGHT side for myself from base mats. Only using 1 HQ mat for i490 (levinstrike was easy to get HQ and I could HQ the i480 mats easily)

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Originally Posted by Nabril

So basically you just want to drive up the price of everything. The rarer the ingredients, the higher the price. Not everyone wants to pay 20 million gil for a weapon. Hell, you can get a medium house for that. It it's bad enough that us crafters are being forced to spend millions overmelding just to craft the new stuff. I've already overmelded by 460 set and I can't craft the new equipment until I overmeld again? Only to dump that gear next expansion? No. Crafting doesn't need to get anymore "difficult" than it already is.

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If my idea drives up prices, than yes, why not. The effort put into an item should be worth a nice price should it not?

And "Us" crafters spend millions on overmelds? You're speaking for every crater with that sentence and that's flat out false. I spent only about 1.5m for my melds, because that majority of materia could be earn EXTREMELY fast through some crafting and gathering. My current 490 gear is free just from doing the content. Simple and easy with some effort.

Thanks for your response though

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Originally Posted by Nabril

It it's bad enough that us crafters are being forced to spend millions overmelding just to craft the new stuff.

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I'm max pentamelded on the entire 490 set including 16 tools and it cost me nothing. In fact I had a few hundred materia spare and I've been making profit. I simply planned ahead, kept my retainers on mats duty for Syrups and Tinctures (now Lemonade and Espresso), spent half an hour here and there grinding scrips and it added up to silly amounts over a month or two. Gathering is the same and I have more materia than I'll ever use, I've even posted the method several times. The problem is most crafters nowadays can't be bothered taking time to research or earn anything and stockpiling in advance probably never occurs to them.

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Originally Posted by Nabril

So basically you just want to drive up the price of everything.

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I love that people still bring this up. The easier crafting changes have effectively made the top crafters ten times richer than new and casual crafters. They were sitting on a billion or more gil. That sort of money is ten times harder to earn than in StB or HW with everything being cheap and easily obtained now, thus their wealth is at an untouchable level that the casual player can never obtain.
If crafting was harder at endgame, it opens up the opportunity for even casual players to earn decent gil with some effort. Right now, they can only ever earn peanuts and the rich players are quite happy sitting on their gil mountain. We really don't care about gil that much. We just liked crafting a lot.

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Originally Posted by Nabril

So basically you just want to drive up the price of everything. The rarer the ingredients, the higher the price. Not everyone wants to pay 20 million gil for a weapon. Hell, you can get a medium house for that. It it's bad enough that us crafters are being forced to spend millions overmelding just to craft the new stuff. I've already overmelded by 460 set and I can't craft the new equipment until I overmeld again? Only to dump that gear next expansion? No. Crafting doesn't need to get anymore "difficult" than it already is.

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Implying that crafting in Shadowbringers is anything but piss easy. Nowadays, you can get away with cheap melds and still HQ everything without any HQ mats. It's among the primary reasons prices for endgame crafted gear have plummeted compared to expansions prior. Well, that and the rampant botting that SE largely ignores.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I love that people still bring this up. The easier crafting changes have effectively made the top crafters ten times richer than new and casual crafters. They were sitting on a billion or more gil. That sort of money is ten times harder to earn than in StB or HW with everything being cheap and easily obtained now, thus their wealth is at an untouchable level that the casual player can never obtain.
If crafting was harder at endgame, it opens up the opportunity for even casual players to earn decent gil with some effort. Right now, they can only ever earn peanuts and the rich players are quite happy sitting on their gil mountain. We really don't care about gil that much. We just liked crafting a lot.

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Case in point, I made my first 10M way back in Heavensward selling almost nothing but baby leveling gear and Chocobo Aprons. It helped get my foot in the door to eventually make the Ironworks set. I actually spent a fair bit of time figuring out exactly how to get the stats to make it while spending the least amount of money. All of that is gone nowadays as they all but throw gear at you and crafting has become absurdly easy to the point it'll barely take any effort at all to catch up.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I love that people still bring this up. The easier crafting changes have effectively made the top crafters ten times richer than new and casual crafters. They were sitting on a billion or more gil. That sort of money is ten times harder to earn than in StB or HW with everything being cheap and easily obtained now, thus their wealth is at an untouchable level that the casual player can never obtain.
If crafting was harder at endgame, it opens up the opportunity for even casual players to earn decent gil with some effort. Right now, they can only ever earn peanuts and the rich players are quite happy sitting on their gil mountain. We really don't care about gil that much. We just liked crafting a lot.

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At the same time though the changes drastically decreased the utility of owning that much gil. A billion gil doesn't get you any better gear than 10 million. A full set of HQ neo-ishgardian is what, a million or so gil? Endgame combat materia practically rains from the sky so there's no need to buy any. Houses are more limited by supply, and since there's no reliable way to sell houses, price-jacking can't really happen. Glamours crafted from treasure dungeon materials can be kinda expensive when they're new, but fall to affordable levels as players farm the dungeons. I guess if you're a diehard collector and absolutely must have every rare pet and mount in the game, you could drop some serious gil on buying them. But I don't know if I'd call that sort of player a casual.

Casual players are still in a decent spot to earn $ atm - it's just not in "endgame" gear.
This patch, moreso than any due to the accessibility changes, rly emphasizes collectable grind, DoL empowerment, and selling mid-tier crafts/subcrafts to other crafters rather than trying to sell the completed items. Particularly as there's no immediate need for the gear (unlike raid patches driving demand).

I don't like that they've been so eager to casualize crafting, but obviously there's data driving their reasons for doing so, and Ishgard's been widely adopted / popular so it can't all be bad. But in that spirit, I don't see them adding harder crafts to the master books or main-line crafting system, as expert crafts were specifically to counterbalance that casualization for the crafter mains. It'd be a complete 180 from their current philosophy. But it'd be neat to see grindier long-term achievements and crafts outside of Ishgard too, maybe even some sort of gil sink tied in via npc-sold mats.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Case in point, I made my first 10M way back in Heavensward selling almost nothing but baby leveling gear and Chocobo Aprons. It helped get my foot in the door to eventually make the Ironworks set. I actually spent a fair bit of time figuring out exactly how to get the stats to make it while spending the least amount of money. All of that is gone nowadays as they all but throw gear at you and crafting has become absurdly easy to the point it'll barely take any effort at all to catch up.

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I was in the same boat as you back in Heavensward, but I was NEVER into crafting in ARR. I spent the majority of ARR and Heavensward broke and never really ever getting more the 150k gil at any one time. I didn't make my first 1 million gil until mid heavensward.

I had such a difficult time selling high level crafted gear, and opted to sell mid tier (45-55) gear and sub-required mats to make said gear. I made a killing on just farming sand and making nuggets and mythril ingots. I made my first 1mil gil in the span of 2 hours just selling mats instead of focusing on high level crafted gear that could take days if not weeks to sell while playing the undercut game.

Now there is so much ease in crafting it's almost impossible to fall below 10 mil for me. Well I take the back, I did drop like 6 million when 5.3 dropped. I had to buy my gathering i490 jewelry. (I don't have carpenter maxed). But to gain that back only took about a week of casual gathering and crafting.

I suppose you really have to watch the markets. Supply and Demand is very ebb and flow on my server. And I never craft something unless the supply on the market is dire. Example: Crab Cakes i490 gathering food was 15k/unit. I made 198 no more, and for my own reasons are this.

Diminishing returns.

Don't go crazy and plow through crafting and make like 500 Crab Cakes or Chili Crab food. Your going to be adjusting prices like crazy until you get fed up and your patience runs out. You will spend ALL your time trying to sell those items. I keep it simple and make 99 of something, go to a different item make 99. Now i'm not focusing on 1 item in particular but 10 different items. Don't kill your own market with to much of your OWN supply. Make your 50k and move on.

I really made a killing on chili crab on my server as it was going for 15k/unit and I sold 198 the first 2 days of the 5.3. Nobody was making chili crab and I made around 3mil, and I broke my own rule and made another 198. Another 3mil! I thought I had the market cornered and made another 198....then the market supply exploded. Went from zero to 600 units in the matter of hours. And that made the price implode as people were asking 20k, 30k, 50k/unit. The price spiked and then plummeted to 2k/unit. I held onto mine and decided to wait. Currently it's back up to 8k/unit and I sell 6 at a time every day and it's solid income everyday.

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Originally Posted by tdb

At the same time though the changes drastically decreased the utility of owning that much gil. A billion gil doesn't get you any better gear than 10 million.

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True indeed, though it's always been that way. In the past a billion gil still wouldn't get you more than 100m would. Having silly amounts of money has never really served purpose other than just having it, which is why it's strange some players get so jealous by it and constantly bring it up as some sort of evil.

In that sense, the casual player being able to earn far less is probably not really an issue as long as they can earn enough. What some players actually miss is the challenge, the satisfaction of finally completing that melded endgame set after weeks of theory-craft and grind and having actual difficult and rare items to strive for. That doesn't exist in crafting now, so you're simply done with it a week into the patch.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

In that sense, the casual player being able to earn far less is probably not really an issue as long as they can earn enough. What some players actually miss is the challenge, the satisfaction of finally completing that melded endgame set after weeks of theory-craft and grind and having actual difficult and rare items to strive for. That doesn't exist in crafting now, so you're simply done with it a week into the patch.

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I too missed the challenge of sitting in Urth's font for hours on end to break materia to get that melded end-game set.

This was touched on a thread Camie made months and months ago. A suggestion for changes that would offer challenging recipes that would not be required to succeed but there for the challenge and the bonus of having the items they would provide. Its a shame the thread has long since been burried and forgotten.