DoH levellng with 6.0 changes

Levelling a crafter depends a lot on HQ mats, Ive read the liveletter and I have a friend who is not sure what this means, as they are still working on their crafters.

Will that make crafting HQ items harder?

As we all know, the more hq mats for an item, the better your chance to hq the finished item.

So, anyone got anything on this? Im kinda confused.

While this is of course relevant for Levequests, the bonus exp for the craft itself is not given for making HQ items but for filling up the quality gauge with your actions. By using all HQ materials you are basically lowering the amount of exp you can possibly get for a single craft by half.

If Ishgard restoration turn ins are going to continue then making leveling harder would be welcome. Making high quality/collectability if you meet the minimum, isn't that critical with how much turn in based content there is.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by VelKallor

Levelling a crafter depends a lot on HQ mats, Ive read the liveletter and I have a friend who is not sure what this means, as they are still working on their crafters.

Will that make crafting HQ items harder?

As we all know, the more hq mats for an item, the better your chance to hq the finished item.

So, anyone got anything on this? Im kinda confused.

---

I don't know what they said in the liveletter, but I do know that currently levelling a crafter does not depend at all on HQ mats.

If you have decent gear and know what you are doing you can easily craft most items from NQ materials and get an HQ result.
To earn maximum amount of XP per item crafted you are best off starting with NQ materials since the amount of XP you get depend on how much you increased the quality of the item while crafting, not on what the endresult is.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MistakeNot

To earn maximum amount of XP per item crafted you are best off starting with NQ materials since the amount of XP you get depend on how much you increased the quality of the item while crafting, not on what the endresult is.

---

That's not accurate at all.

You got the same exp regardless as long as the end result was HQ.

Quote:

---

I don't know what they said in the liveletter, but I do know that currently levelling a crafter does not depend at all on HQ mats.

---

There are a few crafter quests that require an hq product to complete.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by VelKallor

There are a few crafter quests that require an hq product to complete.

---

I think the point being that checkpoints in story do not equate to leveling.

You can progress your XP without HQ mats/crafts quite easily. HQ crafting is expedient and necessary for some quests, but not necessary to progress to 80. Once you have overleveled a crafting class past the HQ quest, it's trivial to HQ something of a lower level without HQ mats.

Also.. I expect there will be systems/skills implemented to facilitate crafting HQ at relevant level without HQ mats.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deceptus

That's not accurate at all.

You got the same exp regardless as long as the end result was HQ.

---

No, you don't. You get exp based on how much you improved quality, so getting 100% quality when starting with NQ materials will give more exp than getting 100% quality when starting with HQ materials.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by VelKallor

There are a few crafter quests that require an hq product to complete.

---

There are many crafter quests that require you to craft an HQ product, but they can all be done starting with NQ materials. Easily so if your gear is up to date.
It is only 4-star and Expert recipes that can be troublesome, and those are not required for any of the normal crafter quests.

If I'm understanding what they said correctly, the non-HQ thing applies only to raw ingredients such as ore and skins. You can then craft HQ processed materials to use when crafting a finished item. I've been trying to figure out why they decided to do this since "saving inventory space" doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. I'm willing to bet that they're hoping to combat gathering bots somehow by making this change as we won't "need" to buy huge stacks of HQ raw materials to reliably craft that quest item we need to reliably HQ.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deceptus

That's not accurate at all.

You got the same exp regardless as long as the end result was HQ.

---

I just happened to be crafting on my alt tonight and tried this out. HQ Adamantite Nugget with HQ materials was 149,696 and with NQ materials was 172,727. MistakeNot is right.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tint

While this is of course relevant for Levequests, the bonus exp for the craft itself is not given for making HQ items but for filling up the quality gauge with your actions. By using all HQ materials you are basically lowering the amount of exp you can possibly get for a single craft by half.

---

I guess a close comparision would be collectibles.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Deceptus

That's not accurate at all.

You got the same exp regardless as long as the end result was HQ.

---

This is incorrect.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Illmaeran

If I'm understanding what they said correctly, the non-HQ thing applies only to raw ingredients such as ore and skins. You can then craft HQ processed materials to use when crafting a finished item. I've been trying to figure out why they decided to do this since "saving inventory space" doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. I'm willing to bet that they're hoping to combat gathering bots somehow by making this change as we won't "need" to buy huge stacks of HQ raw materials to reliably craft that quest item we need to reliably HQ.

---

Expanded inventory is a pretty common request. At the very least, it does work towards that goal by reducing the number of different items someone may have to carry around.

There's also probably some measure of time saving on the development end to not have to create a HQ version of every material they add in a patch or expansion. Even if it only takes a minute of time for a developer to add a HQ item, that could shave off hours of work better applied elsewhere.

I can completely see people wanting expanded inventory in general; it's a pretty clunky system given all of the items we often carry around. I've had problems myself at times when trying to hold all of the materials needed to make the daily GC turn ins if I haven't been good about emptying out my personal inventory. The sheer number of materials required to make some individual products can be a bit much.

That being said, I think there's more to this that we don't know about. The Japanese are very good at speaking obliquely or making "polite fictions" as my Japanese wife likes to say, when trying to express something that may upset another. It's not uncommon for them to give what we in the West would call a "lame excuse" as a means of saying No rather than being direct and possibly upsetting the person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if "saving inventory space" was one such polite fiction to address an issue best left not directly spoken to.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Illmaeran

I can completely see people wanting expanded inventory in general; it's a pretty clunky system given all of the items we often carry around. I've had problems myself at times when trying to hold all of the materials needed to make the daily GC turn ins if I haven't been good about emptying out my personal inventory. The sheer number of materials required to make some individual products can be a bit much.

That being said, I think there's more to this that we don't know about. The Japanese are very good at speaking obliquely or making "polite fictions" as my Japanese wife likes to say, when trying to express something that may upset another. It's not uncommon for them to give what we in the West would call a "lame excuse" as a means of saying No rather than being direct and possibly upsetting the person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if "saving inventory space" was one such polite fiction to address an issue best left not directly spoken to.

---

More than likely, the reason isn't particularly interesting unless you're a programmer. Considering they lead the LL with saying they weren't covering changes to DoH/DoL, but then they have this change to how both gathering and crafting will work going forward, albeit minor, tells me that the removal of HQ materials is a side affect of the issue, not the main goal.

My guess is there's some technical issue that cropped up due to several years of adding more and more items to the game, and cutting roughly half of that bloat would help. And seeing as how there's conflicting opinions on the importance of HQ materials anyway, they probably looked at the data and concluded that cutting them would work best.

Their explanation on them changing the damage formulae and seemingly lowering potencies for melee skills was important, but probably had more than a few people zoning out. Whatever this reason could be is probably not as important in the long term, so they may have decided to skip that and focus on what will affect the players.

That makes sense and isn't something that came to mind. I'm a scientist, not a programmer. :).

My guess is that the NQ and HQ items were previously being treated as separate items in the various tables, instead of HQ being an attribute of the item on the same table. If they're trying to cut down the total number of items, then removing base HQ raw materials is one way to do that. Hypothetically, those kind of data tables are infinite, but if you're trying to optimize, you still want to keep the number of lines the system has to search to a minimum, and removing HQ raw mats would instantly halve it.

They're not being removed from the database altogether but they're being removed from the marketboard and you'll have to manually downgrade items before you can sell them as NQ.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Illmaeran

I'm willing to bet that they're hoping to combat gathering bots somehow by making this change as we won't "need" to buy huge stacks of HQ raw materials to reliably craft that quest item we need to reliably HQ.

---

I doubt it. The bots are fine selling NQ.

Most likely this change is to combat inventory bloat. With the amount of crafting materials in the game and hundreds more coming in Endwalker, we just don't have room anymore for doubling the number further with the HQ/NQ divide.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Iscah

They're not being removed from the database altogether but they're being removed from the marketboard and you'll have to manually downgrade items before you can sell them as NQ.

---

I would imagine this is step one of a multi-step process, similar to how they phase out tomestones. First they remove the ability to get more, but allow players to trade in any HQ items they still have. A future patch will probably remove them from the game entirely.

I would imagine the difficulty of crafting HQ items is adjusted accordingly with the removal of HQ raw materials.

But the removed HQ items are things you would get from gathering as the DoL jobs, from mob drops, or bought from merchants.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by VelKallor

Levelling a crafter depends a lot on HQ mats, Ive read the liveletter and I have a friend who is not sure what this means, as they are still working on their crafters.

Will that make crafting HQ items harder?

As we all know, the more hq mats for an item, the better your chance to hq the finished item.

So, anyone got anything on this? Im kinda confused.

---

Leveling a crafter does not depend on HQ mats. I don't know where you got this idea.

Things will be fine without HQ mats. Everyone will still be able to level. They'll just have to work a little harder to get HQ.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

I would imagine the difficulty of crafting HQ items is adjusted accordingly with the removal of HQ raw materials.

But the removed HQ items are things you would get from gathering as the DoL jobs, from mob drops, or bought from merchants.

---

Nothing needs to be adjusted. Final products don't need to be HQ to reward XP.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jojoya

Nothing needs to be adjusted. Final products don't need to be HQ to reward XP.

---

But didn't get gatherers more exp for gathering HQ items? o.ô;

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tint

While this is of course relevant for Levequests, the bonus exp for the craft itself is not given for making HQ items but for filling up the quality gauge with your actions. By using all HQ materials you are basically lowering the amount of exp you can possibly get for a single craft by half.

---

It's not really relevant for Levequests. DoH doesn't "turn in" HQ items (save fisher). Their leves are self contained events.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tint

But didn't get gatherers more exp for gathering HQ items? o.ô;

---

XP rewards for gathering could be adjusted but that's not necessary either. Leveling gathering is extremely fast.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jojoya

XP rewards for gathering could be adjusted but that's not necessary either. Leveling gathering is extremely fast.

---

Except FSH when you stuck in ARR at level 60+ and them fishes on MB too expensive (to buy and submit to GC daily) :D

Taking into account the past expansion (I started in 5.0) I've seen that the developers not only thoroughly test the new content and changes internally, but also take into account player feedback.

I have faith that the removal of HQ gathered items will not make getting a HQ item any more difficult than it already is, especially considering that after a certain point it is beyond easy to HQ a crafted item (not material) with all NQ materials, with a sudden, rather nasty gap when crossing into HW crafting.