Armorsmithing is useless. Coke is WAY too expensive / Needed WAY too much @ lvl 50

[Bridgeburner]

It's too expensive today. Prices on coke will come down as more people get into endgame farming, particularly if they have to sell it to raise money for their Tier 3 materia.

Give the economy a bit of a chance. 3 weeks isn't much burn-in time.

[Mistz]

I've made like 10 pieces of Vanya/Gryphonskin/Heavy Darksteel gear. 100% HQ'd every single one of them.

Really? 10 pieces HQ on all, whats your Craftmanship & Control?
Sounds very unlikely you would allready have gathered more then 100 items that req, 125 tomes pr item, unless you bought them, wich lead to my next question, what stuff are you makeing to obtain 100x 30~50k items lol.
besides the other mats where i assume u had to get the HQ versions of them, so in other words u manage to farm around 10million gil since release must hand it to you, thats and accomplishment right there.

[des]

It was pretty easy to make millions at the beginning of ARR, now the market has been crushed by people selling HQ gear for less than what it's worth. And since people only need gear once the market isn't all that huge anyway.

As for crafting the i70 stuff, Mish crafted items for people in the LS/FC as well. And reaching 100% is not that hard when you have the control/craftmanship needed for the ** recipes.

[Mishaela]

Really? 10 pieces HQ on all, whats your Craftmanship & Control?
Sounds very unlikely you would allready have gathered more then 100 items that req, 125 tomes pr item, unless you bought them, wich lead to my next question, what stuff are you makeing to obtain 100x 30~50k items lol.
besides the other mats where i assume u had to get the HQ versions of them, so in other words u manage to farm around 10million gil since release must hand it to you, thats and accomplishment right there.

Oh, no, I haven't gathered that many tomestones lol... I didn't make them all for myself. As des noted, most of them have been for friends in my FC. By the end of headstart weekend, des and I and a few other people in my FC had made a group effort to get crafting and gathering AF assemebled quickly. des farmed lots of hippogryph skins for us, some others farmed lots of crawler cocoons and ore, and I seriously spent probably 20 hours just crafting DoH/DoL gear for us that weekend. We were definitely ahead of the curve on DoH/DoL on our server.

As for the other mats that you assume were HQ, they typically weren't. I needed HQ mats to work with at the very start on some of my crafting AF but once I HQ'd my Weaver AF (all on first try, thank you based tri-melded Dodore Doublet) it was smooth sailing from there to make my LTW AF after that, then BSM so I could HQ a good variety of Militia tools easily. Full HQ mats are not needed to HQ the i70 ** recipes--that said, since I usually work my way up on the mats (like, I take NQ ore, make nuggets, nuggets into rivets, or whatever), by the time I make the final product some/most of the mats are HQ, but I don't buy HQ mats. I can just buy or gather NQ turn them into HQ and use or sell them for great ROI. I made a Vanya hat just last night for a SCH friend and I started with all NQ mats. 100% HQ on the hat with durability to spare.

My weaver is my best geared DoH right now by a little bit. I don't remember my Control stat but my Craftsmanship is at 359 unbuffed and Control is like... 340ish I wanna say. My BSM/GSM/ARM/LTW/CRP are all pretty close to that (at least double-melded HQ AF, tri- or quad-melded accessories, HQ militia tools) with ALC on their tail. I just got CUL to 50 a couple days ago so it's still at a lowly 333/324 craft/control with no AF melds.

And sorry to disappoint but I didn't make 10mil. I was too busy helping FC members out to be playing the markets as hard as I could have, but I still did have time to make a few mil. Demand on legacy server for lots of high-end gear has dropped a lot now that people have their DoH/DoL geared up. As des mentioned HQ is being sold for a lot less than it "should" be but that's partly because there are enough people like he and I that can HQ with NQ that those people can afford to undercut pretty far and still make a profit. I make better money selling individual HQ darksteel/rose gold nuggets, twinthread, spruce lumber, and hippogryph leather now than I do selling most pieces of equipment. I certainly don't need them for anything :P

Also, for what it's worth, I giggled at the part where you said tomestone crafting materials are 30-50k. I haven't checked this week, but they were like 100k minimum last week. Around launch, 150k+ each. Those items could be purchased for 50k gil from an NPC in 1.x (or 100k at the "wrong" time of the week), but that's only 5k/10k in ARR money, remember. If I had stocked up on more of those in 1.x I'd be rolling in dough, but alas, I had only a handful of coke brought over.

[Gamemako]

HQ darksteel armor is equivalent to Darklight armor in def/mdef and pretty equivalent in stats, but has the advantage that it can have stats added with melds.

So much this. The point is, HQ Darksteel costs INSANE amounts of effort to make and has an itty-bitty advantage over Darklight. To get there, you'll burn 3x the dungeon tokens and 30 additional pieces of equipment combined with a dozen hours of spiritbond farming to get the materia. And that's not including all the effort the crafter went to in order to be able to make the stuff.

In addition, AF gear is so good that while you could make HQ Militia for the period between AF and Darklight, it's pretty pointless -- you get ~10 points of def/mdef and a few mostly-inconsequential stat boosts. But hey, at least it's not too bad to HQ once you get the gear. Pop some Mahi-Mahi or HQ Dagger and hammer away.

Quite frankly, the only solution here is to buff both one-star and two-star greens.

[pilot]

Lets just pretend for a moment that we are all ok with 9 crafting materials worth of tomestones per item.

The bigger problem to me is the fact that some gear requires 18 or even 27 tomestone materials. For some of the accessories it almost feels like someone looked at a lower level recipe formula and blindly applied it to this two star stuff. A lv 49 mnd neck requires 1 turquoise since you only have one neck and lv 49 mnd wrists require two turquoise because you have 2 wrists. Meanwhile, vanya pants take 2 vanya silk and one hard leather. 27 tomestone materials because "pants take 2 cloth and one leather" in general? This can't be intended. This feels like as much of an oversight as the required lv 40 rivets for your lv 12 hatchet way back in early 1.0.

[oceanlord]

i should never level an armorer knowing coke is too overpriced and small chance to craft hq if you only have 1 DoH...

[Ksenia]

Avoid Weaver as well. It's the same thing with Potash and Vanya Silk.

I'm pretty sure it's working as intended. I just haven't quite figured out what they intended to do, considering the alternatives to crafted gear directions the game has in it.

[Ahlen]

It was pretty easy to make millions at the beginning of ARR, now the market has been crushed by people selling HQ gear for less than what it's worth. And since people only need gear once the market isn't all that huge anyway.

As for crafting the i70 stuff, Mish crafted items for people in the LS/FC as well. And reaching 100% is not that hard when you have the control/craftmanship needed for the ** recipes.

Nah, the market has been crushed by supply, and people realizing that making gil from NPC sources is very hard to do.

[Rainsford]

I know it's something we'll never know, but the decision making process to make this change would be incredibly interesting to me. Did no one on the development team notice how silly their token-trade in system was?