As LVL 50 in all DOH/DOL - stop now it's a waste of time

[Zumi]

I basically have all the crafts to cap except 2 but both are close to cap. If you think crafting doesn't make money it does. I made around 5m so far selling base relic weapons. If there was no grind to getting mats to make lv70 crafted gear then people would skip a major part of the gear process, and not run dungeons if it can be just bought off the AH.

I still believe crafting is in a good place making entry level gear to get started with dungeons/raids.

[Reika]

And in ffxiv's case, your wrong about where craftings place should be. Putting it anywhere other than at end game strength will invalidate even having them as leveled up classes. They can just drop it all and adopt wows 1 click crafting if they arent going to make it truely viable for anything.

[Yohek]

How can you be 50 in all the DOH and DOL in only one month ? I'm leveling all my DOH/DOL, starting one week ago, 5 to 7 hour a day, and i'm around level 15 in each !
That's so much time !

[Caraway]

I think the casual friendly nature of this game is the biggest reason that crafting is broken. You level so quickly in this game that spending gil on an HQ piece is pointless because that piece will get replaced by a quest reward within the next 5-10 levels which you can achieve in a matter of hours. Furthermore, Level Sync allows players to play any content below their level without having to re-gear to avoid running "naked". Finally, most of the content that I've seen thus far isn't all that difficult unless you are severely undergeared. As such, there really is no need to buy any of your gear from 1-50 and therefore crafted gears take a large hit from lack of demand. Unfortunately, I don't believe it is possible to fix this issue without a change in direction from the developers.

Crafting wouldn't be such a waste if it had a purpose beyond making materials for other crafters to use to level crafting.

i.e. gear and weapons and tools. If gear/weapons/tools weren't handed out so bloody easily on every single damned quest, for every class, then we may have something that people desired.

Perfect example: I came back with my ALC already nearly 50. I do all the class quests and get handed every single tool/offhand i needed through some fairly easy class quests. I secured my Luminary alembic in 1.0 only to realise i get a bloody Blue one which matches it stat-for-stat at level 50 ALC quest (which took me 5 minutes). So any armourers who, say wanted to make Alembics for ALCs, have absolutely no use in making Alembics.

This can be applied to every single craft which makes any tool/offhand. A similar thing is applied to every single craft which makes gear/weapons.

The only market is for HQ versions, but then people don't want to pay for them, because you can outlevel them so fast.

Add to that the nerfed as hell materia, so people are even reluctant to soulbind/convert gear for currently mainly useless materia.

In short: There is no incentive to recycle gear, make gear, or buy/sell gear!

What if...rather than having the actual gear drop in end-game, the items to make that gear dropped instead - which then would require hiring a crafter to complete.

The above quoted items contain a lot of truth and I'd like to expand on it, coming from a couple games where crafting did matter and was its own separate form of advancement.

One of the major issues I find with crafting right now is the fact that the fruits of our labours are given for completing quests. And ultimately this issue lies with the tiering of gear.

Crafters can make the lowest tier of gear at each level by default. If they try hard or over level it they can make something better than that. They cannot make green or pink until quite some time later so this is pointless for those leveling up.

I feel it is wrong for quests to be handing out the same gear that a crafter can make. Gear provided by quests should be the lowest common denominator. Just enough to get you by. If you want to go through more expediantly and have the cash flow, you can go to a crafter who can consistently (that's the key word there, consistently) make you something better for your level.

As crafters are encouraged to make at least one of every item they can make for the XP bonus, that would ensure that the base level equipment they can make (which should be a slight increase over the quested gear) is available at a reasonable price to adventurers. Crafters could then also provide HQ gear of the same level, that would be equivilent to the next tier's quested items and so on and so on.

As it stands now, even HQ items will soon be replaced by the trash you get from going through quest lines. They'll hold you for a couple of levels (maybe one more if melded) but they'll soon be replaced by quest trash.

And that's really discouraging to the crafter's. I suspect a lot of crafters craft because they want to make stuff people want to use. They want to provide something to people that makes them go "Wow that's cool!" The money's nice, for sure, but that generally gets rapidly spent crafting more.

I see this "we give you crafted gear as quest rewards for facerollingly easy content" to be insulting to crafters and a good way to discourage them from providing a service to the community.

As for the end-game stuff... I personally think a crafter should be the one to make the absolute best of any gear available... Provided some of the materials are drops from the hardest zones.

If you want BiS raid gear, it should require raid drops worked on by a crafter to make something spectacular.

There have been games to do this. Two Sony games, EQ2 and Vanguard, both had high level content providing molds and items that needed to be worked by a high level crafter to give spectacular equipment.

And if you're concerned about people buying their way to the best stuff without having to earn it, then make the dropped materials bind on pick-up and make a commission crafting system similar to how we have Request Meld.

This makes everyone happy and keeps everyone involved. Ya know, community.

[Asiaine]

A lot of us are 'Legacy', which means our characters persist from 1.0 (which has been around for years). So we have a big head start :P (Day 0 I had 3 level 50 crafting jobs for example).

[Evumeimei]

My Solution to the crafting jobs not having things to craft would be to make dungeon drops be up-gradable to +1 or +2 versions by CRAFTERS! Also people are hunting down shiny dungeon drops right now, but soon many people will realize that you can get extremely good gear ( on par almost certainly better ) if you risk the quad-melds.

I support the idea of making dungeon drops up-gradable by crafters. That would be a pretty simple way to have crafters more involved with making gear that people want. But, considering that most dungeon pieces are unsellable (and untradable?), I'm not sure how this would work exactly. Perhaps once a crafter upgrades a piece of armor (that they got as a dungeon drop) to +1, it becomes like all other crafted pieces (a.k.a sellable on the AH, etc...)?

Edit: Or have specific items drop from dungeon bosses or something that are required for specially crafted gear? And to get said gear you'd either have to ask someone else, buy it from the AH, or level the crafting class yourself. This would potentially make some dungeons farmed, though, which could be bad in some ways (I'm thinking of what I've heard about AK and other higher level dungeons). I feel like the gear would have to be decently better than some of the other dungeons drops, or it'd just end up like the whole Darklight vs. crafted iLvl 70 gear debate (i.e.: hard to craft gear for "little merit" [I know Darklight isn't a dungeon drop :P]).

I don't know, just throwing ideas around.

Have it work like melds; you can request a crafter to upgrade an item you can't give him just like you can request a meld for an item you can't give him. BTW, why can't you do that for repairs?

That's a pretty good idea. I haven't really gotten to the point where I need to request for a materia meld, so I'm not sure how those deals work. But, if that system is currently working well, then I could see a similar system working for the crafting of +1 gear.

[Conradus]

I support the idea of making dungeon drops up-gradable by crafters. That would be a pretty simple way to have crafters more involved with making gear that people want. But, considering that most dungeon pieces are unsellable (and untradable?), I'm not sure how this would work exactly. Perhaps once a crafter upgrades a piece of armor (that they got as a dungeon drop) to +1, it becomes like all other crafted pieces (a.k.a sellable on the AH, etc...)?

Have it work like melds; you can request a crafter to upgrade an item you can't give him just like you can request a meld for an item you can't give him. BTW, why can't you do that for repairs?

[Laryndra]

How can you be 50 in all the DOH and DOL in only one month ? I'm leveling all my DOH/DOL, starting one week ago, 5 to 7 hour a day, and i'm around level 15 in each !
That's so much time !

im level 50 all crafts on siren (Non legacy) with lvl 50 miner.. Not hard lol. I can level a doH job from 1-50 in a day.

[Reika]

You have a crafter that can upgrade equipment gotten from dungeons, but that like having materials to craft gear simply drop from the dungeons, also requires running of dungeons. They could just do both.

Also yea, it would be bad for no trade things to be used in crafts, or for the mats that drop from dungeons (or probably obtained from tokens, since they did the token thing in the first place to avoid RNG with drops), or even the finished items to be tradable, because despite all the cowardly fear of gil sellers and RMT, by some players and factually the whole SE corperation, there should be a market for things crafters make. Some people will just craft for themselves, but they should still be sellable. They just need to fix the whole spiritbonding thing with high ilvl gear. It should be spiritbonding against any monster that could give you exp, not just inside the coils or upcoming crystal towers.

[Conradus]

That's a pretty good idea. I haven't really gotten to the point where I need to request for a materia meld, so I'm not sure how those deals work. But, if that system is currently working well, then I could see a similar system working for the crafting of +1 gear.

Once you go to Mutamix and unlock materia in general, you get an entry on the context menu for other PCs: "Request Meld". You'll need the equipment, materia and catalyst on your person (the equipment can be equipped). I actually haven't done it myself, but I would assume that you simply select the materials involved, the other player must agree (or abort the whole thing by not agreeing), and then the meld happens.