whats the point of crafting...

[Fantasy9]

If the same items were made craftable, some players might find it easier to save up their gil, robbing them of this motivation to undertake the game’s toughest battles.
As of Version 2.0-2.1, this position is held by the Allagan gear that may be won by completing the Binding Coil of Bahamut. With only the most skilled of adventurers able to complete this challenge, many others must settle for obtaining high-item-level gear via tomestones while biding their time, waiting for the difficulty of this battle to be eased.
Buy high-item-level gear at excessive prices to drive up value (market manipulation)
More persistently solicit RMT gil purchases from players (increased spamming)
This would, in turn, lead to more players choosing to purchase gil, creating a vicious cycle that would feed further RMT abuse.

Because of this exactly is why the content we have now is getting boring.Players are finding that in order to get this said crafted gear have to spend upwards of 2mil gil for the whole HQ set otherwise the stats just don't match that of the Darklight. And that isn't with the materia that costs 40k+ each. This is because you have to use items that are only obtainable from spending 125 Tomestones of Philosophy a piece. By the time you get enough of the items you could easily have 2 or more of the Darklight gear.

About players not having motivation to tackle the toughest battles isn't about gear. Well sort of but mostly about difficulty causing groups to take only players that have exp in the dungeon which essentially means "Have you beaten it?". I understand that it is tough for a reason but the difficulty is too high because it was meant to be run with gear from Crystal Tower, not Darklight or crafted ILvl 70 equivalent. Myself and players like me have opted to capping every week versus doing coil because it is faster to cap than to find a group that will take inexperienced players.

[Encarion]

While I see what you are saying, I believe you could solve the problem by adding for example in dungeons mining spots.
These mining spots would have rare material that is used to make gear better or equal to allagan.
Also you could make it unsellable and untradeable, So people would be forced to use the dungeons to obtain said item(material).

[Zieg]

Why not introduce Abjurations like what they had in XI? You needed a crafter to make the Cursed Body / +1 and the Abjuration dropped off a boss and or bought from myth tomes... Voila Crafting and Raiding brought together in harmony. Would def give the FC crafters who aren't in a core raid group a chance to help the FC other than HEY GUYS I can make your NEXT 50's Relic Precursor!!!!

[Kincard]

I'm sure other people have already said these but I'm feeling lazy to read right now:
1. Having multiple ways for us to obtain gear is not a bad thing, does anybody seriously care that much if someone "buys" their way into endgame? Even if you try to restrict it in various ways people will still do it in ways like selling Titan runs. Restricting gameplay because of this accomplishes absolutely nothing.
2. RMT will always be around regardless of what you do and you'll just have to accept it's an eternal cat-and-mouse game. It's also completely self-defeating to design your game obtusely specifically to inconvenience RMTs because it will almost always inconvenience legitimate players even more as well as defeat the whole purpose of fighting RMT in the first place ("RMT ruin the game, let's stop that by changing our design philosophy in a way that makes the game less fun!" What?)
3. XIV's crafting is one of the most unique things it has to offer when compared to other MMOs and I'm very disappointed that the dev team has decided to continue with the philosophy of making it largely useless other than for its own sake (crafting crafting gear to help others cap crafting so they can craft crafting gear for other crafters to cap their crafting) or for spending more points to create gear that's barely any better than you can just buy with those same points. In case any of you haven't kept up with it, base stats are generally ~6x what your secondary stats are worth so no amount of overmelding crit rate and determination is going to make your gryphonskins better than your myth or allegan pieces except in rare cases where they decided to saturate the higher ilevel with nothing but garbage stats like skill speed, even in these cases it was probably accidental and it really has nothing to do with why the design philosophy itself is flawed.

[Allyrion]

It's actually funny how crafters are considered "classes" and require gear, materia and/or buff food, but produce only mediocre gear and consumables and have no place in endgame, just like in every other plain cloned MMO out there. Why bother then, just make crafting (and gathering, while you're at it) a skill you learn as a DoW/DoM and be done with it. No point in calling something a class if it doesn't serve any purpose.

But crafters can make the best crafting/gathering gear.
I agree it should interact with DoW/DoM more, but the fact that crafters mostly interact with other crafters/gathers lends itself to crafting/gathering being it's own thing outside of the battle classes.
So that doesn't really follow.


You're saying it doesn't deserve to be its own class because it's not serving the battle classes well yet finds its own niche within itself.
Um...what?

That said, I hope it does start being more useful for battle classes. Just saying, as it is...it really is its own thing. Not just a means to an end for the battle classes.

What could be great here is if, instead, a more thorough commission system could be implemented in game.

The idea is, one player provides the components and a possible fee or item trade, allowing the crafter to craft the item and receive the fee/item(s) upon success, while allowing the result to go to the component provider. (Failure should be tied to the normal result.) Given how people are, you would probably need to put in separate fee/reward slots for normal and High Quality results. I don't know how complicated that would be to implement, but you've already got something VERY similar with the "Request Meld" option people have. This completely skirts around the problem of RMT farming for components if both key components and the end result are untradeable. Of course, it does absolutely nothing for people selling runs, but that seems to be something that's considered an unavoidable evil so far.

Commissions would be a great addition.
GW2 had a market board where you could sell things at your own price or you look at requests where people say they'll pay a certain amount for X items.
Doing it even further to be like request meld would be great, but I would like something on a larger scale.

Maybe something like a job board where you can request items. If you take up the job, you might be able to trade it through a system similar to the request meld.
I don't know how hard it would be either, but hopefully you won't need to be standing next to the person for each job you take up. Though it'd be nice if there was some interaction between the client and crafter.

I think that's a great direction since crafting high end gear is pretty niche, might as well make it snazzy and streamlined or people just will continue not to bother.

[Mediave]

While I can totally understand the reason for not allowing us to craft gear equivalent to the highest tier gear available, I do have some concerns here.

Materia - Is all but useless leveling up, as the main scenario is -very- easy and all content there in can be completed with minimal difficulty even in gear several levels below it. This needs to come into play much more in end game, allowing player to better spec their characters where they otherwise cannot.

Crafted iLvl 70 gear - The cost to craft this also seems disproportionately large (especially in the case of the DRG set, for instance, which requires far more of the tome materials than the other sets do). If you compare how much philosophy it takes to craft a piece of ilvl 70 gear, compared to how many pieces of DL you could obtain with those tomes, it seems hardly fair, especially since ilvl 70 is not the best in the game.

[Fantasy9]

While I can totally understand the reason for not allowing us to craft gear equivalent to the highest tier gear available, I do have some concerns here.

Materia - Is all but useless leveling up, as the main scenario is -very- easy and all content there in can be completed with minimal difficulty even in gear several levels below it. This needs to come into play much more in end game, allowing player to better spec their characters where they otherwise cannot.

Crafted iLvl 70 gear - The cost to craft this also seems disproportionately large (especially in the case of the DRG set, for instance, which requires far more of the tome materials than the other sets do). If you compare how much philosophy it takes to craft a piece of ilvl 70 gear, compared to how many pieces of DL you could obtain with those tomes, it seems hardly fair, especially since ilvl 70 is not the best in the game.

Exactly This^^

[juniglee]

While I see what you are saying, I believe you could solve the problem by adding for example in dungeons mining spots.
These mining spots would have rare material that is used to make gear better or equal to allagan.
Also you could make it unsellable and untradeable, So people would be forced to use the dungeons to obtain said item(material).

I like this idea, but as it stands, you can't change classes while in duty...

They should also make it spawn randomly, so that it's not a 100% chance for the node to spawn when you go in the dungeon - something like unspoiled nodes, except less predictable. This should create a good supply for them, and an income source for gatherers who are not up to par with crafting. Since I hit lv50 Miner last week, I am quite appalled to see that Astral Rock, Gold Sand and Volcanic Rock Salt, 3 items which you can only gather via unspoiled nodes as a Lv50 Miner, are only worth 35g, 30g or 40g a piece on my server.

[Felis]

Heh yes, that saddened me, too. If it were up to me, one could start the game as any class they wanted and not be gated out of the creation classes. Why not be able to start as a crafter who gets (reluctantly) sucked into fighting? Why not have a way to experience the main story as a pure crafter/gatherer?

But those are issues for a different thread .

You mean like in 1.0, where you could choose between killing the enemy or discuss with him (parley mini-game)?

Yoshida, can you bring crafted ilevel 80 gear ingame, that would be with materia like ilevel 85 gear? It would be still weaker than ilevel90 gear

[Supersun]

This doesn't seem that difficult of an issue to fix.

Just make iLVL 90 Dungeon gear the "Jobs" of armor while making the Crafted gear the "Classes" of armor.