Crafter / Gatherer Stat Caps are Extreme

[Estellios]

Don't need T4 materia to reach these stats at all. All my DoH and DoL that have these tools are able to reach these stats without them. The lowest meld chance you will be facing will be 19%.

Gathering is really easy to get the stats for through food and you technically only need to focus on melding for the gathering stat in order to be able to gather at the nodes, though getting HQ items is a different story. Crafter stats are really difficult mostly because you really want to be able to use +CP food to have a not-entirely-luck-based chance to craft 3-star items.

Get a bunch of L45-ish gear, meld some T1 materia on it, then go spiritbonding. Sell whatever you don't need and use that money to buy what you need, do the math and use your guaranteed meld slots on more expensive materia. You might have to start your melds all over on all new pieces of gear for better success rates on more important stats which isn't a big deal at all since any crafter worth their salt can hq them with no problems.

[SarcasmMisser]

It's funny because prior to 2.2 a common complaint from crafters was that there was nothing hard to make, which flattened the market. Now they made 3 star difficult with decent barriers of entry and some complain that it is too hard.

Reminds me of fleece, people complained that it was hard to farm so they made it easier and therefore worthless to farm. No foresight. Everyone I know who maxed out their melds easily made the money back.

Being too hard > being too easy

[Welsper59]

It's funny because prior to 2.2 a common complaint from crafters was that there was nothing hard to make, which flattened the market. Now they made 3 star difficult with decent barriers of entry and some complain that it is too hard.

Reminds me of fleece, people complained that it was hard to farm so they made it easier and therefore worthless to farm. No foresight. Everyone I know who maxed out their melds easily made the money back.

Being too hard > being too easy

The fleece thing was similar to the diremite webs issue. It was a huge RMT target (or for botting in general). It needed to be resolved, one way or another.

[SarcasmMisser]

It doesn't stop people botting it, it just gives honest farmers no incentive to farm as the bots can now multibox more to flood the market with cheap stacks. If you intentionally crash markets to try and drive botters out they will be the last to stop farming.

[Welsper59]

It doesn't stop people botting it, it just gives honest farmers no incentive to farm as the bots can now multibox more to flood the market with cheap stacks. If you intentionally crash markets to try and drive botters out they will be the last to stop farming.

Nothing will stop people from botting, that's essentially an accepted reality. No matter what, someone will bot something. If there's a will, there's a way... and so on with my cliche old-timer sayings. It did however provide what was basically a high demand (and somewhat necessary) material for crafters to level with and use for their synths after the fact. Having one or more botters monopolize the market because of being able to hit one of only a few areas where the target spawns does far greater harm to legit players than having a larger supply of target spawns. The legit players do not only involve non-botting farmers, it also includes those who need the drop.