Demimateria

[Kenji1134]

You also have the i180 artisan tools... likely from Rowena's Tokens. No meld slots, but from what Ive seen on Lodestone they are SIGNIFICANTLY better in terms of Crafts/Control.

Same for armors. The 180 armor has 30 Crafts and 13 Control more than the NQ crafted. So maybe fully melded HQ crafted "may" be slightly better. Most likely we'll be able to trade some Crafts/Control for CP by using the HQ Melded 170... but cmon, who in their right mind will LOWER their Crafts/Control for a bit of CP AND PAY OUT THE ASS FOR IT VIA MELDING!

So all in all SE screwed the pooch on crafting.
What we have here is the inventory congestion and complication of 2.0 AF crafter gear, PLUS the what was it 2.3? demimateria mess.
And if reports are to be believed, we now have to go back to grinding the old tokens to get things like MC's... Granting this is MUCH easier now but still.
Couple that with inflated materia prices and the fact that higher meld caps now require more expensive materia with a lower melding success rate, and anyone who's lived through this before can foresee the ridiculously high prices crafters will to charge to recoup their expenses.

But thats OKAY! Because we can Red Scrip gear which is (mostly likely) as good as OR BETTER than HQ AF2 crafter gear without blowing millions on exploding materia!
But wait! There's more! All crafted combat gear maxes at 180, which you can buy by grinding more Law! Alex Normal is 190, and likely equal to or better than pentamelded 180, and infinitely cheaper! Then comes Eso gear which is 200 and simply blows any crafted gear out of the park!

So... we're pretty much left with Cul (who it seems received 0 new recipes) making food, and Alc (who got no new potions) making either Draconic Pots... one at a time... or going back to X-pots such that people can make the dps checks in Alex Savage.
I understand that you need 6800-6900 dps to barely beat Faust, so food and pots will likely be required until people gear up for 2-4 weeks.

And there we go, the current state of crafting. Abso-fuckin-lutely useless. GG SE, GG.