Crafting is dead

[Dement]

I'm going to wait to see how it plays out before completely weighing in completely. There are possibilities to make this system work. It seems obvious that they no longer want people to omnicraft the highest items... they want omnicrafters to have all the crafts at 60 and in chimera gear so that they can supply themselves base materials but when it comes to producing the top of the line items, they want people specialized into one-three crafts (specializations as well as gear).

As for people saying you're only providing other crafters and gatherer's, it's been that way for a long long time. Other than pentamelded tank accessories and maybe a piece or 2 on BRD, I can't think of any crafter gear that was part of BiS for DoW/M. When it comes to using the crafter gear as quick stepping stones for people catching up and trying to gear for higher level raids/dungeons, we have plenty of patches that they can reduce the requirements of getting these items. I would be surprised if the purified coke etc. line of items weren't blue scrip items by 3.2 allowing near infinite crafting using them. At the start of ARR, the equivalent line of items (coke, animal fat, potash) were difficult/expensive as well, the only thing they ruined about it was the DoW/M jobs supplying the crafter jobs which helped to stabilize things a bit, but you were still at the whims of battle classes if you were only a crafter.

For the gear itself, it could work if SE intends of this gearset to last us the whole of the expansion. In ARR we had to upgrade our mainhand 4 different times, and every other slot 2 or 3 times, all requiring lengthy item acquisition/grinds. If SE were to tune the recipes of 3.1 under the assumption that people have their main hand and body (5 weeks of red scrips) for their main craft (specializations, remember) and the rest is melded chimera gear it would be fine. Then in 3.2 they could tune it to the assumption that people have their main hand, off hand, body, and pants or main hand, body, pants, gloves and boots... etc. etc.

I'm not saying it is ideal and I'm sure it'll be tweaked/eased every patch, and the grinds are still long but it could work if the DoH/L grinds are all front loaded and this isn't just the first of 4 upgrades that need to be completed prior to the next expansion.

[Kenji1134]

^ That is my biggest concern with going back to class sets but with huge gating and material costs.
If it remains useful for the next say 9 months, and then we simply get a cross-class set for the following 9 months which requires this gear to make, then thats okay...

Honestly if they were to do something "unusual" and give everyone a set of recipes using lightly gated (Blue Scrips) materials which makes an untradeable, unmeldable, full set of crafting gear which requires you to have say 3/4 of the BiS set to meet the stat req's to make it... then sure.

The present concern is twofold:
1. As with the last class set, having to PAINFULLY meld 8 sets is awful, especially now that we're gonna need to use 3 V's and the rest IV's to make then good enough... Thats a huge failure rate and a massive investment... Not to mention the retarded price gate we already have.
2. Having to repeatedly upgrade pieces if not the entire set... Eventually it just doesnt feel like its worth it.

Maybe if we could make our own personal set and avoid melding... Or if the sets came with 5 materia slots on each item to make melding worthwhile without costing 100M in materia.
...Maybe...

[LongsunZhao]

After this crafting has been so heavily butchered along with gathering. I don't feel like there any point in me continuing to play. I play the game for crafting and helping friends. Cant help anyone if I can't craft. Not only that. I only use culinary. Its not like I can cook myself a new pan is it. Down to the fate of the mb. Until crafting for red scripts is changed. I wont be resuming.

[Seyb]

After this crafting has been so heavily butchered along with gathering. I don't feel like there any point in me continuing to play. I play the game for crafting and helping friends. Cant help anyone if I can't craft. Not only that. I only use culinary. Its not like I can cook myself a new pan is it. Down to the fate of the mb. Until crafting for red scripts is changed. I wont be resuming.

Can you please elaborate on this? Why can you not help your friends anymore? 3.05 didn't give you any 2 star recipes, or am I missing something? But even if it did, some people got 2 star stats by overmelding 3.0 gear. There is nothing you need from 3.05. On the other hand, 3.05 gives you a cheap way to upgrade your gear by collecting red scrips and exchanging them for ilvl 180 gear.

[seorin]

I can't speak for anyone else, but my viewpoint is pretty simple:
-Red scrip gear will be needed for later recipes. Pentamelded Patrician's couldn't handle 3 star, and neither will pentamelded 3.0 gear.
-We don't know what those recipes will be. We have to hope that any time/money we spend on red scrip gear will be worth it someday.
-The current trend is for recipes that are less useful and require vastly more material to craft, meaning I have little basis to hope for any future benefit.

I'm staring at a months long grind that costs millions of gil in crafted collectibles each week for a mystery prize that I have every reason to believe won't be worth it. That kills my interest in crafting, ending that part of the game for me. If you have the free time or gil to cap scrip every week without any trouble and you have faith later recipes will be worth it, I see why the grind doesn't bother you. I don't have that faith after riding the train to grindsville over the last two years, after the broken promise to tone back crafting to be more accessible to casual players. I just see a mountain of work that isn't fun to me and isn't likely to be rewarding or otherwise worthwhile to endure. To me, crafting is dead.

[Alexiell]

the worst part of the grind is doing favors, if getting scrips was all it takes id be very pleased >.<

[Sartori]

Yeah I'm not doing anything else for gear progression after I get everything to 60. They are going to have to make some drastic changes to this red scrip nonsense for me to continue. Which is really sad as gathering and crafting is one of the reasons I play this game....

[Hoobala_Boobala]

My personal view is SE took a lazy approach to end game crafting and gathering without actually thinking why gatherers and crafter's play those classes. They've look at end game battle classes where the meta is to max gear to deal more damage and thought "lets make end game gathering and crafting about gearing up, players only play to get better gear don't they?", but IMO this is not want gather's or crafter's want. They want end game to be about playing the marketboard, economics, making gil and helping out friends with their crafting and gathering skills. The scrip system does not allow for any of this as anything from the highest tier of crafting will be so exorbitantly expensive that normal players will not be able to afford it, and even if they could; wouldn't since they can gear up so fast with law, alexander (normal) and esoterics.

IMO the way SE should have done red scrips:
1) Capped red scripts should only have ever been used as an alternative way to get high level gathering and crafting gear in a cheap but slow progression sort of way.
2) Capping access to high level crafting materials behind the same system is the main problem and has killed off end game crafting/gathering - take materials out of the red script system and put them somewhere else either:
a) Blue scrips since these are not capped
b) Level 60 dungeons drops (gets DoW/DoW back into the crafting cycle)
c) Centurio seals/tomestones of law (gets DoW/DoW back into the crafting cycle)
d) Grand company seals
e) New gathering folklore nodes or existing
f) All of the above
If they won't make the above changes then uncapping red scrips will offer a less satisfactory improvement but at least removes the weekly limit on raw materials.
If they won't uncap red scrips then the battle class gear from crafting should be equivalent to Esoterics i200 and upgradable from savage drops in the same way to i210.

Effort =/= reward atm and the frankly the actual "game" of crafting and gathering (at the highest level/endgame) is no longer fun

[LongsunZhao]

It's not that I cannot help friend. I can and do with old crafts. But at the present moment. I've been given 450 red scripts a week to obtain and I can't get any. This is because of a few reasons. Many of the items requested in the food I need to supply are fish based. Other items involve butter made from a new type of milk dropped in Coretheas. But this recipe would take absolute ages to gather for, and then I would need to make around 40 of them because red scripts are so low in how many given. It's not worth it. Not only that, there is only one craft a day, which has for the last two days been the fish based one.

And not only are this red scipts unavailable to me. So are the crafts. When available at HQ. It will cost me far more then I'm worth.

Until this changes, I won't be bothering with crafts, which is awful since it's half of my game.

[Xerius]

They wanted to breathe new life into the economy and accidentally strangled it to death in the process.