Specialist Recipees: Why do the developers keep listening to bad requests?

[Ranzan]

Alts are always only optional and not neccessary.
Just cap your red scripts every week

Yet said system rewards alts while under minds the armory system. And 2 weeks is a long time to switch specializations and your also assuming said person is done using red scripts to gear their crafts.

[Kenji1134]

All in all it seems like meaningful crafting is being phased out.

The single best example is really the combination of the post 50 skills, specialist skills, and the marked decrease in good/excellent conditions on 55+ recipes. (TY for the correction Ayerinn)

All of the worthwhile new class skills require a good/excellent condition to work.
At 60, you blatantly have less good/excellent condition that at 50, or even 55, rendering most of these skills useless.
As a specialist, you have an ability which increases the chance of getting a good condition, by some unknown amount, at the cost of 45 CP, meaning you need to ToT at least 2 of these "goods" in order to break even... BUT it also consumes a scrip item which itself costs 25 blue scrips! You literally have to grind out a scrip collectible to use Heart of the <> 1-1.5 times!
So lets say that Heart increases the rate of good conditions by some infinite percent for the next 7 steps. You cannot have 2 goods in a row, so at best using Heart looks like this:
Heart - Good - Normal - Good - Normal - Good -Normal - Good, 4 Goods over the next 7 steps, this is the absolute maximum you can get. You need to ToT 2 of these to make up the ability cost. So we're looking at a delineation for at most forcing 2 useful good conditions.

No wonder people pretty much ignore most of the specialist actions. If your Good rng is "bad', you spent 36 CP for nothing. Hell you need enough Goods to get the Whistle stack down to 6 so you can use Satisfaction 2x to make up 30 CP of the 36 CP cost! In essence if you are going to use Whistle, you had better use Heart along with it to actually make it useful, otherwise you are just wasting CP.

I wonder if SE has a means of "magically" seeing how many times Heart of the <> is actually used? Or how many delineations have been bought.
I am sure that if you compare the amount of people crafting lvl 60 items, vs the amount actually using Specialist actions, not the best metric mind you but it should prove the point, you'll see that the cost of even attempting to use Specialist abilities is not worth the risk on high end items.
You could literally just spend 36 CP on Whistle and get a single Good/Excellent over the course of your synth, this will bring your Whistle stack to 10 and no lower, so you dont even get a single use of Satisfaction out of it. The only saving grace is adding on another 18 CP to use Nymeia's Wheel to return what, 10 durability at 10 stacks... which also makes this combo the single most CP inefficient way to restore durability, but at least it is something.

Perhaps the thing to do at this point it to greatly reduce the risk associated with Specialist actions.

Make Whistle cost no CP, like IQ. That way if your Good rng is terrible, you are not out 36 CP for no good reason.
OR
Remove the delineation requirement from Heart of the <>, while restricting it to 1 use per synth.
OR
Remove the CP cost of Heart and cut the price of delineations, make them obtainable w/ GC seals, whatever, just make it so this ability which is frankly not all that amazing, does not require an ADDITIONAL time investment every time it is used.

SE, before you start making intricate plans to add valuable recipes to Specialists, how about making being a Specialist actually... Special? Because right now using the Specialist toolkit on anything 55+ is more of a liability than a benefit.

Or, you know... un-nerf the good/excellent conditions rate on 55+ items?
The crafting meta was stuck on using HT as your sole quality action due to its CP efficiency because everything else was just not as good. Then we got Precise Touch and for a few levels crafting was fun again! You could make choices, you had to count how many Precise Touches you could do before you would not have enough CP for your finisher sequence. You'd make decisions on whether to Precise or ToT depending on your synth quality, IQ stacks, and CP reserves... it was actually pretty fun!
Now what do we have? Due to the sharp drop in Good conditions on 55+ recipes, along with the increased max CP, one of the "new metas" is using nothing but HT! Some people are not even using BB anymore, just SH2 and HT, along with MM2 to restore 60 durability twice per synth, maybe more. This gives you a total of 7+6+6 = 19 moves, 4 of them are for progress, so you effectively have 15 HT's... its 79% HT spam!!!
We went from a fun process requiring decision making from 53 to 55, to 79% HT spam at 60, how did this happen??? There is no strategy there anymore, it is simply SH2, HT, ToT on Good/Excellent, restore as much durability as you can, save enough CP/durability for your finisher. RNG w/ some more RNG, but extended over so many attempts per synths that it amazingly evens out to a higher success rate than using GS-BB! It is almost baffling that crafting managed to go from a decisive high to a rng-spam low in just 5 levels!

[Ayerinn]

All in all it seems like meaningful crafting is being phased out.

The single best example is really the combination of the post 50 skills, specialist skills, and the marked decrease in good/excellent conditions past maybe 57.

All of the worthwhile new skills require a good.excellent condition to work.
At 60, you blatantly have less good/excellent condition

35/70 durability recipes have a much lower chance for good/excellent procs, no matter the level of the craft.

[SinisterJointss]

35/70 durability recipes have a much lower chance for good/excellent procs, no matter the level of the craft.

might I ask where you are getting this information from? Just so I can read up on it myself.

[RiceisNice]

might I ask where you are getting this information from? Just so I can read up on it myself.

It's from experience. I mean, only the higher level crafts (55 and higher) are gonna be 35/70 durability anyway so it practically covers all the important crafts.

[Gyson]

My god I am so sick of people complaining about systems that actually encourage player cooperation in an MMO. It's an MMO! You're not supposed to be able to do absolutely everything yourself! Find other players who have the specializations you don't have and cooperate to make what you need. It's not hard.

Well, to counter that I'm tired of people preaching that every aspect of a modern MMO needs to force player interaction down everyone's throat. It's ok for an MMO to offer some solo-activities.

Via my combat classes, I have plenty of player interaction in all the meaningful end-game content that's available - raiding, pvp, dungeons, etc. I do not mind having a portion of the game sectioned off around solo-activity which I can enjoy on my own. In this case, that can be crafting, as crafting makes for a fine solo activity that I can enjoy at my own pace when I simply can't stand one more minute of "player interaction" (as lovely as it often is).

I loved crafting in this game because I could be self-sufficient. If I put in the work I could master each of the crafting classes, and it was my own little thing I could enjoy, where I only needed to rely on myself. The further crafting moves away from that setup the less I enjoy that portion of the game.

[Waeksyn]

Every week you can only get 1 gear from Alex Savage and you have to choose for which job you want it.

DoM and DoW have main jobs, DoH have now specialist classes.

You must not be a crafter. The best gear in the game now for crafters is locked behind weekly limits (scrips) that are FAR more restrictive than the DoW/DoM lockouts.

SE should immediately implement changes that allow you to only level up to 3 DoW / DoM jobs. We can't have people "specializing" in more than that, now, can we? Don't worry, you can still level all of the classes up to max level. You just won't be able to specialize! Too restricting? Don't worry, you can at any time throw away the soul crystal and level up another job. You just can't have more than 3 at any one time!

Sound reasonable?

[Fenral]

You must not be a crafter. The best gear in the game now for crafters is locked behind weekly limits (scrips) that are FAR more restrictive than the DoW/DoM lockouts.

Most pieces take one week (some require a week and change), the chest takes two, and the mainhand takes three. How is that more restrictive than DoW/DoM? If anything it's less restrictive, since left-side gear for DoW/DoM takes at minimum two weeks (besides the belt). The accessories, belt and offhand only have crafted versions, which kind of blows, but beyond that I don't really see that staggering a difference.

Unless your real issue is not being able to gear all eight crafting classes at the same time, in which case, as someone who plays four combat classes fairly evenly but can only gear one at a time, well, I'm playing the world's tiniest violin. "Crafter" is not a class, it's eight separate classes, and the devs are just finally treating them as such.

[jomoru]

Compare the masterbook for ALchemy to Leatherworking. Alchemy gets 9 recipes Leatherworking gets 34. This is why Specialization is a horrible idea in this game. The crafts are horribly unbalanced. Weaver always gets the majority of glamour stuff. Blacksmith useful stuff for crafting. Goldsmith the only real upgrades in the end. So unless they start spreading things out so each gets an equal number of useful recipes drop the whole damn specialization concept.

[Waeksyn]

Most pieces take one week (some require a week and change), the chest takes two, and the mainhand takes three. How is that more restrictive than DoW/DoM? If anything it's less restrictive, since left-side gear for DoW/DoM takes at minimum two weeks (besides the belt). The accessories, belt and offhand only have crafted versions, which kind of blows, but beyond that I don't really see that staggering a difference.

You must also not be a crafter. The best equip for crafter is not the red scrip gear, it is the crafted / melded gear. That gear requires you to play the red scrip game with gathering classes as well. In fact, high level crafting right now is 95% gathering and 5% crafting. The equivalent for a DoW / DoM model designed along the same way would be needing you to have a level 60 WHM, spend 16 hours in raids with frustrating rng limiting the drops you need, then taking the multiple drops gathered and turning them in for a 50% chance of creating the gear you actually need for your PLD, which will still need several mil gil worth of materia melds before it's ready to go.

One of the biggest attractions of this game is that there are no restrictions on jobs you can have on a single character, unlike other MMOs in which you must use alts to experience all the content.