The Direction Of Crafting

[Alahra]

That's what I hoped. What we got was Grade 1 Terminus Putty of Strength, Grade 1 Termins Putty of Dex etc.

Yep. They sell fairly often on my server but at relatively poor margins. I doubt there will be a stable market for the Grade 2 Dissolvents until they either buff the item level of the 2-star gear or severely nerf the materials requirements.

[seorin]

I don't think it's either/or - we need both better recipes and lower costs before crafting will approach anything remotely as fun and useful as it was in 2.0. Even if we could craft BiS gear, you will never be able to sell enough gear at a high enough profit to offset all the time and gil spent gearing up and melding materia. They definitely need to add new stuff or improve the existing recipes, but it will barely do any good if the time and material costs stay the same.

[Sibyll]

The part that's a joke is they say its intended to be "catch up" gear, but the time/gil cost to make these items is far beyond anything you'd expect an individual that is just returning to the game to have on them.

The other problem is that tome gear requires such a low time investment to equip yourself that it begs the question why you would even choose this alternative in the first place.

The sad irony is that SE has stated they don't want BiS crafting because it would encourage RMT, but the only people I can feasibly see having the resources to gear themselves in i180 crafted gear in less them than they'd spend farming tomes would be gil buyers.

[Alahra]

The part that's a joke is they say its intended to be "catch up" gear, but the time/gil cost to make these items is far beyond anything you'd expect an individual that is just returning to the game to have on them.

I still don't understand why they couldn't have done two things:

1) make 2-star gear i170 and relatively as easy to produce as i70 gear was at ARR's launch, providing an alternative to tome gearing (melded i170 gear would be about on par with i180 gear, too, providing an avenue for people that dislike Hunts) and;
2) introduce i190 gear in 3.1 to coincide with the release of the new 24-man, with a grind not unlike the grind to produce i90/i110 gear in 2.2/2.4. Pentamelded i190 gear would be about on par with the (presumably) i200 gear, and the 24-man patches have always been catch up patches anyway, so if it's easier to gear than it's no big deal. They had already begun to do precisely this with weapons and accessories, so they could have moved *all* of the gear to the second patch and stopped it from having too much impact on progression, which is supposedly what they wanted.

Structured like this, they would have kept pentamelded gear from greatly impacting the Savage world firsts, but provided crafters with something relevant to craft, and the gear wouldn't have been so impactful that it would require a grind so ridiculous as the one we have now.

I just can't wrap my head around why they did things the way they did.

[Sibyll]

The only problem with that is i70 crafted gear and i70 tome gear both required Philosopher Tomes to acquire. The cost of the i180 gear would be less of a problem if you could just get the mats with Law tomes, and frankly the gear is so irrelevant making it easier to acquire would just make them more feasible as glamour pieces than as actual side progression.

Problem is that previously, with melding, you could argue that an HQ i110 piece is at least a good alternative to an i120 tome piece that had less than desirable stats and would allow you to free up tomes/twines for other slots. Given that tier V materia isn't widely available, I hesitate to say that HQ i180 gear is even on par with the Alex i190 gear.

Who were the target customers for this gear?

[seorin]

...and who are the target players that are supposed to be making it?

[Alahra]

The only problem with that is i70 crafted gear and i70 tome gear both required Philosopher Tomes to acquire. The cost of the i180 gear would be less of a problem if you could just get the mats with Law tomes, and frankly the gear is so irrelevant making it easier to acquire would just make them more feasible as glamour pieces than as actual side progression.

Oh, right, I'm not sure why they didn't keep the mats on the Law tomes, for that matter. In my head, it was implied they would have kept things that way when I was mentioning that above but I wasn't explicit about it. There wasn't anything inherently wrong with the old system. They just needed to delay when we could acquire the "top" gear. They already solved the "progression problem" by increasing the gap between lower tier tome gear and high end tome gear/raid gear, anyway. They took far more steps than they needed to.

[Sibyll]

Oh, right, I'm not sure why they didn't keep the mats on the Law tomes, for that matter. In my head, it was implied they would have kept things that way when I was mentioning that above but I wasn't explicit about it. There wasn't anything inherently wrong with the old system. They just needed to delay when we could acquire the "top" gear. They already solved the "progression problem" by increasing the gap between lower tier tome gear and high end tome gear/raid gear, anyway. They took far more steps than they needed to.

I'd have liked a Law tome mat if anything to provide a tome sink and provide a gil stream for non-crafters/gatherers. The accessibility of coke/scheelite/ehcatl sealant as a form of income is what allows non-crafters to afford 1-2 million gil accessories and armor pieces or 40-60k HQ food every week.

[Alahra]

I'd have liked a Law tome mat if anything to provide a tome sink and provide a gil stream for non-crafters/gatherers. The accessibility of coke/scheelite/ehcatl sealant as a form of income is what allows non-crafters to afford 1-2 million gil accessories and armor pieces or 40-60k HQ food every week.

That too. The interplay between DoL/DoH and DoW/DoM-focused players was a substantial part of the economy in ARR. I really can't fathom why they eliminated it so completely. That aspect of the system worked quite well and I'm not sure why it was a casualty when their apparent goal was deadening the impact of crafted gear on progression.

[Snugglebutt]

The direction I am sure SE is heading in is that of decreased omni-crafting necessity, increased focus on specialization and further pushing people to cooperate and work together to accomplish their goals shown with such things like specializations and FC crafting workshops. They cannot stop omni-crafting from existing long term as people can get around it with alts in order to have every kind of specialist but they can lower the need to be an omni-crafter plus entice people to not go down that route via making each specialization highly rewarding as single entities. Such things as some unique specialist recipes would be a prime example of such rewards.

There are still issues too with red scrips, especially on the crafting side but those will be balanced over time. However having caps and/or limitations is something they have always done, it was done more so with DoW/DoM content in the past than DoL/DoH content but I think they will continue to make DoL/DoH more balanced on par with DoW/DoM style group cooperation in order to advance to the top of the food chain. They will continue to make minor adjustments in all areas until they feel it is balanced correctly but will be baby step changes not large scale knee jerk reactions.

They almost certainly won't allow for DoH to craft endgame top tier gear for a multitude of legitimate reasons so that is not likely to change in future too. Within a couple of months the market will also start being flooded with red scrip materials once more and more people no longer have to decide between gearing their DoL/DoH and spending their scrips on materials. It will be slow process as more and more people fully gear up on red scrip gear but eventually enough people will have progressed to that stage that they will switch to purely spending the scrips on materials for either sale of aforementioned materials or crafting items for sale, the availability on the market will continue to increase as time goes on as will the decrease in prices.

That's how I see SE's direction they are taking crafting in the long term.