The crafting grind

[Gilthas]

Crafting and Gathering was already stupid before Heavensward. Heavensward just made everything even more grindy:

- bloated recipees requiring a lot more materials.
- common recipees for leveling gear requiring mats from hidden and unspoiled nodes.
- even just doing GC daily deliveries now requires a lot more time because of the above. They double the amount of seals you get, but the effort to farm and synth the items has tripled or more.
- you spend most of your time chasing unspoiled nodes to get scrips, leaving you no free time to do anything else.
- monsters drop less materials and there's fewer of them to farm. This isn't that bad because of retainers, but on the other hand SE also screwed over daily GC deliveries.

I've barely logged in in the past month because gathering and crafting has become such a chore. The best thing about FFXIV that really set it apart from FFXI was the ease in making your own gear. That playstyle has been pretty much destroyed just to make greedy players happy and a MB with inflated prices.

And lets not even consider the poor planning that went into the recipees. One of the best things while leveling from 1 to 50 was being able to craft my own gear. In Heavensward, plenty of times you can't craft equipment for your level because the mats are locked behind higher level quests. It was just stupid.

Gathering and crafting should be a relaxing side-activity that you did to gear up your battle classes. Instead its become far more time-consuming than battle content. I play FFXIV to relax and have fun, but SE has turned it into a job. And I already have one of those to pay my bills.