The easiest way to buff Specialists - free Heart of the -whatever-

[Sibyll]

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I'd like specializations to be more than just a way for a crafter to craft without relying on cross class abilities, otherwise they are mostly trivial and pointless. However, given the RNG that is involved with the specialist skills they aren't even useful for that.

Honestly, I'd like to see them design crafting around something other than just dice rolls and bigger HP bars. Gathering got more interesting in the expansion. Crafting feels like it has gone backwards when there is a lot of areas that it should be improved on. It's a pretty bad sign when crafting potions and food for raid becomes a chore because crafting has to be a Rube Goldberg machine.

I'm not trying to hate on the mini-game design of crafting, but when crafting an HQ potion/food takes 30+ steps and you need to make them in bulk (especially true for potions) it gets real old real quick. There was no reason to make potions and food single yield again.

[Mindy_Macready]

I think making it free wouldn't be a good option nor do I think increasing the duration. I'd rather they fix the number of procs to specific steps. I'd happily pay 45 cp and farm delineations if I had an ability that I could predict good procs on for specific steps. I'd also use WWYW if I could guarantee 3-4 good procs minimum.

I don't think making people farm delineations is going to make the system more accessible, which is what the system was supposed to solve. Farming delineations is a time sink pure and simple, and if you're specializing in a craft, you shouldn't be subject to spending more time/gil in prep in order to have an easier time crafting than someone who is not a specialist.

Also, are you talking about guaranteeing Goods in WWYW, or that you would use WWYW if HotX guaranteed 3-4 Goods? If the latter, that would make it too easy to recover CP, as -45CP becomes +35CP while you only spend a few durability to buy time.

[Sibyll]

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The latter. If you are using the good procs for TotT, I feel like you are doing it wrong (I'm assuming that's how you got +35 CP). I'm assuming the aim of HotX was to allow precise touches to build IQ stacks, but this idea falls on its ass when getting only 1 proc during it's duration is possible or when it's possible the proc will pop up after your SH2 buff drops off.

It seems overpowered and broken when you look at it from the stand point of someone that is using optimal/max melded gear and food. However, my first 2* attempt was done with 373 after food buff with 718 Craft and 695 Control. Given that the aim of Specialization is to allow casual crafters to have a real shot at doing high end crafting without requiring tons of cross classes I fail to see how the WWYW system or HotX would ever be usable unless you are looking at high end melds, which is stepping outside of the realm of casual crafter.

Also, when I saw delineations my first thought was it was a buff to allow you to do 2* crafting specialist only recipes. I actually agree that it's stupid to require these just to use a skill, especially something as lack luster as HotX.

[MN_14]

They are also using band-aid fixes for poorly designed skills: Brand of Elements were meant to be used on Aspected Element recipes, which never gets used. So instead of making Aspected recipes more common, or doing something innovative, they just make Name of Element so people will use them.

There actually is a purpose for these abilities if you think about it from a single class perspective at least. With the Name of Element abilities added, each class has a method of knocking down significant portions of progress without having to worry about high level cross class abilities or relying on heavy rng based abilities like rapid synthesis. It gives the single class specialist some more options.

Arm - PbP or Ingenuity 1 + Name/Brand Abilities
Wvr - Ingenuity 1 + Name/Brand Abilities
Ltw - Ingenuity 1 + Name/Brand Abilities
Bsm - Ingenuity 2 + name/brand abilities
Crp - Ingenuity 1 + Name/Brand Abilities
Alc - Ingenuity 1 + name/brand abilities
Cul - Muscle Memory
Gsm - Maker's Mark/Flawless Synthesis

[Nyalia]

How to fix specialization:

1. Have Specialized class synths get 80/40 max durability wherever a non-specialist gets 70/35.
2. Have Specialists ignore the Good proc nerf for endgame crafts restoring the old rate of 25%. This could be either always or only when Whistle is active.
3. Instead of #2, Rework Heart of the Class to instead be a permanent buff that removes the Good proc rate nerf and give a Good proc rate of 25% for any craft. Reduce the cost to 20 CP.
4. Instead of #2 or #3, reduce the cost of Heart of the Class, increase the Good proc rate to 50%, and allow Goods to follow Goods while it is active.
5. Make Whistle cost less CP (possibly 0).
6. Make Trained Hand cost less CP (possibly 0). The requirements to trigger Trained Hand are difficult to come by and you can generally only use it once per synth. Having it cost so much CP makes it a skill I never want to use when I meet the requirements. It should be a skill that's always good that you'd always want to use if you could to give a solid incentive to balancing IQ and Whistle stacks. As it stands, I've never wanted to use it when it came up, especially since using it makes Name Brand crafting less effective, negating the progress bonus, and Ingenuity II is never up when it's available since, on a good synth, TH becomes available in the middle of the synth. Another change that would be very welcome is to make TH a 100% success action instead of 80%. That means it's always a valid skill to use even if SH is down (as long as you have 15+ durability, of course).
7. Make the free and mandatory 200% progress hit from Whistle ending have a 100% success rate, or not cost Duability, or both.
8. Document more clearly the quality increase from doing a Progress action while on a Whistle stack multiple of 3.

Any of the above changes would be very welcome. 3+ of them would make me actually use my specialist skills.

[TechnoTechie]

How to fix specialization:[*]Make Trained Hand cost less CP (possibly 0). The requirements to trigger Trained Hand are difficult to come by and you can generally only use it once per synth. Having it cost so much CP makes it a skill I never want to use when I meet the requirements. It should be a skill that's always good that you'd always want to use if you could to give a solid incentive to balancing IQ and Whistle stacks. As it stands, I've never wanted to use it when it came up, especially since using it makes Name Brand crafting less effective, negating the progress bonus, and Ingenuity II is never up when it's available since, on a good synth, TH becomes available in the middle of the synth. Another change that would be very welcome is to make TH a 100% success action instead of 80%. That means it's always a valid skill to use even if SH is down (as long as you have 15+ durability, of course).
.

That just gave me an idea for a rotation for specialists: get your 11 IQ stacks, pop whistle, then spam trained hand to completion (ignoring byregots of course, because of the quality you'd get from trained hand). Might be feasible with lots of CP?

[Nyalia]

That just gave me an idea for a rotation for specialists: get your 11 IQ stacks, pop whistle, then spam trained hand to completion (ignoring byregots of course, because of the quality you'd get from trained hand). Might be feasible with lots of CP?

Why would you ever do this? It's 32 CP for a Standard Synthesis that's also an Advanced Touch. If you have 11 stacks of IQ and GS+BB won't get you to 100%, even with minimal stats, you're doing something wrong. Trained Hand is barely more progress than a 0 CP Careful Synthesis II, and it's an 80% action. Whistle also costs 36 CP right now, so you're talking 68 CP to get a 15 CP action that comes with a little unneeded quality as a bonus. Even with all the buffs I suggested (and I wasn't saying implement them all, I was saying implement a few), that isn't a useful strategy. Well, unless they made TH cost less than a Standard Synthesis, but I don't think they should do that.

I just want comboing Byregot's Miracle into Trained Hand followed by Byregot's Blessing (or Brow at that point) to actually be a cool thing you can do that's not a waste of CP over just BB by itself.

[TechnoTechie]

well for one thing, it might be useful for people that don't have their crafts leveled up as an alternative to cross-classing things that you've mentioned (two slots from CS2 and BB or if they don't have their WVR or CRP leveled to 50 quite yet). A fully charged byregots blessing is 300% potency, comparable to the potency of two casts of trained hand, but yes as you mention the CP cost is quite monstrous.

But yea, I didn't quite think out the CP costs before posting that idea; it was just something that randomly came to me as a potential use of the ability as it is now.

[Sibyll]

There actually is a purpose for these abilities if you think about it from a single class perspective at least. With the Name of Element abilities added, each class has a method of knocking down significant portions of progress without having to worry about high level cross class abilities or relying on heavy rng based abilities like rapid synthesis. It gives the single class specialist some more options.

The point I was making is the skills were designed to be used with Aspected recipes, hence the double progress you get from them. Instead of actually designing recipes to utilize such a mechanic, you know something that might actually be interesting, they chose instead to lazily make Name of Skills so that all the classes get a version of Maker's Mark. Thanks for reminding me that Maker's Mark is the equivalent of Name of X, but for Flawless Synth: a way of making a shitty ability useful for a few steps without actually fixing the underlying problem that made it useless in the first place.

good ideas

Another option would be to provide ways for the player to manipulate Whistle stacks that doesn't require RNG. To my knowledge you can drop whistle stacks in only 2 ways: 1) Good/Excellent and 2) Using Satisfaction. It's really easy to get nothing out of WWYW which is part of the reason I can't see a reliable way of using it.

[MN_14]

The point I was making is the skills were designed to be used with Aspected recipes, hence the double progress you get from them. Instead of actually designing recipes to utilize such a mechanic, you know something that might actually be interesting, they chose instead to lazily make Name of Skills so that all the classes get a version of Maker's Mark. Thanks for reminding me that Maker's Mark is the equivalent of Name of X, but for Flawless Synth: a way of making a shitty ability useful for a few steps without actually fixing the underlying problem that made it useless in the first place.

Whether you like these abilities or not, a lot of players find maker's mark to be very useful and it added an additional small element of strategy, so all of these abilities do have a purpose. It would be hypocritical if you trashed maker's mark, yet used it for your own 2* rotations. At least the older abilities can be used again even if their purpose is a bit different from their original design.

It also neatly takes care of the problem of single class crafters who can't easily take care of progress.

This is kind of off topic, but flawless synthesis did have it's purpose too prior to 3.0. It was useful when HQing low level leve quests if you didn't have a lot of other cross class abilities. Helped me out a bit when leveling some of my classes in the past.