Propositions to address crafting/economic woes circa 3.0.

[Yaichiro]

The problem with crafting is that it is becoming marginalised by developers for some unknown reason. Apparently they want crafted gears to be weaker than gears dropped by raids and those making crafted end game gears can't be looked at unless you're a collector or interested for glamour. 2.0 and the following 3 patches had somehow relevant end game crafting since they were 2nd best gears and were essential in the to raiders attempting world first. However, Heavnsward made crafts really less important as the highest ilvl can be made is 180 while the highest obtainable gears are 210 which is a huge gap.

If they really want to keep raid gears to be the best then they can make adjustment to the loot system that can make crafting relevant too. Raids could drop exclusive crafting materials that can be used to craft gears which are the strongest to be obtain given that they are over melded and HQ. In this way crafting is not necessary to pass content (you need to pass the content in the first place to obtain said materials) but also relevant to players who don't craft either by gaining the best gear or selling the materials.

[Sibyll]

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Thing that irks me is that crafted combat gear is subpar at best, but for crafters (and previously gatherers) it's best in slot. On top of this crafting end-game has always required tons of expensive overmelding just to do the new recipes when they come out.

And yea, the sad thing is many other MMOs have managed to have affordable, relevant crafted gear in their games. Instead of reinventing the wheel they could maybe look at other titles in the genre to implement more than two itemization paths and slot machine mechanics.

[Ohiuu]

Yeah I made mention to the primary stat issue on the accessories and how that particular element is what may be driving the concerns about crafted equipment being OP. Simple solution: cap them. Also, if they're concerned that healers are pushing their ACC too high (and their dps along with it) then they could add caps for that too on the MND based equipment. Silly to spit on a huge part of the game due to easily adjusted concerns. I'm quite curious to see what direction they're going to take crafting in 3.1. It's already been mentioned that there will be rare and exclusive gathering points in the airship exploration islands...which one can only assume means something will be crafted out of them. I just don't see why they took the time and effort to make a creative and interesting crafting system only to toss it to the wayside by starving it of relevant recipes. Glamours, btw, are not a sustainable paradigm for crafters...it's an intrinsically fad based and mercurial system that eventually collapses when people lose interest. The only way to keep crafters useful from patch to patch is to create a relationship between them and raiders.

[Sibyll]

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In all honesty, they could either remove primary stat melding from accessories or add the option to the other gear. The part that aggravates me is that left side gear and off hand are garbage because you can't meld enough secondary stats to make up for the missing primary stats. Weapons aren't if usable because weapon damage is so important.

The other thing is their idea of crafted gear as catch up gear. I get this concept and it's a fine approach, but not for the way they've designed FFXIV. In WoW/Rift you'd have to spend weeks farming up token gear to hit the ilvl requirement for experts, which you'd have to farm to hit the raid entry ilvl. Crafted gear generally got you right into experts.

No such system exists in FFXIV and even if it did you can get full i180 gear in a weekend from running dungeons. This begs the question why a person would ever need to buy this gear. Crafting could be removed from the game today and nothing would be impacted because of how insignificant it is to the vast majority of raid groups.

I don't get how they could spend so much time developing an intricate crafting system and completely fuck up making it actually useful.

[Alahra]

The other thing is their idea of crafted gear as catch up gear. I get this concept and it's a fine approach, but not for the way they've designed FFXIV. In WoW/Rift you'd have to spend weeks farming up token gear to hit the ilvl requirement for experts, which you'd have to farm to hit the raid entry ilvl. Crafted gear generally got you right into experts.

You know, there is kind of a point where a gear set could fit in that would work this way: i190, and in that regard, the crafted gear actually sort of would do its job (with melds), but for the fact that it's so difficult to make. Melded 180 gear would be pretty comparable to the Alexander Normal gear (well, actually, I'm not sure that's true with the flattening of secondary stat values, now that I think about it). From what they said pre-release, the Normal gear was supposed to be necessary to get started in Savage, so in a different world than the one we got, crafted gear could have been situated as stuff to "get started faster." It didn't work out that way though.