Propositions to address crafting/economic woes circa 3.0.

[Sibyll]

snip

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.

[AnimaS]

Nothing will fix an economic system in a video game based on 100% Blind Vertical Progression . If the halfwits at SE knew there would be a breakdown in money velocity they could have AT THE VERY LEAST required various crafting classes to use the drops in Alexander (Gob whip etc) ; to apply it to the gear...... but all that was given was a few food recipes that are of interest and draconian potions. No poison pots; due to Yoshida's rampage on people beating his raids.......

Now we have literally NO idea , but i will take a stab at what will happen.... all the mats we've spend countless MILLIONS on will suddenly be more accessible in November as the crafted gear becomes utterly MORE useless. Tier V materia cannot supplement the massive increase in ILVL BOOST (+100 of a secondary? not happening) so they will attempt to move the crafting system to
A) Useless Glamour
B) food / alchemy (Already Done)
C) ...??...

It won't work. Content sales are lower then ever due to the dps checks in alexander so demand for anything not required is gone. The very measures they said would wipe out omni crafting will create the Omni Crafter/GATHERER and blow up in their faces. Only gear of use (since armorer, blacksmith etc... create ARMOR and TOOLS/WEAPONS) will be bought if put up for sale so back into the dark. t5 materia is utterly useless it can never even come close to a stat cap. Crit 100ish? +12 Savage Aim? Sorry 5 slots does not even nearly cover it.

[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.

[Sibyll]

snip

This is more or less how they've always designed it, but I still don't like this design simply because the crafted gear competes with easily obtained token gear. It more or less becomes irrelevant because as time goes on an even more easily obtained gear set (24-man gear) becomes available.

Nothing will fix an economic system in a video game based on 100% Blind Vertical Progression . If the halfwits at SE knew there would be a breakdown in money velocity they could have AT THE VERY LEAST required various crafting classes to use the drops in Alexander (Gob whip etc) ; to apply it to the gear...... but all that was given was a few food recipes that are of interest and draconian potions. No poison pots; due to Yoshida's rampage on people beating his raids.......

Now we have literally NO idea , but i will take a stab at what will happen.... all the mats we've spend countless MILLIONS on will suddenly be more accessible in November as the crafted gear becomes utterly MORE useless. Tier V materia cannot supplement the massive increase in ILVL BOOST (+100 of a secondary? not happening) so they will attempt to move the crafting system to
A) Useless Glamour
B) food / alchemy (Already Done)
C) ...??...

It won't work. Content sales are lower then ever due to the dps checks in alexander so demand for anything not required is gone. The very measures they said would wipe out omni crafting will create the Omni Crafter/GATHERER and blow up in their faces. Only gear of use (since armorer, blacksmith etc... create ARMOR and TOOLS/WEAPONS) will be bought if put up for sale so back into the dark. t5 materia is utterly useless it can never even come close to a stat cap. Crit 100ish? +12 Savage Aim? Sorry 5 slots does not even nearly cover it.

WoW/Rift had gem socketing (like materia melding but for all gear and not retarded RNG) and enhancement bonuses you'd have to apply every time you got a new piece of gear. This by itself would make all crafters relevant because people are always upgrading gear pieces.

But something like this would be way to obvious. They'll just give us Grade 6 Glamour Prisms and call it a day.

[Ohiuu]

Not trying to shamelessly bump my thread but I just added two additional points to my OP and would love to hear input on if this seems reasonable. I don't know what the difficulty of implementing this from a development perspective would be, but the concept would do wonders for the longevity and value of both crafters and gatherers for every patch to come. Points 10 and 11 are possibly two of the biggest permanent solutions to economic collapse that could be available since their usefulness would never recede completely. What we need to do (or rather what SE needs to do) is create a more complex and dynamic relationship between all facets of the economy. The ball was dropped pretty hard in 3.0 in regards to this.