We need a mercy rule.

[Silverbane]

Personally, I enjoy the risk, it keeps the crafting interesting. With hours of work on the line, it all comes down to a single "pitch-and-toss." As the poet wrote:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
...
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.

That said, when I eventually do lose the gamble and get an NQ final craft (as opposed to an NQ 2-star mat, which I have had plenty of) I'll just meld it, equip it, and start working towards 100% spiritbond, so I can convert it (hopefully) to valuable Grade 5 Demimateria when they turn that option on. So it is not a complete loss.

[Sibyll]

they are cheap, aether sand in NQ is worthless, folklore items in NQ are worthless, demimateria are worthless, everything is worthless except the red scrip items, which cost probably 2m all together. Given the fact that you get them back for every NQ try makes it incredible cheap to HQ everything without expenses

NQ Aethersands and Folklore items being worthless is a design flaw. Makes me wonder what they devs were smoking when they chose to have the materials used for only these items. Only folklore mats that are useful NQ are the ones used for food and Astral Oil and only because it's not much of a loss if you NQ those recipes as a result.

Honestly, I wouldn't say it's fine as is. 4* crafting was a far better design. 2* crafting is total shit no matter what angle you look at it from.

[Katlyna]

We don't need a mercy rule we need our normal goods to not cost 10 million in materials AND we need NQ and HQ to matter less. As I mentioned in another post. The only difference in NQ and HQ should be the amount of material required to MAX the stats. Both should be maxable. HQ goods should be trival to max with materia, while NQ goods should be relatively costly to max (but possible). And by costing I mean in the realm of 0.5-2 million in melds... not some insane fictional number.

[Lastelli]

This is basically the reason why I turned to gathering in 3.x even if I was an omnicrafter in 2.x. Crafting now requires insane investment (either time if you gather the stuff yourself or gil if you just buy the mats), reward is too little too late when compared to the risk of losing everything because no "good" procs/failed HT/failed reclaim, especially since you can just take your time and gear up using ilvl180 equipment...not to mention that you should spend millions in tier V materia melding to actually have a better version of ilvl180 gear.
ilvl170 crafting gear is simply the new frontier of glamours (ppl craft those because they are dyeable).
I agree, we should have a mercy rule, but I'm not expecting much from SE at this point.

[Silverbane]

ilvl170 crafting gear is simply the new frontier of glamours (ppl craft those because they are dyeable).

Hardly. At least some people craft them because you can get them 6 to 8 times as quickly as the red scrip i180 gear.
And also because there are no red scrip offhands, and the upgrade to the i170 offhand is very significant.

This is pretty basic knowledge regarding i170/i180 gear, so I am surprised you seem to be unaware of it.

[TechnoTechie]

And, as I mentioned in my post, there are no scrip OH, and the crafted OHs produce the same increase in stats as the red scrip MH, only requires 3 RCT and 3RGT (or less, IME) worth of mats, and can be made at the rate of 3 a week: infinitely faster than you can get OH with scrip alone, because you cannot. But more importantly, in the time it takes you to get one red scrip MH for one crafter (3 weeks), I can craft NINE offhands that produce the same stat gain, and upgrade 9 classes instead of just one. That's what I call gearing up nine times as quickly.

If we're getting technical with numbers, that should be 4.5, because you could have bought the token mainhand for one gatherer and one crafter, so two items versus nine.

[Sibyll]

snip

It's pretty common sense shit that the off hands are the single best upgrade you can do on your crafter, and to correct you the off hands are actually a slightly better upgrade in stats than either version of the main hand without going into overmeld territory. Considering the NQ version is also and upgrade from the i140, I'd say its safe to say there is no reason not to make these first and at no point was I arguing otherwise. In fact, I explicitly said this in my post.

However, unless you are assuming the off hands (and other green items) will be enough of an upgrade to hit the next tier of (likely disappointing) recipes in 3.1 you will still have to purchase or craft the blue pieces to upgrade the rest of your stats, which only the chest and main hand are really obtained faster and at a large hit to stats unless you pentameld them.

While I agree the MH and OH give a ton of stats for DoL that doesn't mean the next tier doesn't require any of the other blue pieces to hit the requirements.

[Silverbane]

If we're getting technical with numbers, that should be 4.5, because you could have bought the token mainhand for one gatherer and one crafter, so two items versus nine.

But that's not "gearing up" if you already have a gathering scrip mainhands for each L60 gatherering class you have. Which my wife and I already do, and which many other people probably already do as well. So practically, that's not relevant.

And I'm talking about gearing up me. Sure, I could upgrade my retainers from mere adamantite mainhands, but that would be silly. They'll take my hand-me-downs and that gatherer blue scrip gear and like it, or they can look elsewhere for employment!

[Sibyll]

But that's not "gearing up" if you already have a gathering scrip mainhands for each L60 gatherering class you have. Which my wife and I already do, and which many other people probably already do as well. So practically, that's not relevant.

Okay, so if you already got your gathering main hands then you had to delay getting your off hands by 3 weeks per DoL that you got a main hand for. So practically it is relevant.

[Silverbane]

This thread has gone off-topic. It's really no skin off my nose if other people actually believe all the "crafting i170 gear is a waste of time and resources" rhetoric or give a damn about nit-pickers who post to prove how smart they are. Y'all feel free to gear up your DoH and DoL using just red token gear, we'll see who is in better shape when patch 3.1 is released in November.

Really, I should just stick to paying attention to people who post actual useful information, like on rotations, drop/proc statistics, attribute effects, gathering techniques and the like. I'll strive to do that better in the future. What do I care whether people believe all the nonsense people post? It's the Internet, there's really no holding back that tide, is there?