Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
They didn't do a very good job of discouraging omnicrafting with 3.0 anyway, to be honest. Individual DoH classes depend far more on other DoH mats than they ever have before, and Specialization abilities don't compare to the power of the old suite of level 50 abilities well at all. I never liked being an omnicrafter, so I was looking forward to Specialization, but they didn't really make it worthwhile.
Unfortunately I think that a lot of people loved Crafting BECAUSE they could omni-craft, and their methods of discouraging omni-crafting have actually worked so well that it has discouraged a lot of people from Crafting in general. Their intent (In my opinion) with 3.0 was to discourage omni-crafting and encourage us to rely on other people which would in turn revitalize the market and keep it from stagnating because most people can craft everything themselves. This doesn't mean omni-crafting is impossible, and it will certainly get easier as time goes by, but the length of the grind means that the market will be active much longer than it was previously.

The main problem is the fact that Combat classes have very little incentive to spend gil on anything from Crafting/Gathering which has removed a HUGE chunk of potential gil from the market, which leaves much less incentive to Craft or Gather, which in turn means less mats on the market, which means higher prices on the mats that ARE on the market, which means most Crafters are Gathering their mats themselves, which means less people buying said mats, which makes the market stagnant.

As for Specialist skills, I may get some flak for saying this but I think they're exactly where they need to be. They were never MEANT to be as powerful as their respective lvl 50 counterparts, otherwise their would be no real reason to level any other Crafting class. They're there as a stepping stone to be able to craft Endgame recipes but still have an incentive to level the other classes.