Crafting a Dead Horse: Work vs. Reward Seriously Needs a Revamp

[raela]

You'll never see a serious effort made for crafting to be end-game relevant. The focus is largely on leveling gear, novelties, and side content like airships.

I've loved the crafting system since I started playing, but I ragequit it for a month, and I'm still not happy. I don't care about being an endgame crafter - I like leveling sets. Repeat a dungeon until I have a full set of gear? Nah, I'll make current hq pieces.. Good gear and materia as a bonus.

HW killed that. Crafting a set takes me about 30 mins for all NQ mats, more for HQ, which is fine.. But now the gathering requirements are huge. One set of gear will burn through nearly a stack of DoL mats, plus you're looking at multiple types and mob drops. I like being self sufficient, so I avoid the MB.. Yay for my retainer. :/ Due to the vast time sink of crafting leveling gear, I'll only do poe -> 56 -> law gear + current weapons, because honestly, the rest just isn't worth my time.

[CatfishCassie]

So... aside from the incredibly semantic discussion as to which "cost" buyers should be aware of... the only things in the real world that get sold at a loss are discontinued or obsolete products that no one would otherwise want, or platforms for which additional merchandise or services can be sold at a profit. In the former case, you're recouping a small amount of your investment as an "Ooops, sorry, bought/made too much" kind of move, and in the latter case, you're making a profit overall and you selling the platform at below cost (your cost, as the manufacturer) enables that profit. People don't generally plan ahead to sell things at an overall cost... if they see that an item costs more to make than anyone would be willing to pay, they don't make it in the first place. That's the point of this thread... right now, it's not worth making the 2-star stuff because no one will pay the price point that the costs to manufacture make necessary. I highly doubt I could even sell any of the ilvl 180 gear at the market cost of the resources required to make them, and any less than that, I might as well be selling those resources instead.

[CatfishCassie]

Also, I love the part where the grade 3 wheels in the FC crafting pane require 3 Astral Oils each...

[CatfishCassie]

... just like the DoM/DoW classes are essentially required to do ...

It's actually a realistic requirement, too. When I was studying to be an engineer, they required me to study non-engineering things, like English and PhysEd. Not that the latter did me any long-term good ...

They do that because that's the University model, not because those are, in any way, required for Engineering.

[CatfishCassie]

You'll never see a serious effort made for crafting to be end-game relevant. The focus is largely on leveling gear, novelties, and side content like airships.

If this makes you unhappy, you should drop crafting. I'm not saying this to be dismissive, I'm saying this because crafting must be this way. Making crafting competitive with drops will ultimately reward people who bot or RMT more than actual players. Many top raiders, crafters, and gatherers abuse these systems because they can use them to get ahead. Botting and cheating are not well controlled, but only have a mild impact because the economy isn't tightly bound to the core mechanics of the game. Also the gating system frustrates a lot of people, but it does keep people without much playtime on more equal footing.

I'll agree that the sheer effort involved is not in proper proportion to the rewards. The system is very convoluted, and only really serves to make crafters craft things which make them better at crafting. That's a lot of running in circles.

That's why I suggested a system whereby crafted DoW/DoM gear would be upgradeable just like the Esoteric gear/Law gear is, using items from Alexander (Parts and Manifestos). This would add more variety to what is best in slot, putting crafted items back in demand without straight-up letting someone bypass the content/esoteric cap to get geared. They'd still have to be running Alexander and Alexander savage to get the stuff they need to upgrade their gear, they'd just have more options on which gear they chose, and crafted gear would be one of those options.

As for botting and cheating... there's a software solution for that, but so far Square Enix seems to be unwilling to pay someone (or a couple someones) a couple hundred thousand dollars to implement any sort of automated log parser.

[Ksenia]

I've loved the crafting system since I started playing, but I ragequit it for a month, and I'm still not happy. I don't care about being an endgame crafter - I like leveling sets. Repeat a dungeon until I have a full set of gear? Nah, I'll make current hq pieces.. Good gear and materia as a bonus.

HW killed that. Crafting a set takes me about 30 mins for all NQ mats, more for HQ, which is fine.. But now the gathering requirements are huge. One set of gear will burn through nearly a stack of DoL mats, plus you're looking at multiple types and mob drops. I like being self sufficient, so I avoid the MB.. Yay for my retainer. :/ Due to the vast time sink of crafting leveling gear, I'll only do poe -> 56 -> law gear + current weapons, because honestly, the rest just isn't worth my time.

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It`s good that you avoid the MB because most of the HQ gear we make is quest reward and sells for around a third of what it would cost us to make it. Holy Rainbow shirt of Healing HQ goes for 9K on Sarg. The Holy water in that suit would cost me over 21K to make. I considered buying them up so I might one day desynth them but then I thought, why bother?

[Caimie_Tsukino]

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It`s good that you avoid the MB because most of the HQ gear we make is quest reward and sells for around a third of what it would cost us to make it. Holy Rainbow shirt of Healing HQ goes for 9K on Sarg. The Holy water in that suit would cost me over 21K to make. I considered buying them up so I might one day desynth them but then I thought, why bother?

Speaking of that, I find it soooooo stupid that they'd give out HQ crafted gear in our main story quest. What's the freaking point of having a "recipe" if one can get it FREE from the MSQ? In ARR, they used to give out only NQ, which makes the HQ crafted ones having a value. Now the amount of money and effort needed to craft an HQ one is so much higher than buying an HQ one from the MB (which some people got it for FREE, and not wanting it). Anyone who crafted their own gear must feel "BEING FOOLED" now by S-E. Whoever in the development team decided to hand out free HQ gear in the MSQ is a total #$%^&$% (fill in any swear word you like).

[Lastelli]

Speaking of that, I find it soooooo stupid that they'd give out HQ crafted gear in our main story quest

Well, I can kinda understand we they did that. The new dungeons and trials up to lvl 60 are arguably more challenging than those in 2.x, so they had to at least make HQ gear easily available for returning players. Also, when the expansion launched everyone was busy leveling their main job and completing the main scenario, there weren't many crafters around to craft and sell HQ gear at a reasonable price.
I feel like the real problem here is that even more basic recipes require a lot of materials that even now are quite expensive and so the price of the crafted gear is too high for the average player. I am reluctant myself to spend 50k+ gil to craft one piece of gear that I'll have to substitute after a couple of levels...especially since starting at ilvl130 you can basically clear gubal easily.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Well, I can kinda understand we they did that. The new dungeons and trials up to lvl 60 are arguably more challenging than those in 2.x, so they had to at least make HQ gear easily available for returning players. Also, when the expansion launched everyone was busy leveling their main job and completing the main scenario, there weren't many crafters around to craft and sell HQ gear at a reasonable price.
I feel like the real problem here is that even more basic recipes require a lot of materials that even now are quite expensive and so the price of the crafted gear is too high for the average player. I am reluctant myself to spend 50k+ gil to craft one piece of gear that I'll have to substitute after a couple of levels...especially since starting at ilvl130 you can basically clear gubal easily.

I see what you mean, but still, if dungeons were arguably more challenging than NQ gear could handle, then they could have simply lower the difficulty of the dungeons to suit the use of NQ gear... IMO, that would actually be the best case - People SHOULD be able to complete dungeons in NQ gear! HQ gear are a type of luxury. If you crafted it yourself, you earned it! If you could afford to buy it, you paid for it! But as of now, everybody gets it free from MSQ and side quests... People crafted it for themselves became idiots, rendering the leveling of crafting pointless. Funny enough, the smart level 60 crafters don't craft, but go to MB and buy the HQ piece for like 1K.

Ok, this alone doesn't kill the game. It's not that serious. But it's one of those things that renders crafting even more useless in Heavensward. When crafting is already in a pretty terrible spot, this idiotic design just makes it worse.

[Lastelli]

Well, you can clear dungeons even with NQ gear if you're a decent player. HQ gear just makes it a little easier...still, I've met so many terrible players (even with HQ gear) that I am actually grateful that devs decided to make HQ gear obtainable by doing quests, but this is another story lol
The thing is, since a lot of players have come back with the expansion, they probably don't remember how to play very well and don't have enough gil to buy HQ gear, so I believe that devs made this choice so that the DF didn't turn into hell for more experienced players. I mean, at least mediocre players are a little overgeared when entering an instance for the first time.
Ofc I'm not saying you're wrong with your analysis, but it's pretty obvious that devs think that content related to DoM/DoW si much more important than...everything else, at least for now. They're probably waiting for more people to reach the end game before they stabilize the economy with a better designed crafting and gathering system. Hopefully it will not be too litle too late.