Thoughts On Live Letter Crafting Changes

[Alahra]

It feels like SE is trying to extend the life of the Crafting Endgame in HW and if they only release new Accessories then that leaves very little to do for mid-hardcore Crafters after the first few weeks besides making gil, but that isn't the Endgame, it's a by-product of it.

They are, yes. They're just hitting stumbling blocks. While ARR's progression was sort of piecemeal (and I'll agree it did feel like an afterthought at times), it has so far *worked* better, comparatively. I've been thinking a lot about why, trying to pinpoint it. My current thinking is that right now, we're sort of missing part of the endgame for crafters.

For combat classes, you tend to go through two or three gear stages per raid tier. In HW, you started with Law gear (upgrading that to i180), moved on to Alex, and then, once you were geared enough, you moved on to Savage. In a sense, I think it's the Savage (or "raid") step that we're missing right now. Getting geared enough to move to the next stage is a rewarding feeling, so Savage sort of serves two purposes: one, it provides loot, and two, reaching/completing the current raid is sort of a reward in and of itself, and it tends to keep you coming back every week to get more gear, hit BiS, and so on.

There's a sense in which the combat gear crafters made in ARR was kind of the "raid" level for crafters. You got your base gear done, and then you started making stuff you couldn't make before, learning the best rotations, and eventually, consistently HQ'd that stuff. That, in a way, mirrors the process of learning new raid fights and the like. The reward for crafting wasn't generally more gear, but rather, more gil, and you could keep crafting the gear throughout a patch cycle, sort of how you continue raiding for the whole cycle.

The current HW structure is sort of missing that feeling. All of the *pieces* are there for it--we do have 2-star combat gear and other items to make, we have currency gear to buy, and so on. But the "gearing up" progression stage is too short: you can hit 2-star level with i150 and melds, such that we were already "done" progressing when Red Scrips were introduced. Red Scrip gear in and of itself probably has the length of progression about right, but gearing up with it doesn't really provide a particularly tangible benefit, outside of making your own AF, since the effort required to make the combat gear is simply too high relative to their relative value. Making your own gear has always been a hallmark of the system, especially for omnicrafters, but the difference between now and then is that we used to make our own AF *and* stuff for other people.

I know it's mentioned sometimes that we should love crafting for its own sake, but not even the combat classes work that way. "Crafting for its own sake" is not unlike sitting on a Striking Dummy on your DPS class of choice and running through the motions. There has to be more to it than that for it to truly be engaging: for combat progression, it's the raiding scene, generally.

From the looks of it, though, they seem to have picked up the fact that something's missing. Starting in 3.2, we know we're going to get more powerful crafted gear, and in fact, it seems like they're making it even better than we've ever had before, meaning that we'll have a reason to keep crafting from beginning to end of the entire 3.2/3.3 patch couplet.

In the near term, 3.1 should also be better as well. Materials will be more readily available, meaning the 2-star items should start to become a worthwhile pursuit in general, which will, again, keep us busy. They also mentioned changes to Red Scrips, though they didn't exactly say what those were going to be.

So I think we've got a lot to look forward to.

Edit: Oh, and this hit me later, regarding possible progression paths. There aren't any i180 offhands either, so we're likely to see those added in 3.2, if I had to guess. That takes care of the necessary increase for Craftsmanship and Control for 3-stars in terms of progression.