Have a Materia Melding NPC

[Khalithar]

Crafting is mostly useful in keeping yourself and others geared while leveling, and providing various fun cosmetics either as personal glamour or housing decorations.

I've recently started crafting myself, power leveled cul to 50 using a leveguide and about to do the same for the others (all my crafters besides Cul are 25+) with HQ crafting sets already prepared for me to go by a very kind omnicrafter buddy of mine. So I'm not saying this as a non-crafter, I'm serious about getting in to crafting myself and I actually really enjoy crafting and gathering in MMO's I play. But I have a question for you with the above quote specificially: Is that really so bad?

[Belhi]

Outside of Food or Pots there isn't a huge amount of benefit for the amount of time and effort endgame crafting offers. There are glamours and furniture but most of the endgame stuff requires a pretty substantial time and effort investment or a lot of gil. Beyond glamours endgame crafting gear is mostly useless, particularly since endgame pieces are tied to Red Scrip time gating. That might change with the 3.2 changes but I'm incline to wait and see the detail.

The main use for crafting is Materia Melding, repairing your own gear (which is really a small convenience thing) and making glamour stuff and levelling gear. A lot of the pleasure I get out of my crafting is being able to offer some of these services to my friends and FC members.

[Airget]

The issue with this is, why? Nothing restricts you from leveling crafting so if melding is that important to you, you can level crafting, what are you doing with your leves? If melding is important and you don't want to socialize then you have an option but you just want an easier method. That's what I don't like about this, it's just asking for an "easy"/"lazy" way of doing it instead of taking that effort to leveling crafting yourself.

[iambanana]

its not about social interaction, its fine if materia melding request have fixed price or something like that. normal melding is fine, but overmelding sometime just too much.

because of various reason,not every crafter can say, "hey pay us something, we already wasted 20-30 min, time is money for us (crafter), if we spend the time doing overmeld with craft/gather something,we already have thousand/hunded thousands more gil, than doing this annoying service for you, and not getting anyhting other than thank you from you".

[myahele]

I agree with this. Just so that crafters can still have a small influence they can make it so that NPC melders can only meld the available materia slots and not beyond that. That way crafters can be the only only that can meld beyond the available materia slots/ over melds

[Gunspec]

Is that really so bad?

Crafting is fine, even if it is mostly a fun side diversion. I leveled mine to 60, knowing that the only real reason to do so was to gear them to continue gearing themselves. The problem is that crafters often complain about not being relevant, and the devs throw them a bone by shackling new systems to crafting.

Case in point... I know a few fcs of moderate size, and they are excited for the upcoming airship exploration, but they can't build their own airship because they don't have players who have the appropriate levels of blsm, arm, and crp to turn in the items.

While I can just shrug and do my own thing, I can understand people who just want to have fun and don't want to play an mmo like a chore. And the need to constantly ask your crafter friends to make a thing, or put a ball into a slot, can lead to people not even bothering to do it. Do you ever see someone in ilevel 35 gear that has melded materia? No, because while they might have materia to do it themselves, it's not worth asking someone to give you a moment of their time.

[SchalaZeal]

Here's hoping that 3.2 brings relevant crafted combat gear (even if not BiS). Not 50 million gil glamours.

[Rawrz]

Create an item for each tier after 30. Allow crafters to make a simple box you can put your materia in and attempt a set number of melds.
Example:

Grade 4 Goldsmith's Leafed Box:
A box infused with the aetheric knowledge of a skilled craftsman. Does not come with a severed head.
Allows the user to attempt melding of materia on GSM attributed items level 60 and below. Bound once used.
Requirements: 1 materia and an appropriate catalyst.
Count: 10

This can be unlocked at level 50, but level 60 boxes can only be made by level 60 crafters. The materials to make them should be trivial, like glamour prisms.

Just an idea xD

[RyuSaarva]

I have a better idea, lets make this game into a single player game, that way there are no dungeon wait times at all and nobody is stealing my kills when I farm item drops.

[Steady]

Never heard so many sensitive people on this issue. Why don't we just take away the repair vendors as well. I leveled my GSM for this purpose to 50, it was tedious, I didn't enjoy it, and it was barely worth the effort.. had it not been for Ixal dailies I'd not have bothered. I have no shortage of crafter friends, but it is equally tedious to go through the menu options of repeatedly trying to get a 8% meld to hit. Their time is valuable, my time is valuable. There is barely any social interaction in getting a meld.. it's usually me asking my FC... them changing to GSM, me spamming them with materia melding requests.. and them being stuck doing it till they get sick of doing it, or I run out of items to attach.