Patch 3.1: Crafting Not Reborn

[Lobotomite]

SE is basically trying to balance things that were unbalanced in the past by introducing more disequilibrium now in the opposite direction.

This is (probably) why DoH/L tier Vs are still incredibly rare; they're trying to use their rarity (and thus, cost) to sink some of the hardcores' gil stores out of the game. Thing is, (a) the hardcores are savvy enough to see what the devs are trying to do, and they're largely not going to bite/play ball, and (b) the entire non-hardcore crafting community's being held at gunpoint as well, especially if the recipe difficulty of 60 3* will require fully-melded 60 2* gear to reliably HQ (or, hell, even break past the drop-dead craftsmanship/control requirement).

Again, wasn't the whole point of the 3.0 crafting rebalance to make it accessible to casuals? Where is this vaunted accessibility? I, for one, am not looking for the recipes to be faceroll easy. But I am looking for a clear progression path, a reason to care, and for recipe materials to be cheap enough so that I can play around and experiment with rotations just like when things were good with Lucis and 50 4* back in the glory days of 2.4 yore.