Removal of relevant crafted gear seems like an overreaction to me

[Tango185]

Random stats insure a much longer lifespan of current craft levels, because you -might- get your awesome coat tails of Dexterity +99, or you'll get shit.

ISN'T THAT A FUN WAY TO KEEP CRAFTING RELEVANT?

It almost seems as though you simply hate crafters. Some players, myself included, find a level of peace with the gathering and crafting part of the game. Periodically I'll run some dungeons but I mostly gather/craft. If SE were to tell gatherers and crafters to shove off because it has no reason to remain relevant, they could actually lose a pretty large portion of their subscriber base.

SE needs to keep gathering and craft relevant. FFXIV has one of the best MMO crafting systems at this point. I'd really hate to see them throw it away because their "balancing" is really more of an overcompensation.

Edit: After seeing that you yourself craft, I don't understand the reason behind your sarcasm.

[Tango185]

I used to be more focused on dungeon delving and raiding until I ran into a sort of wall of people taking their playing time WAY TOO SERIOUSLY. Trying to even ATTEMPT a run at A1S is impossible because even Party Finder entries of A1S Learning Parties require that everybody KNOW THE FIGHT. Nobody seems to want to just have fun dungeoneering or raiding anymore and so I turned to something I can take at my own pace. I don't have people yelling at me to watch videos prior to trying to learn what I'm doing.

[Kabooa]

It almost seems as though you simply hate crafters.

Edit: After seeing that you yourself craft, I don't understand the reason behind your sarcasm.

I 'hate' people saying 'make it better' or 'put it back' without giving thought to the reasons why it was changed to the current state.

Crafting was meant to be an optional pursuit. Beyond the initial 2.0 release where the only way to make money, and by 'make' I mean 'redistribute' it because it wasn't being brought on as new system gil, was to craft, every patch has brought a way to try and repair the economic wreck that happened in that early release.

This is why dungeon gil was increased, why roulettes offer sustainable (but not house buying) gil rewards, why the challenge log mainly rewards gil instead of other topical things, and why current crafting is gated.

It's an opt-in. That's what it was meant to be. It wasn't meant to be like it is in other games where it is either required or factored in heavily to battle progression.

I'm not sure how many of you actually -started- in 2.0, but your path to 50 as a battlecraft, doing almost every side quest and selling off the reward usually left you with about 300k gil with no tangible and sane of way of generating new gil.

This is when a 2star HQ item at the time was 500k.

This perpetuated a terrible cycle of crafter-centered loops, where you grinded tomes to buy materials to sell to crafters so you could afford to buy the crafted item from the crafter. The gatherer made minimal profits for their time, especially as bots began picking up speed, and no matter how much you grinded dungeons, the fact of the matter was that there was a net positive flow of gil going into the crafters when new gil was extremely hard to make and easily lost. Dungeons from 100% to 0% of your condition costs more to repair than you got, and guess who repaired things?

Crafters.

So yes. Forgive me for not feeling sorry for things being far more equivalent now, where Gatherers are given far better opportunities to make money, where Battlers aren't living in states of abject poverty, and where a crafter might, heaven forbid, not be making millions a day by logging in to craft an item now and then.

Sorry.

Ain't got no feels for them.

[Sollux]

The sad part is that if the devs were remotely creative, they'd have given us a system which allows us to upgrade existing gear instead of replacing it every update. Keeps older content relevant, and keeps crafters in the loop the whole time. This constant planned obsolescence is getting really old, really fast and I think people are finally starting to clue into this.

Upgradeable gear is nice, and we already have it to an extent with Law/Eso, but unless it comes with other options that are easier to obtain it becomes a problem when it goes from 2-3 upgrade steps to 6-8 and so on. Whether the issue is with Crafting gear and gil or Combat gear and time, as the game progresses it will start to feel like there's a wall of "You must invest x amount of hours before you can enter Endgame". Think Relic, but for every armor piece and the upgrades NEVER END. Great for veteran players, not so much for new players or those looking to gear alts.

If every major update is just a new item level, with then same tome/raid grind as before, it quickly loses incentives to keep people playing. I'm not sure about you guys, but I've seen a nose-dive in activity over the past few months, and the last update did little to quell the lull.

I agree it gets pretty stale with the Tomes system, but I like that they're trying something new with Diadem gear, even if the process to get it is getting stale fast. As far as player activity, it always drops after the raiding scene dies down and people are "hibernating" for Relic. This is true for literally every MMO, though you are correct that the most recent update doesn't seem to have the retention they were likely hoping for.

[Moqi]

I 'hate' people saying 'make it better' or 'put it back' without giving thought to the reasons why it was changed to the current state.

The reason is the devs are lazy and more worried about how to gate raids through gear checks and lockouts than properly balancing the fights, gear distribution and recipies they introduce so when players find a loophole and exploit it, instead actually solving the problem they'd rather eradicate it entirely so they don't have to deal with it at all.

Don't blame the players and try to excuse the devs. If the stat distribution they put on raid and tome gear is terrible compared to costum made, the fault is solely on the devs that don't that test enough (if at all) their content. They're also responsible for the high prices on crafted gear since they were the ones that decided to gate those recipies behind millions of gils in materias and rare mats and players have to get that gil back somehow. It's all on them. And it didn't happen once, it happened thrice and in all that time all they could come up with was "well let's just take crafters out of the picture and keep doing what we've always done".

[Aniforani]

Instead of having crafting gear limited to a lower ilvl than dungeon/raid gear they could add unique bonuses to non crafted equipment. Things like lowered cooldowns for certain abilities, dmg bonus to a type of elemental spell, and triggered effects upon taking damage. I'd love to see some equipment without any stat increase, but offering situational buffs powerful enough to balance the loss.

[Kabooa]

I'd love to see some equipment without any stat increase, but offering situational buffs powerful enough to balance the loss.

Personally, I'd have preferred to see more interesting materia / enchantment effects that crafters offer. It sort of achieves what you want to keep both sets of equipment interesting to juggle, but puts the expanded content into the player's hands.

Like, you have stats as they are now with a single materia slot, with the available materia / enchantment depending on the armor piece.

Boots? Faster move speed, reduced sprint cost / increased sprint duration, less damage from ground effects.
Chest? + resource regeneration, + health regeneration, + defense.

Maybe even let raid gear desynth into said materia for the crafter to socket.

Just need to adjust how Diadem loot works if that's going to be a thing going forward.