what's the point of specialist recipe?

[Catwho]

The problem with the specialist skills is that they are all situational. High level crafters would rather spend millions of gil and months of time getting their gear good enough that they can mash a few macros and turn out a HQ product from scratch. The specialist abilities don't work well in macros, therefore they are ignored.

[CyberForte]

The problem with the specialist skills is that they are all situational. High level crafters would rather spend millions of gil and months of time getting their gear good enough that they can mash a few macros and turn out a HQ product from scratch. The specialist abilities don't work well in macros, therefore they are ignored.

Honestly? No, they're just too weak in general compared to the cross-class skills, especially with the decreased occurrence of goods in high level crafts and the fact that the specialist skills are entirely dependent on goods...

[Vandril]

The problem with the specialist skills is that they are all situational. High level crafters would rather spend millions of gil and months of time getting their gear good enough that they can mash a few macros and turn out a HQ product from scratch. The specialist abilities don't work well in macros, therefore they are ignored.

As someone who is capable of HQing 2-star items and makes everything but his Red Scrip crafts manually, I can say that this is actually not the case. The specialist actions are all but useless at the highest level crafts, where they are most needed. In all my time manually crafting, I have never once desired using any of them in high-end crafts. The only ones even remotely useful is Byregot's Miracle (if you don't have Byregot's Blessing), and Innovative Touch if you're desperate enough to take that risk and can't use/don't have innovation. WWYW and Satisfaction have an extremely low chance of even breaking even on the CP costs, which renders them a waste and thus useless. Due to this, Nymeia's Wheel is also rendered useless. Both of these are caused by the drastically reduced chances of getting Good quality turns on higher level crafts, starting at level 51 and reducing in chance every so often up until the lowest chance at 60 2-star. Trained Hand is almost literally useless, as it is almost never worth the CP cost even if you DON'T count the costs of having WWYW active needed to use it. Lastly, Heart of the <Class> is a joke which costs too much CP to ever be worth it unless you got 3/3 of the possible Good turns out of it and used them all on TotT from alchemy to gain 15 CP as an end result.

The specialist actions are just truly terrible.