what's the point of specialist recipe?

[MN_14]

I'm not disagreeing that there are major issues with crafting at the moment. 4* crafting was already considered inaccessible for most back in ARR (even a month after 2.4, the cost of a Supra tool was around 3.5 million gil and a master book was 500k provided that you weren't blowing up more than 2 FC3s per book; a lot of crafters blew up way more than that, artisan's offhands were worth at least 1.5 million in materials). The 4* crafts themselves could cost anywhere from 500k to 3 million gil per item in terms of production costs, so I do have to note that crafting high end items to sell on the market board is generally much cheaper now than back then including specialist recipes like the anima weapon items or the sky pirate's gear. The only exception would be recipes that require gated red scrip materials.

In my opinion, crafting has an overall far larger barrier than before due to the time commitment required if you can't buy your materials or if you decide to craft i170/i180 items. Lower tier items have also gotten really expensive due to general inflation and crafters with lots of gil who are willing to spend a lot if they believe that they can earn a huge return.

[Granyala]

I just don't get why there is such a HUGE wall of grind/timesink to the ENTRY of crafting.

It's not as if crafters could easily craft endgame raid equivalent gear or something and imho the difficulty should come from crafting these specific recipes not from a mindless MEGAFARM in order to get the necessary crafting stats in order to be graced with the possibility of attempting the craft.

From the looks of it, it seems that I leveled my GSM to 60 for umm.. well ... nothing really. I can't craft anything interesting and progressing further gets prohibitively expensive in both gil and playtime.

Meh.

[Katchoo]

The 4* crafts themselves could cost anywhere from 500k to 3 million gil per item in terms of production costs, so I do have to note that crafting high end items to sell on the market board is generally much cheaper now than back then including specialist recipes like the anima weapon items or the sky pirate's gear. The only exception would be recipes that require gated red scrip materials.

I like what you are saying but thats not a great example. 4* Crafts often were BiS pieces of gear VS gear that is purely for glamour. It's also not made from anything particularly hard to get nor does it matter if you HQ it or not.

You are correct tho. Crafting has had some variation of a lockout for a LONG time. Desynthesis being one where you could only have 3 crafts levelled to a useful level AND it took considerable investment for the most part to get them that high. And your right, unlocking 4* was a bitch and took a lot of time, money, practice and skill.


However, specialist recipes, like so many other things in HW, are a LAZY LAZY way of gating content. There is no "with time and skill you can unlock more things" or even "throw money at this to unlock more things" it's a flat boring "nope you are stuck with those crafts or you can blow all your red scripts on unlocking one more craft every week"

[Giantbane]

No more contradictory than the weekly tome system since 2.0 and on.

You can do everything.

You can't specialize in everything.

It's that simple. (Except for gatherers, but they work around competing time slots for materials)

Beginning of 2.0 with the first relic: Any crafter could easily make and meld the required components as long as you were 50 in that craft, you didn't even need to HQ it. However, each recipe required an ingredient that was stuck in a dungeon that anyone could farm.

Since most crafters could make those items, supply was high and prices were reasonable. Even then, I still made a decent amount of $$ on crafted pieces and melds. Anyone else could make money on the materia or by farming the weapon pieces that came out of AK. Seems like it worked much better than this gated nonsense with crap specialist actions.

[AdamZ]

You must either be badly spending your Gil on inefficient crafts or be failing your collectables if you think 480 red scripts are worth THAT much. (or maybe your server just has incredibly inflated prices on materials since no one wants to gather it).

Think he is looking at how much you could sell the red script item for, not cost to get.

So, we have 70K (average) a pop for a gather item. Need 20 items and 1 red script to get 15 crafting items.
Total if you buy the gather stuff is 1.4 million.
The crafting items, for example Purified Coke, sell for an average of approx $130,000 each. As you get 15 that is 1.95 million
Therefore the value of one red script is 0.55 million.
Round the 480 down to 450 for 9 scripts and that is 4.95 million Gil.

Now if you have larger supply the margin will likely get smaller, but that is my server at the moment.