FFXIV is becoming a grind fest with little enjoyment.

[Mindy_Macready]

Crafting was pretty great in 2.x. Why did they thing crafting was so popular in this game? You could

* Make raid-viable gear (who cares if the top groups can use this to beat raids in 1 week? I'll go on a limb and claim most of the player base didn't)
* Level any crafting class you wanted (just like you can level any DoW/DoM class)
* Didn't have weekly chores in the form of red scrips for mats you can't get without a lvl 60 folklore'd gatherer, or for gear that's almost as good but you can't dye
* Sane recipes for things like battle potions ("You know what'd be a GREAT idea? Reducing potion yields to 1-per-craft, and hiding one of the mats behind an ephemeral node and have it not always even show up for retrieval, while competing with red scrip gathering items and/or aethersand")

Good thing they messed all that up! Hopefully they will at least address the mess crafting is in sometime soon.

[Alahra]

Good thing they messed all that up! Hopefully they will at least address the mess crafting is in sometime soon.

According to what information we have now, raid-viable gear is coming back, at least. We can still level whatever classes we want, but the structure more resembles DoW/DoM classes now, in that the best gear is tied to weekly lockouts (and I agree, Red Scrips are nothing but a chore—I'm finishing my third class this week and I'm not touching them again). I don't care much for the current structure but you can still level and use all DoH classes just as you always could.

[Mindy_Macready]

According to what information we have now, raid-viable gear is coming back, at least. We can still level whatever classes we want, but the structure more resembles DoW/DoM classes now, in that the best gear is tied to weekly lockouts (and I agree, Red Scrips are nothing but a chore—I'm finishing my third class this week and I'm not touching them again). I don't care much for the current structure but you can still level and use all DoH classes just as you always could.

It's actually not like DoW/DoM classes right now, because you don't have features locked from DoW/DoM like you do with specialist recipes right now. You can grind the gear, grind all the mastercraft books you want, but you'll still never be able to completely "be" another class, without wasting more than a week of your life for a re-spec at least.

The closest we've had to that scenario is when Hymns cost 48k GC seals to re-spec SCH and SMN attribute points. Look what happened there.

[Alahra]

It's actually not like DoW/DoM classes right now, because you don't have features locked from DoW/DoM like you do with specialist recipes right now.

You only mentioned leveling in your post, which is what I was responding to. There's still a lot of value to having all the crafts at 60 and you can still gear them and use them for a variety of things. Specialist recipes are different, yes.

[Mindy_Macready]

You only mentioned leveling in your post, which is what I was responding to. There's still a lot of value to having all the crafts at 60 and you can still gear them and use them for a variety of things. Specialist recipes are different, yes.

Of course there's value in leveling, that doesn't need to be said.

The specialist system does not add anything to crafting; it only subtracts from it, and makes it more annoying. Blah blah blah socialization interaction - socialization and market interactions were happening in 2.x any ways.

As for the best gear being tied to weekly lockouts, Square needs to understand that not everything needs to be tied to some sort of weekly lockout. It becomes yet another chore/grind you have to worry about for the week, and actually makes it less fun to do.