Hardcore crafters, SE has rewarded you big-time in this patch.

[Alahra]

Your talking about what it would take now bare minimum to reach 3 star stats, sure your route would work. Not the way I would go, but sure. She's spent the last what, 7+ months doing the bare minimum each week, and wants to be equally rewarded.

You're missing my point. We were equally rewarded up until patch 3.2. It's fine if the team wants to change the direction, but the problem is that we spent all that time and are now being told with no warning that our time (as opposed to effort) is no longer "good enough."

Like I said, if I had known they were going to change direction out of nowhere, I would have gone for pentamelds from the getgo. Compare it to what they did for tanks moving toward 3.2. We knew a couple months in advance that VIT accessories were probably going to be necessary moving forward from 3.2, so they had time to get Esoterics accessories and whatnot. We got no such information for crafting, so 180 crafters were essentially blindsided when 3.2 hit. If they had told us around the same time that 180 crafters would be at a significant disadvantage for future top-level crafts, you can bet I would have started working hard to catch up then. Instead, I'm forced to do that now, and by the time I actually do catch up, it'll probably be 3.4, meaning that I will have missed out on an entire tier of "content."

Again, before 3.0, in everything Yoshi said about the Red Scrip system, we were told that we would be able to invest time instead of gil to progress in crafting. From 3.0 through 3.1, that time investment put us at effectively the same point as melding did—it just took a lot longer to get there. That meant we lost out on the earliest stages of the market, when the items are most profitable, but we could still compete later on for less (but not insubstantial) profit. What we're seeing in 3.2 is that even if we do invest the time, we won't reliably be able to compete, and so now we need to invest gil instead to catch up.

It's the bait-and-switch that's my issue. The alternate progression path is no longer viable, and we're essentially being punished for taking a path we viewed as better for us that the developers provided for us. If the developers didn't want that path to be successful, they should have informed us of that, so we had time to shift gears to the other path before 3.2. Is it our fault for looking at the options we had and concluding that one way worked better for us? I don't really think it is, and implying that we're lazy isn't a good way to make your case.

I'm currently working out the best way forward for my pentamelds and so on, weighing the cost/benefit analysis of i150 accessories versus the i170 ones, and so on. It's not that I'm lazy (I had fully pentamelded sets for all of my main crafts in ARR—it's just that, given the choice, I chose to minimize the impact that RNG had on my wallet in 3.0). It's that I saw two options that were formerly equal, chose one of them that I deemed to be more suitable for my playstyle, only to be informed out of nowhere that the options would no longer be equal and that I should have apparently predicted the future and gone with the option that didn't work for me.