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.

[Seyb]

snip

I have to ask: How was your time not "good enough"?
Just take a second to look at this build:

This is what you could have had pre patch 3.2 for 2 star crafting. Accessories and belt aren't even crazily melded.
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/TC5C

With patch 3.2 the devs gave you a perfect 180 offhand to immediately reach 3 star (thanks to the specialist crystal) given you had saved enough tokens.
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/TBZ4

So how did they put you at a disadvantage?

[Alahra]

So how did they put you at a disadvantage?

Asking for melds from the advancement path that was supposed to allow us to not meld is the crux of the problem, though. Those materia aren't exactly cheap on my server. Control IVs are currently going for 400-500k here and the IIIs aren't insignificant in cost either. When we also need materia for all battle class gear now, not to mention the inflation on food and potions for raiding (especially in the case of potions and the 1 per recipe change), I can't just dump all my gil into overmelding at this time.

Like I said, I'm currently working out the best way to proceed. But I don't have to like it. By the time the time I've gotten the gil together to get the melds, it'll be well past the point where I can actually make the investment back in a timely manner.

I looked at your thread yesterday, and it's been the starting point for me, but I also know that it likely won't be enough come 3.4 with 4-star crafting, which will undoubtedly result in needing to remeld everything again, which is going to increase the impact of melding on my wallet. So I'm considering building from the ground up so that I don't have to do this yet again come 3.4.

[Seyb]

I can understand that it's hard to catch up right now. I was missing like 5 Control IV in the end (after I had used up my full stack) and had to buy them at 500k a piece because the demand increased so much.
But my point was, you could have already had everything before patch 3.2. You needed at least 437 CP for Rath's rotation for 2 stars and you need the same amount now for 3 stars. So your accessories should have already been melded meaning all you needed to do was upgrade your offhand to 180. :/

[Alahra]

But my point was, you could have already had everything before patch 3.2. You needed at least 437 CP for Rath's rotation for 2 stars and you need the same amount now for 3 stars. So your accessories should have already been melded meaning all you needed to do was upgrade your offhand to 180. :/

You didn't need 437 CP to reliably HQ them, though. I made a killing on the i185 gear with 375 CP because we could meet the requirements and still use CP food. The difference with the 3-stars is that we have to use Beet Soup, which robs us of the extra CP, making them much more difficult to HQ even if the same base rotation works because you're entirely at the mercy of Hasty RNG.

[Seyb]

You didn't need 437 CP to reliably HQ them, though. I made a killing on the i185 gear with 375 CP because we could meet the requirements and still use CP food. The difference with the 3-stars is that we have to use Beet Soup, which robs us of the extra CP, making them much more difficult to HQ even if the same base rotation works because you're entirely at the mercy of Hasty RNG.

So you mean, you weren't, aren't and won't be willing to ever meld your accessories? The main source for CP? Well then, in my opinion S-E did eveything right to not allow you to craft 3 star as easily as those who put in that little bit of materia.
I've shown you the easy way to get the 3 star stats with enough CP using seafood stew. But if you aren't willing to meld, then it's not going to happen.

[Alahra]

So you mean, you weren't, aren't and won't be willing to ever meld your accessories?

You haven't read my posts entirely, as I've said multiple times I'm currently working on a melding plan (I already have base melds on my accessories since the CP IIIs were really cheap at one point), and I had full pentamelds in ARR.

My issue is that we were told going forward we wouldn't have to meld, and I made a decision in accordance with what we knew of the development direction. We received no indication that melding was going to be all but necessary moving forward. If we had, I wouldn't be so frustrated right now.

[Seyb]

You haven't read my posts entirely, as I've said multiple times I'm currently working on a melding plan (I already have base melds on my accessories since the CP IIIs were really cheap at one point), and I had full pentamelds in ARR.

Good luck with your melding plan then... As I said, you should only be a tiny step away from 3 star stats.

[Alahra]

Good luck with your melding plan then... As I said, you should only be a tiny step away from 3 star stats.

I'm already able to make them with Beet Soup. But actually doing so profitably is prohibitive since it all but requires fully-HQ mats for any reasonable chance of an HQ, and with the current state of the market (on my server at least), that leaves me essentially unable to participate with 3-stars.

I'm definitely not a "tiny bit" from being able to do them without Beet Soup, though. It's going to cost millions that I presently don't have.

[Kabooa]

I didn't really have to meld, other than cheapo melds into the accessories and into the headpiece I made myself for Goldsmith.

I think the real issue here is misinterpretation. Omnicrafters? Yeah, I can see them being the ones who got blind sided, via both specialist lock outs and the sudden jump in stat requirements. Suddenly that melded leftside might not cut it and you have to (shocker) grab specialized armor for it.

But if you were a crafter who picked two or maybe 3 (the specialist focus in other words), odds are you had your mixture of cheap i180/i170 already set up. I can guarantee that I was in the bottom percentile of 'people prepared for 3.2' and I still managed to cheaply hobble together the bare essentials to get a tiny slice of the volatile first day market.
d
Given I hadn't done red scrips for nearly the entirety of the prior 3 months, I'd say the blindside itself wasn't nearly as exaggerated as you're making it.