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

[Alahra]

I know I'm probably sounding elitist and I apologize if I do, but if you take away anything from this discussion please let it be this: Regardless of whether you can make as much of a profit as a HC Crafter the fact remains that you have the ability to Craft 3* when a vast majority of players still do not.

The main thing I'm taking away from it is that the entire crafting endgame for Heavensward is still an unbalanced mess on both progression paths, such that i170 crafters still aren't making back their investment, either. You definitely should have been able to break even by now and I agree that it's ridiculous that you haven't. The combo of Red Scrips and Specialization, which were intended to address a number of "problems" with crafting in ARR have failed to address most of those issues, and they've left the state of crafting as a whole largely broken. I took the opposite path from you: I saw that the investment to max out 170 gear likely wasn't going to pay off and chose not to, and now I'm paying for that.

But that the system is messed up for 170 crafters too shouldn't necessarily mean that 180 crafters should now be locked out of equal market participation, at least not without advance warning. I'm sure many crafters in my position would have gladly changed directions had we been aware that there was going to be a much greater gap going forward.

I do think they should have put the new 180 gear on a new token, not the old one, so that that option would have locked 180 crafters out of the highly profitable early market. But then the gear we eventually got would be somewhat weaker but still comparable to the other option. That was the bargain we signed up for originally, going by how the gear was balanced in 3.0. Instead, we were able to participate (in a hindered way) in the early market and will not, for this raid tier at least, ever be able to craft the items at a comparable level of effectiveness to what we had in 3.0 and 3.1.

But your post seems to suggest something analogous to this: imagine that MNK spent the first seven months of Heavensward underpowered (which, they actually sort of did, relative to the other melee). Changes in 3.2 to MNK meant that it was now the preferred melee DPS (compared to say, NIN). But imagine that the raid environment had also changed at the same time such that NINs could no longer effectively participate (perhaps due to increased damage taken for some reason or another, much as was the case with DRG in early FCOB before their Magic Defense buff). The response to NINs rightfully frustrated that they could no longer effectively participate in raids (with the market being analogous to raids) should not be "But MNKs couldn't raid for 7 months!"

The response should be that both NIN and MNK should be on relatively equal footing (they still aren't, from what I can tell of most raid compositions—NIN still has a slight edge). I'm a NIN main and I still think MNK needs to be brought up to par (even if I'm not really happy with so much of NIN's design direction in the expansion). NIN is in fact generally considered easier to play at a high level than MNK, but that doesn't mean NIN should be less useful in a raid because of it, in my view. I see 180 vs. 170 similarly (which should, in my view function much as Zodiac/Anima weapons do vs. raiding, with the investment of time on the one hand and the investment of effort/gil in the other).

The fact of the matter is for everything else in the game, you are able to participate in all aspects of content if you follow your chosen progression path to the natural endpoint in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from the other progression paths. Tomestone gear is at worst, marginally less effective than an optimal mix of raid and tomestone gear. Zodiac/Anima weapons still eventually reach the exact same weapons damage as raid ones do. Market participation is part of the overall "content" of crafting much as raids are part of the "content" for battle content, and it's my view that the progression paths should ultimately be comparable in a similar manner.

[Sollux]

The main thing I'm taking away from it is that the entire crafting endgame for Heavensward is still an unbalanced mess on both progression paths, such that i170 crafters still aren't making back their investment, either. You definitely should have been able to break even by now and I agree that it's ridiculous that you haven't...

But that the system is messed up for 170 crafters too shouldn't necessarily mean that 180 crafters should now be locked out of equal market participation, at least not without advance warning. I'm sure many crafters in my position would have gladly changed directions had we been aware that there was going to be a much greater gap going forward.

To make things clear, I didn't become a i170 Crafter for the profit. It's nice, yes, but to me Crafting IS my Endgame, and I would have geared my classes to the teeth regardless of whether it paid off or not. I don't care that I haven't made 200m because I farmed the majority of the mats for my sets myself because prices were insane and I wanted to gear up as quickly as possible.


The system isn't broken, but it's also by no means perfect. The reason a lot of Crafters are playing catch-up now is because from 3.0 until 3.2 there was no monetary incentive to gear up which meant they either stuck with white gear or slowly got i180 gear. This actually worked in my favor since materia and aethersand prices stayed low for a very long time which made Crafting and melding the gear much less painful than it is now.

One other thing as well, in regards to being prepared for changes in Crafting: They never have, and likely never will, release information on the next tier recipes before release. Part of being a good Crafter is planning for the future, and preparing for possible changes that might occur based on previous trends. In 2.0, 3* recipes were released 7 months after the game was released and had such a big requirement jump that you almost had to get at least a few Artisan pieces and overmeld a little in order to Craft it. Guess how long it's been since Red Scrips were released? 7 months. Someone in full i180 with a few melds can Craft 3*, the only difference between now and ARR is that you had 7 months to gear up whereas in ARR the Artisan gear you needed to Craft the 3* was released along with the patch.

Your example comparison with MNK and NIN was good (MNK is my Combat main actually), however it wasn't that i170 was underpowered, it was actually overpowered and unnecessary for the current content. When I mention it taking 7 months for the i170 to be relevant it's not just a complaint, it's an example of how long you could go without needing i170 gear as well as a reminder of how much time we had to GET i170/i180 gear before it actually became necessary.

The fact of the matter is for everything else in the game, you are able to participate in all aspects of content if you follow your chosen progression path to the natural endpoint in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from the other progression paths. Tomestone gear is at worst, marginally less effective than an optimal mix of raid and tomestone gear. Zodiac/Anima weapons still eventually reach the exact same weapons damage as raid ones do. Market participation is part of the overall "content" of crafting much as raids are part of the "content" for battle content, and it's my view that the progression paths should ultimately be comparable in a similar manner.

Regardless of what aspect of the game you're speaking to the majority of the time the optimal build involves a combination of both the time-based and skill-based gear, and if you want to be optimal and reach Endgame faster than others you HAVE to mix and match. The increase might be marginal in some cases, but that increase becomes much less marginal when you're on the bleeding edge of Endgame. Also, Tomestone gear only reaches the ilvl of Raid gear when upgraded, and if you don't Raid or are unable to then you're going to be behind everyone who can until they release an alternative way to get the upgrade mat. In the same vein, if you don't Craft/meld i170 gear or are unable to you're going to be behind every who can until they release alternative Scrip gear.

I would also agree that "Market participation" is part of the overall Crafting content, however I see it in the sense that there's always money to be made if you're willing to look for it and a dedicated Crafter will never be poor. Those who actively participate in the market should have no trouble buying or melding 1 or 2 pieces to reach the level they're comfortable with for 3* recipes.

[Alahra]

In the same vein, if you don't Craft/meld i170 gear or are unable to you're going to be behind every who can until they release alternative Scrip gear.

This is actually the biggest point at which I feel they screwed up. There's essentially no "time" element to the 180 gear for 3.2 and there should have been, so that, just like the left side gear, the right side gear could have had "psuedo-melds" that were comparable (but not as good as) pentameld gear. That cements the primary benefit of 170 gear being early readiness. I honestly don't think the 180 gear should be able to craft the gear yet, period—but once they *can* craft it, it's my belief that it should be comparable in effectiveness to the 170 gear, which parallels the gap between Tomestone and raid gear for non-raiders. Once non-raiders *can* upgrade their gear, it is essentially just as good as raid gear since the period for bleeding edge progression is gone, and that's fine.

What we got instead with crafting this patch is the equivalent of tomestone gear not being upgradable without raiding, period (meaning non-raiders would always only have i230 gear) unless they do something unexpected and increase the strength of the 180 accessories with patch 3.25 or 3.3. We have no precedent for that, though, so as of now, it looks like 180 crafters are always going to be behind.

It's my belief that they should have made it easier to catch up to 170 gear too, though (much as they did with Esoterics gear this patch). The cost for the materials has actually gone up on my server at least since 3.2, so for someone who is perhaps coming back to the game after not being happy with the state of crafting, they're in a pretty tight spot right now unless they're already prepared to do all the gathering of the mats themselves (and I'd imagine that there are a lot of folks who aren't). That would have also made the transition from 180 gear to 170 pentamelds an easier pill to swallow for those of us who aren't satisfied with the change in relative effectiveness.

Regarding how long we had to get to 170 gear: the time period is obviously true. But there was no indication from the developers that one path particular would ever be necessary to be effective at the highest tier of crafting, since they were fairly comparable in 3.0/3.1. The effective gap is simply much larger now, since we all know CP is the single most important stat—and the gap would be analogous to locking tomestone players to lower Weapon Damage or something, which they do actually do, but they've never yet done something of that nature for crafting. However, the clearest example of time (as opposed to effort) producing a top-level reward is with the Zodiac/Anima weapon: those do in fact meet the potential of raid-class weapons given enough time, all without ever needing to do difficult content (the equivalent of melding in this example). But regardless, they could have told us that they were going to reduce the relative strength of 180 gear without actually revealing any information regarding recipes or the like (much as they told us about the new advancement path before HW even though we had no idea what endgame crafting would be like at the time).

I had stopped doing Red Scrips about 2 months prior to 3.2, when I finished the gear for my last specialist, as the standard practice for battle classes is that the old currency had always been replaced with a new one. We found out about 2 weeks before the patch (in a Japanese interview) that this wouldn't actually be the case, and once we did, I capped Scrips for those two weeks—but given how abysmal the 180 accessories are, that ended up being unnecessary. i150 accessories provide more CP than the i180 ones with a single base meld that I already had, which is honestly pretty strange, given that it likely costs more to cap Red Scrips for one week to get an i180 accessory than it does to get a single Grade 3 Cunning.

[Sollux]

What we got instead with crafting this patch is the equivalent of tomestone gear not being upgradable without raiding, period (meaning non-raiders would always only have i230 gear) unless they do something unexpected and increase the strength of the 180 accessories with patch 3.25 or 3.3. We have no precedent for that, though, so as of now, it looks like 180 crafters are always going to be behind.

You are correct that there is no Crafting equivalent of the Combat i230-i240 upgrade but consider this: A Crafter can, for all intents and purposes, have a full overmelded i170 set without even unlocking a single Master Book. No amount of "Raiding" is necessary, as a clever Crafter can easily earn enough to afford any "Raid" piece they want. Think of gil as a sort of token system, except it has no cap, there are a TON of ways to get them, the better Crafter/Merchant you are the more tokens you can make in a day, and with enough tokens you can trade them for "Raid-level" gear.

Combat doesn't have this option. They can't work towards Midas gear by running Brayflox over and over again. There's no token they can trade for Raid gear that drops outside of Raiding. They can't even upgrade their Tome gear until SE releases an alternative method weeks if not months after release.

You said yourself the Market is a part of the Crafting experience, and you can BET they took that into account when they planned the gear progression.

It's my belief that they should have made it easier to catch up to 170 gear too, though (much as they did with Esoterics gear this patch). The cost for the materials has actually gone up on my server at least since 3.2, so for someone who is perhaps coming back to the game after not being happy with the state of crafting, they're in a pretty tight spot right now unless they're already prepared to do all the gathering of the mats themselves (and I'd imagine that there are a lot of folks who aren't). That would have also made the transition from 180 gear to 170 pentamelds an easier pill to swallow for those of us who aren't satisfied with the change in relative effectiveness.

I see this comment a lot these days, and to save what little space I can in this essay of a comment here's a link to a reply I made in this exact thread detailing all the ways gearing has been made easier since release, ESPECIALLY for i170 gear: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post3618514

In regards to the prices, how easy the materials are to obtain has little to do with how much they cost on the market. Demand VASTLY outweighs supply right now because a ton of Crafters are trying to catch up. If they DID choose to gather the mats themselves they'd find it MUCH easier than it was before and would likely save way more in gil than they'd lose in time.

Regarding how long we had to get to 170 gear: the time period is obviously true. But there was no indication from the developers that one path particular would ever be necessary to be effective at the highest tier of crafting, since they were fairly comparable in 3.0/3.1. The effective gap is simply much larger now, since we all know CP is the single most important stat—and the gap would be analogous to locking tomestone players to lower Weapon Damage or something, which they do actually do, but they've never yet done something of that nature for crafting. However, the clearest example of time (as opposed to effort) producing a top-level reward is with the Zodiac/Anima weapon: those do in fact meet the potential of raid-class weapons given enough time, all without ever needing to do difficult content (the equivalent of melding in this example).

How do we know they're not releasing a Crafting Relic? There's definitely a precedent from 2.0, and it would fall in line with why you're struggling now. Combat classes that can't/don't raid are "locked into lower Weapon Damage" and cannot perform as well as those who can until the next step of Relic is released. In comparison, i180 Crafters are suffering now because they can't/don't Craft/buy i170 gear and cannot perform as well as those who can until the 3.0 Crafting Relic is released.

But regardless, they could have told us that they were going to reduce the relative strength of 180 gear without actually revealing any information regarding recipes or the like (much as they told us about the new advancement path before HW even though we had no idea what endgame crafting would be like at the time).

While I don't have time to find a quote I know for a fact they've stated that the i170 when overmelded would definitely be more powerful than the i180 and will edit with a quote when I can find the time.

I had stopped doing Red Scrips about 2 months prior to 3.2, when I finished the gear for my last specialist, as the standard practice for battle classes is that the old currency had always been replaced with a new one. We found out about 2 weeks before the patch (in a Japanese interview) that this wouldn't actually be the case, and once we did, I capped Scrips for those two weeks—but given how abysmal the 180 accessories are, that ended up being unnecessary. i150 accessories provide more CP than the i180 ones with a single base meld that I already had, which is honestly pretty strange, given that it likely costs more to cap Red Scrips for one week to get an i180 accessory than it does to get a single Grade 3 Cunning.

I don't blame you for assuming we'd have a new color Scrip by now (I thought so too), and I agree that the i180 accessories are sub-par at best and have no idea what they were thinking with those. Spirit Bonding maybe? Regardless, I stopped capping Red Scrips purely because I no longer need them, but if I did I would likely use the tokens to turn a profit selling mats.

[Kakure]

I feel like I am the only one who is actually reading what Alahra wrote.

The i180 accessories are terrible. We all agree on this. They are strictly inferior to i170 accessories.

The community has long understood the i180 gear to be an independent, parallel gear path with distinct tradeoffs, not just a bunch of suboptimally itemized a la carte pieces. Every tutorial I read after returning to the game described the Heavenward crafting system this way.

It was perfectly reasonable to assume that the relative strength of the i170 and i180 accessories would mirror the relative strength of all the other i170 and i180 crafting gear in the game, with i180 pieces equivalent to partially melded HQ i170 minus a few CP.

When i180 gear was introduced, the full set (with i110-i150 offhand and accessories) had far more craftsmanship and control than the two-star minimums. On that basis, and on the understanding that the i180 gear was created as an independent, parallel gear path, it was entirely reasonable to expect that the full set of i180 gear would at least give crafters adequate craftsmanship, control, or CP for three-star crafting, with the other two made up by food. It would even be reasonable to assume that the i180 set might give crafters enough of more than one stat.

What part of this is even slightly controversial?

[Kabooa]

What part of this is even slightly controversial?

The part where 'reasonable assumption' is supposed to be some sort of valid argument.

I'm not really knocking her for being wrong. I'm telling her she's making a bigger deal out of this than it is.

My goldsmith, the only craft I have that's relevant to this particular discussion, can both craft 3star and have a pretty reasonable chance at HQ without the HQ 3star components. Other than the new redscrip offhand, that gear hasn't changed since 3.1

I have an i170 helmet, full i180 otherwise for major armor pieces. I have the i180 mainhand. I have eco melded white belt and accessories. For all intents and purposes I am not in this 'super melded i170' she believes she needs to have in order to compete.

I am, admittedly, not the richest person to come on to these forums, but the amount of effort I put in for my gil this patch cycle is near non-existent. A few minutes here and there, some near-afk craft sessions, and then some give-and-take experimentation with full blown crafts. I've made every piece I can for my battle classes that I care for, for others, and a fair amount I've sold. The fact that she's having such an issue adjusting is, frankly, unfathomable to me, because she'd have to literally be doing nothing.

It's like LZ all over again.

[MN_14]

One thing to consider is that a full i180 build with beet soup might have been balanced to go hand in hand with specialist abilities. Although non-ideal for those with sufficient CP, these abilities do work most of the time (under average RNG) and are particularly useful for CP recovery.

It could be worth trying out.

[Kabooa]

a full i180 build with beet soup might have been balanced to go hand in hand with specialist abilities.
It could be worth trying out.

Eh. Thing about that is, in all the 3star crafts I do using Maker's Mark (17 free steps), on average I'll get 2-3 Goods. Whistle is a heart breaking 36cp to start. So you not only need the 'goods' to count it down, but you need enough to trigger it to 9 to whistle for 15, then from 8 to 6 to whistle again for another cp. You're still 6 CP down at this point. It's difficult to justify the step loss during Maker's to use it, but it's also the best time -to- use it. You need 2 goods to hit 9, then 2 more to 6. That's not even breaking even, and if you're using whistle at those stacks you don't get the 3 stack benefit unless you're fine with getting RNG'd out of whistle.

Whistle While you Work really needs to be a one time use, free ability because I can't see it being worth the bother.

[Alahra]

I see this comment a lot these days, and to save what little space I can in this essay of a comment here's a link to a reply I made in this exact thread detailing all the ways gearing has been made easier since release

I should have been more specific (I'd seen your post before). Most of those changes weren't made with the purpose of facilitating folks catching up. They were made because the system as originally implemented required far too much investment for almost no actual reward.

I think they should have done more to make the items easier to acquire in 3.2 specifically, in parallel to the way they reduced the cost of Esoterics gear, removed the weekly lockout on it, and made Gobdip/twine/coats easier to acquire. The addition of the materials to the dungeons is normally how they do this, but something seems different about the drop rates this time, as I've not personally seen any drop since the patch. Compared to how common the materials drop in the i70, i80, and i90 dungeons in ARR, the difference is pretty striking.

You can catch up a class to i210 in a matter of days now with little effort, but you're going to be looking at more time to do so with i170 crafted gear unless you're sitting on a lot of gil, since the weekly lockouts are still in place, limiting the number of items you can acquire if you go the route of gathering them youself via Red Scrips. And of course, that requires having multiple classes at 60 (at the least, 1 crafter and 1 gatherer)—battle classes don't need to have that in place to quickly catch up (and also requires weekly capping of two currencies—twice what a battle class needs to do).

It's even worse for i180 crafters, who are still looking at the same total number of weeks to gear up that they've always had since 3.0. I don't even want to know what that wall would look like to a fresh level 60 crafter. They would be insane to choose the i180 path at this point (which honestly makes me wonder why the i180 path even exists).

Obviously, crafting is more about time investment than battle content is, so it's reasonable that the catch up period would be longer—but it's probably too much longer at this point.

How do we know they're not releasing a Crafting Relic?

We don't, but that's sort of the issue. If the two advancement paths are meant to be roughly parallel (as they were in 3.0/3.1), then i180 crafters should, I feel, have at least some ability to prepare, which does require at least some sense of of where things will go. The only sense we had of where the i180 gear would go had to be based on what gear was available in 3.0—and that gear provided us with more than enough stats for the top tier of crafting at the time. But the new i180 gear only gets us to the bare minimum instead, so the baseline seems to have changed, and with no information from the developers since prior to 3.0 regarding their design goals for i180 gear, we have no idea why, which makes it very difficult to plan for the future. Being able to plan is, I agree, a very important part of being a crafter.

But if one advancement path isn't going to be consistent in how it progresses, it significantly hampers the ability for players on that path to really plan, making it a notably suboptimal choice (something that say, tomestone gear isn't—it is still roughly equivalent, with the difference being relatively minor differences in "effective main stat" at the progression path's endpoint). As you've noted, I'm more of a "midcore" crafter, which is part of why I chose the i180 progression path. But as a midcore crafter, being something approaching optimal is important to me. Being able to make the items isn't enough to satisfy me: I want to also effectively participate in the market.

The i180 gear was more than capable of doing so in 3.0/3.1 relative to the i170 gear, now instead of being more than capable (by providing us with stats above minimums, allowing for CP food), it instead only reaches the bare minimums with food, and the CP gear leaves us with a very significant CP deficit that causes a heavy reliance on HQ materials. This impacts one's ability to participate in a market where the ability to HQ with NQ mats is greatly desired (understandably so, of course).

While I don't have time to find a quote I know for a fact they've stated that the i170 when overmelded would definitely be more powerful than the i180 and will edit with a quote when I can find the time.

There's no need, I'm pretty sure I remember the interview you're thinking of. They did say the i170 stuff would be the better option, and that was true in 3.0. But the gap between the two advancement paths is much larger now (since it's one of CP, rather than Crafts or Control, which have less of an impact past the minimums for whatever tier of crafting you're aiming for).

When i180 gear was introduced, the full set (with i110-i150 offhand and accessories) had far more craftsmanship and control than the two-star minimums. On that basis, and on the understanding that the i180 gear was created as an independent, parallel gear path, it was entirely reasonable to expect that the full set of i180 gear would at least give crafters adequate craftsmanship, control, or CP for three-star crafting, with the other two made up by food.

Exactly. Heavensward established a certain baseline of relative strength for the two advancement paths. That baseline is now significantly different, and different enough that it seems to me that either the developers improperly balanced the new gear additions, or they wanted a different baseline. If they did want a different baseline, I feel they should have at least given us some information regarding their design goals for i180 scrip gear, so that we could prepare accordingly.

The fact that she's having such an issue adjusting is, frankly, unfathomable to me, because she'd have to literally be doing nothing.

This is what I meant earlier when I said that people weren't actually responding to the things I'm actually saying. I've said numerous times that I'm able to craft the pieces. I'm not having "an issue adjusting" at all. What I am taking issue with is the apparent change in design direction from two roughly parallel gearing paths to one noticeably subpar gearing path and one functional gearing path.

One thing to consider is that a full i180 build with beet soup might have been balanced to go hand in hand with specialist abilities. Although non-ideal for those with sufficient CP, these abilities do work most of the time (under average RNG) and are particularly useful for CP recovery.

I've considered this myself, though I haven't experimented much with them. My experience with the Specialist abilities early on at 60 certainly didn't show that they were useful for CP recovery, though. I nearly always had less CP than if I hadn't used them. At some point when experimenting with the materials won't break my meager bank, I want to sit down and play with it and see if the longer synths will work out more in favor of Whistle While You Work, even so, but I'm skeptical they'll really make much of a difference.