Trying to craft.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Ok, so maybe someone can help explain some of these crafter skills. like:

15 Rapid Synthesis - Improves progress. Efficiency: 250%, Success Rate: 50%. This one I just don't understand, I have enough trouble getting something with a 80% success rate to be a success, so 50% would just be pure painful.

Steady Hand, and later, Steady Hand 2 (from Culinarian at level 37). Add 20% (30% with SH2) to that 50% bringing it to 70 (or 80) percent chance of working. It is 2.5 times as strong as a Basic Synthesis, just a hair over twice as strong as a Careful Synthesis 2. And, it costs no CP to use. It's really a skill for when you have a lot of Progress left to make, though there are other, better, options available at high levels.
And

15 Ingenuity - Lowers recipe level to current level for the next 5 steps. (24 CP cost). This one I think it's saying if you're level 30 trying to do a level 34 recipe does that mean the recipe now becomes a level 30?

Sort of. I don't recall the previous mechanics, nor how exactly they got changed, but suffice it to say that the move (and its upgrade, Ingenuity 2, at level 50) make the harder recipes easier. The effect is that the level-based penalty is lessened. Recipes higher level than your own have a level-based penalty. Heavensward recipes have a worse penalty than Realm Reborn recipes, by the way. This penalty reduces the amount of Progress and Quality you can add with any given move. Ingenuity and Ingenuity 2 serve to reduce the recipe level somewhat, which then reduces the penalty. Now, if the penalty is not there anymore, these moves have no effect (you get no benefit from it for being a level blacksmith trying to make bronze ingots). Also, if the level differential is too great, these moves will not have any apparent effect either - this was observed prior to Heavensward, with the 3 and 4 starred level 50 recipes.
Then:

15 Rumination - Removes Inner Quiet effect and restores CP proportional to the number of times control was increased. - I have only used inner quiet a hand full of times, mostly because i just don't have the CP to maintain it and everything else, but is the CP restored worth using this?

I found this to be a worthless skill. Inner Quiet is a skill you want to hit first off, pretty much always. It increases your Control by 20% each time a Touch is successful. This has the effect of increasing the Quality added by the next touch by around 10% of the base, starting Touch. If your first Basic Touch was 30 points, your second will be about 33, then about 36, 39, 42, 45, and so on. That is much better than simply adding 30 Quality per Basic Touch!

Rumination, however, I found worthless, as I said. There are two reasons for this. First, it teaches a bad habit. Using the skill suggests adding Quality first, then using Rumination to get the CP needed to push the Progress through. This is backward compared to what you are going to be doing once you get Byregot's Blessing. Byregot's Blessing is a move that also kills your Inner Quiet stack - but it adds a TON of Quality when it does so, based both upon the fact that Inner Quiet raises your Control (for more Quality) and that BB gets a bonus to the Quality with each IQ stack! Once you get Byregot's Blessing, you will be focusing on Progress first, until you are one Careful Synthesis (1 or 2) from finishing the synth, then building your Inner Quiet stack as high as possible before using Byregot's to maximize your Quality. The other reason I never found Rumination useful is I never saw it add enough CP to Waste Not, much less any other Durability-affecting move. No Durability increase meant that whether I used Rumination or not, I was about to finish the synth when I was done with my CP anyway.

The rest of them i can see a use for, those kind of seem useless, but that may be my lack of crafting experience lol. But that 50% one is just something I don't think I can even attempt to rely on. RNGesus does not like me. If I use a touch ability it's gotta be with the one that increases success rate by 20% other wise it's all fails, 80% success sounds like a lot, but it's already a 50/50 chance to succeed (And I have recorded this, 348 touches used 163 fails, a little under 50% but still nowhere near 80% chance to succeed.) And it's things like that don't make crafting very enjoyable for me. But again maybe I'm doing it wrong.

The other 50% chance move is Hasty Touch. This move costs 0 CP, enabling you to use your CP for Steady Hand 1/2, and for "Durability games" - effects that reduce Durability losses or that restore spent Durability.

[Cleanse]

Ok, so maybe someone can help explain some of these crafter skills...

Of these, Ingenuity is the only 'useful' one. It can, in some cases, save you a whole synth step.

[MeridaQ]

Of these, Ingenuity is the only 'useful' one. It can, in some cases, save you a whole synth step.

Okay so this isn't true, for example at low levels Rapid Synth & Hasty Touch are some of the best skills to HQ. What I would suggest is to start each craft. Eat some CP+ food (CP is your best friend) use inner quiet>steady hand>rapid synth until you are 1 or 2 progress steps from finishing with a basic/careful synth>then switch over to hasty touch until steady hand falls off>when durability low use masters mend> repeat process until low on CP (steady hand hasty touch spam) then finish with basic synth. If your rapid synth finishes the item in one step then use basic/careful synth in the beginning to be one step from finishing and begin hasty touch spam. Without many skills this is a very effective way to craft at low levels & HQ! Good luck!

[Kakure]

Personally, I've never really understood the "get every craft to level fifteen" mantra. As you noted, half the skills are of questionable value while you're leveling, and you cannot equip them all at the same time until you are level 35 anyway. That said, it is more efficient to level your crafting skills together because you get experience for crafting cross-class components, like leather and bolts of cloth, and it also saves bag space.

I suggest working toward Waste Not (Leatherworker) and Tricks of the Trade (Alchemy) first. Waste Not gives you a durability action cheap enough that you can actually use it at lower levels, and Tricks of the Trade is one of our only ways to generate more CP.

Once you have Waste Not and Tricks of the Trade, Hasty Touch (Culinarian) is a good third skill to work toward. Hasty Touch is the backbone of a lot of high-level crafting, but that does not really happen until you get Steady Hand II (Culinarian level 37) and quite a bit more CP. For now, it will probably just be a filler when you have extra durability but not enough CP to do anything useful with it. For example, it is common to craft 40-durability items, like thread or ingots, by starting with:

Steady Hand
Basic Touch
Basic Touch
Basic Touch

This leaves you with ten durability and about a hundred CP. You can't use another touch action because that would reduce your durability to zero and break your item, but if you use Master's Mend to restore durability you won't have enough CP to do anything. This is where Hasty Touch comes in.

Waste Not solves this problem nicely, by the way. Once you get Waste Not, your basic 40-durability rotation becomes:

Waste Not
Steady Hand
Basic Touch
Basic Touch
Basic Touch
Basic Touch
Basic Touch
Careful Synthesis

As you level and get more CP from accessories you can add Inner Quiet at the start and then upgrade some of your touches from Basic to Standard, but this is the basic template.

Good luck!

[LineageRazor]

15 Rapid Synthesis - Improves progress. Efficiency: 250%, Success Rate: 50%. This one I just don't understand, I have enough trouble getting something with a 80% success rate to be a success, so 50% would just be pure painful.

Roth touched on this one already, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail.

Probably the most important thing to learn in crafting, is how to ration your CP. The longer you can stretch your CP, the more quality and progress you can add to a synth. A lot of crafter strategies are, basically, to get the most possible bang for your buck.

Rapid Synthesis and Hasty Touch both have ZERO CP cost, but the tradeoff is a painfully low success rate. That said, because it's so cheap, Hasty Touch is a very important part of high-level crafting. Crafters almost always use Hasty Touch combined with Steady Hand or Steady Hand II, which boost the success rate of the ability to 70% or 80%, respectively. To put it into perspective, if you use Steady Hand II and then Hasty Touch five times, you're likely to get four successes and one failure, all for only 25 CP. If you were to use Steady Hand II and then Basic Touch five times, you'd get five guaranteed successes - but the CP cost is a prohibitive 115 CP.

People tend to pooh-pooh Rapid Synthesis as there are so many better options available at high levels. However, those high-level alternatives DO still cost CP, and sometimes a considerable amount of it. If your CP budget is aching, Rapid Synthesis offers the same advantages that Hasty Touch does, just for synthesis progress instead of quality. There's been more than one occasion, as well, when I realize that I miscalculated and do not have enough durability left to finish the synth with Careful Synthesis II; Rapid Synthesis, even without Steady Hand, can offer a 50% shot of recovery, where the chances would be 0% otherwise.

[Lemuel81]

snip

Getting all the DoH to 15 (can skip PbP and RS) is highly valuable especially leveling. Gives you the ability to HQ items much much easier for leve turn ins. Is it required? Not for leveling no. Takes such a short time to lvl each job to 15 it is silly not to.

[jmanfrw]

Rapid synth is basically useless until you get steady hand 2 which increases success by 30% for 5 steps

Ingenuity helps increase progress and becomes essential in end game crafting not really needed in the mid levels though as I find steady hand + rapid synth does fine as a nice boost

Rumination is a good way to nab some extra CP in a bind you'll get more inner quiet stacks once you get hasty touch used along side steady hand. Once you get byregot's blessing you're better off using your IQ stacks for that

Maybe a more experienced crafter can shed some better light but this is How I use these skills.

[zemogFC]

You can't really level only one crafting class and expect to HQ anything regularly. You'll at least need to get CUL to 37 and CRP to 50 and get ALC, ARM and LWR to 15.

[Gavceroix]

Hi all. This thread made me create my forum login and post for the first time. Ole Gav here, leveled Weaver, and Leather, and all three DoL classes, then goldsmith... to 60; over the past three months or so since I started playing FFxiv..
Today.. I find out (not too late to save more crushed keyboards... BSM/CAR underway at 20's; Alch/Cul in 50s) that I can use a skill from my Weaver, in particular, Careful Synth II, when I'm not a Weaver.
I really don't know how to feel right now, I'm either really elated, or so depressed I want to laugh.
I may be suffering a bit of dejavu cause I just learned that you can macro common step sequences... this week.

I will say this about this games crafting, it is complicated, interesting, fun; and there's always SOMETHING that you can go do to advance further.

[Shadygrove]

The quick way to L 15 in any craft:

Do each recipie once through L15. The guild salesperson has everything you need* and the guild quests give you the shards.

Save the stuff you make because some of it will be levequest items. What isn't can be sold on the MBs or to NPCs.

*The cooking guild doesn't sell fish but they can be bought at the The Hyaline, just off the Aftcastle.