LF advice from 3-star Crafters: How to properly commission a set of i220 gear?

[Eorzean_username]

If anyone has insight to contribute, I think I may need some more ignorance cleared up on my part.

I am providing:

• All Clusters needed
• Full HQ materials (zero NQ items for any stage of the crafts)
• Any HQ Food requested

I thought I would be saving millions of gil this way (which is a lot for me), because even buying full HQ mats and all Clusters it was 50-70% cheaper than MB per item when I ran all the numbers.

However, all the Specialists that respond to my PF listings are charging a crafting fee so high that it makes the total cost (Clusters + HQ Mats + Fee) almost the same — or sometimes more expensive — as buying the item directly off MB.

Because I'm inexperienced with top-end crafting, I assume the problem is on my part (ie, lack of understanding), so I'm trying to learn.

I'm coming from the (perhaps very ignorant) perspective of leveling crafting (my crafters are level 54-55 so far), where recipes are tedious and slow with NQ mats, but full HQ mats makes a recipe fairly quick and efficient.

Is 3-star Crafting, even with full HQ mats, so unpleasant / time-consuming that basically no one will do it without significant compensation?

[keyburz]

Is 3-star Crafting, even with full HQ mats, so unpleasant / time-consuming that basically no one will do it without significant compensation?

Yes and no. If you compare 3 star crafting to the rest of crafting, yes it is unplesant and time consuming by comparison. In general, no its not. The thing is its a much higher level of skill then doing something simple. 3 star is like raiding. Savage is fun yes, and its a challange, but that doesnt mean I enjoy going into savage.

Getting to 3 star took a long time, but I also had a bigger head start to assist me. Its easier to stay at end game if youve always been at end game. Myself I try to charge a cheap price, but realistically those high prices you see are deserving. I can do 1 3 star craft every 2 minutes with full concetration, but this is because I know my rotation exactly and I know how to time the button presses when they come off gcd. Not many people that I've seen can craft with the speed and accuracy that I can. With a 30 minute food buff, youre looking at 10 3 star crafts for the average crafter, with a hard limit of about 17 (makers mark rotation). Compare this to essentially a beginner's difficulty of crafting of 60 no-star and below. If its not starred, I can literally craft it with my eyes closed, in probably 30 seconds per craft.

TLDR it's not really "hard", but compared to other recipes, end game crafting is hard.