Quote Originally Posted by Carpe View Post
Iron Greaves are part of the old crafting recipes. After a while you won't be able to make these anymore. The new recipe designs don't have these kind of synths that are "just for skill points". The new "grind" synths are the basic mats that you will use over and over in your recipes and that are needed by other crafts for their recipes. Using Armorer as an example, to get to Armorer 40+ you literally do not need to make anything other than ingots, rivets, rings, and plates. These 4 basic materials are used in basically every finished product that an armorer can make in the new recipes. They're also needed by other crafters as well. That's what creates the demand for them and makes them "useful" synths. With leatherworking you skill up on making hides to leathers, carpentry logs to lumber, clothcraft making threads and cloths.

Iron Greaves are a perfect example of what was messed up with the OLD system. You took your materials and kept sything them into more and more specialized materials or "parts" until you ultimately had something like a weapon part, armor part, button, strap, etc. These parts could only go into a small number of finished products which was what made them worthless to try and sell in the wards in large numbers.
I know Iron Greaves are an old recipe. The reason people use them is because ingots require a massive capital investment due to the raw material prices and people simply don't make enough gear to drain the system of them fast enough (the large investment also makes it infeasible to vendor the ingots).

Besides, the basic recipes don't give much exp past L44+ or so and finished gear is what you'll have to make if you want decent exp from the new recipes. On my server the wards are pretty much flooded with cobalt gear and moving them is slow despite the constantly falling prices. Clearly we have yet to hit market equilibrium in materials and gear, so the situation may eventually improve unless materia conversion rate creates a bottleneck to gear demand.