Stormblood Crafting System

[Solarra]

I think Specialisation was introduced far too late in the game to be attractive. It is lot of work levelling all the crafting classes to 50, but there are clear advantages to doing so. Once you've put in the effort and done that, being asked to choose 3 and dump the other 5 seems unkind to say the least. Especially in HW when you only had 10 levels to go and the specialist skills were so poor hardly any crafters were using them.

The point about specialists forcing people to use the MB and 'interact' with each other is one I've changed my opinion on. I used to assume it was good for the economy, but after an earlier discussion on these boards, I came round to seeing that it's the lack of competition that keeps prices high. If there are only a few people crafting (especially on a small server), then the limited supply is going to mean higher prices. Since some specialisations far less popular than others (ALC for example), you also get huge discrepancies in the cost of materials, so a GSM might have to sell 5 nuggets to afford a single dissolvent.
New players don't have the reserves of gil that older players have, so they are particularly hard-hit by high material costs, especially early in an expansion. So, while specialisation might have been introduced with them in mind, in HW the high prices that resulted from specialist-only recipes, ironically encouraged them to continue omnicrafting beyond level 50 as a way of keeping costs down.

I'm hoping SB will see a move away from trying to discourage omnicrafting and will instead introduce measures to make single-class crafting more viable.
I don't like the specialist system and feel it is out of place in a game that claims you can have every class on one character. However, considering how much development time must have gone into it already, I wasn't expecting it to go away.

[Silverbane]

[RE:] Specialisation ... It is lot of work levelling all the crafting classes to 50, but there are clear advantages to doing so. Once you've put in the effort and done that, being asked to choose 3 and dump the other 5 seems unkind to say the least.

Canard. No one was ever asked to "choose 3 and dump the other 5." The Specialist system didn't require (or even provide a benefit for) not leveling your non-Specialist classes to 60.

Since some specialisations far less popular than others ... you also get huge discrepancies in the cost of materials [but] New players don't have the reserves of gil that older players have ...

Another canard. Specialization only affected bleeding-edge crafting for a patch cycle or two. New players weren't affected unless they leveled aggressively enough to catch up with the older players. Those who did that faced greater hurdles than the high cost of specialist materials.