Is Prudent Touch too much?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

At the moment, crafting in general has become significantly easier. Almost all the new craft abilities border or surpass OP status. Unless the new crafted recipes have insane requirements, it seems crafting as a whole will be much easier in Stormblood.

[MN_14]

At the moment, crafting in general has become significantly easier. Almost all the new craft abilities border or surpass OP status. Unless the new crafted recipes have insane requirements, it seems crafting as a whole will be much easier in Stormblood.

2* crafts should probably give us an idea on the SB direction for crafting. In general, they've been trying to make things simpler and easier for quite some time.

HW added the following to close the IQ gap between crafters (like how changes have been made to battle to close the DPS gap):

1. They added precise touch, allowing anyone to build 11 stacks of IQ with relative ease

2. They increased base CP allowing for much more powerful static rotations, eliminating the requirement for free hand work. In ARR, you either crafted free hand for the harder items or used a heavy reclaim based macro method.

3. For end game crafts, they reduced the good proc rate, making everything more predictable. This combined with the higher base CP and maker's mark (for a ton of bait steps) reduced the variability in available CP for use per synth.

Now the SB changes:

1. A major quality penalty was added if you're below the recipe level, but ingenuity 2 will negate it and give you a huge quality boost. Quality requirements were also lowered for each item.

Basically, in HW, the IQ gap was closed but there was still an overall quality gap because different approaches to IQ stack building resulted in differing amounts of quality built up. If you spent all your CP on PT and BT swaps, you typically ended up with less quality than if you moderated your PT use and used CP for additional durability restores as well.

The change to the penalty means that quality is now much more weighted toward your Byregot's finisher. This closes the quality gap because there aren't as many benefits to pushing additional touches on top of your IQ stacks. The best approach for now is to get as high of an IQ stack as quickly as possible (or rng free if possible) and then top your synth off with a byregot's finisher buffed with ingenuity 2 and innovation. Fail to use ingenuity 2 and you'll be hard pressed to even break 30%.

2. New overpowered skills were added. We'll see if there are downsides to using them when higher tier crafts release.

[Danieros]

Definitely the difficulty in SB is a joke compared to HW. IQ 11 easier and reduced need of cross skills, basically all you need is Steady Hand II and Ingenuity II. With the end of weekly scrip caps that heavily gated materials, expecting end game crafting to be way easier this time. They do have a good chance to push for HQ material requirements for reliable end game crafting but it will need to scale quality a LOT more so the IQ 11 Byregot won't cut it anymore.

I just hope they won't push Specialist-only crafting too much, because the extra specialist stats have become less needed than ever.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

The biggest problem right now, is not the so called "endgame" items not difficult enough. The current lvl 70 recipes are not meant to be hard. The biggest problem right now, is when the "real deal" comes, how are we gonna cope with them?

Problem 1: When the real deal is here, and iq11 is far from sufficient to HQ anymore, what's the new strat? Sure, they have lowered Miracle's CP cost, but Miracle is still too weak from my old impression of HW crafting. At IQ5 or 6, Miracle honestly isn't that powerful. It is just not worth spending those 2 IQ stacks. One might as well push IQ up to 11, and then throw out more Prud or Hastys. At IQ11, the quality from each touch is gigantic. Thus, currently, it is rather undesirable to spend half the IQ stack for a Miracle. And so, if Prud is not powerful enough, we are doomed!

Problem 2: progress! When progress goes insanely high, we will likely fall back onto Rath's rotation, which mean Maker's Mark, and some long-axx crafting. When that comes, people are not gonna complain about crafting being too easy, but complaining that it is too long. Can you imagine the amount of Flawless syn (40 progress each) we need to use when the progress amt is like 20k? This, my friend, is a problem!

My overall thoughts? Instead of urging SE to nerf Prud, we might need to think of the hardship we will face very soon.

[MN_14]

I don't think there's going to be anything totally daunting that players will find crafts impossibly difficult to HQ. That would defeat all attempts to make crafting more accessible.

All of this is speculation, but here goes!

1. I'm of the opinion that miracle is probably designed solely for specialists without Ingenuity 2, Blessing, or Innovation. With a weaker finisher made up of ingenuity 1 and miracle, they would want to build up additional stacks before firing off a 2nd finisher. We now have reflect to be able to boost your IQ stack up by 3 and specialists have advantages in terms of CP consumption and perhaps even older spec skills.

Non-specialists can boost quality the old fashioned way by adding additional touches prior to the big byregots finisher. If CP permits, those extra touches can be buffed with ingenuity 2.

2. Progress can't be totally daunting that you're forced to absolutely use Maker's Mark. They have to design it so that crafters without Maker's mark can complete the crafts as well and specialists have not been given any new progress abilities. I suppose for crafts requiring a ton of progress, they could re-scale the name/brand skills to help.

[Cleanse]

I definitely do not see crafting becoming difficult. It will be as easy as the Rath era, or easier. The latter half of HW proved that.

The difficulty will be the melding process.

[magnanimousCynic]

snip

Rath's Rotation won't be viable time-wise (and maybe not even function!) for Stormblood if the Progress needed keeps shooting up.

The Taoist's glamour set is 1-star 70 dura and requires 3149 Progress, which translates to 32 stacks of Maker's Mark. If you wanted to use Rath's Rotation, you'd have to blow through 28 stacks of Maker's Mark, as 4 of the stacks aren't used for Flawless Synthesis. That means you'd be spending over 90 seconds before you'd even activate Inner Quiet!

And if, or more likely when, we do start to eventually see crafts that require 6000+ Progress we're looking at least three minutes of Flawless Synthesis spam! If you add up the time needed for the macro of a 6000 Progress craft you're looking at about 239 seconds per craft, while a 4-star level 60 macro takes only 127 seconds. Unless you like crafting to take up more of your food/potion duration, Rath's Rotation won't be staying long for Stormblood outside of intervention from the SE.

Instead of trying to keep an old rotation alive, we should make a new rotation with the new skills SE gave us. Like Patient touch if you want to gamble your stacks for a chance at more than one Byregot's, Manipulation 2 likely replacing WN2 ,or Initial Preparations plus one of the three new Specialist Actions.

Outside of future patch changes to crafting actions, which rarely happens, Rath's Rotation won't be viable for Stormblood. Instead of requesting SE to constantly make Rath's Rotation viable, we should use the new skills and figure out new and better rotations.

EDIT #1: And besides, with our current gear + max CP melds and HQ Tempura Platter/Cunning Tea, we have 539 max CP while Rath's rotation was built around needing 437. Not using that extra 102 CP to make new rotations feels almost wasteful!

[blueruckus]

The thought of 32+ Maker's Mark hits hurts my head. If you're up to speed on gear/melds and still running Maker's, you may want to reconsider better time-saving options.

[Driavna]

IMO what we need is to spice the system with new conditions, more interesting than poor/good/chipiriflautico of course, so everyone has to relearn the system and adapt.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

chipiriflautico.

We can add a "Caimielicious" condition
Need a sound effect too... that goes "Oh yeaaah!!!!!" XD