Is Prudent Touch too much?

[Nezerius]

But the final success rate depends a lot on "when, where and how" you utilize the Good procs.

The final success rate on the most difficult crafts, the HQ ones for the master 2 books, came down to being able to bait a good/excellent proc for Byregot's Blessing.

Of course, more melds would help. But not by that much. At that time we only had Tier IV materia, our MH were the unmeldable Supra Tools. All that extra melds we could do were only on the OH. It's not much extra melds you could do. So it wasn't really a game of melding.

I'll have to disagree here. It was much more important to hit the meld caps on the ARR gear, as opposed to the current melding. Sure, we couldn't meld the MH tool, but every other piece of gear had the same amount of melds.

Altogether, it wasn't a game of copying rotations, and it wasn't a game of melding. It was more about how you utilize your lucky Goods to push a crap load of quality.

I'll agree that it was much easier to copy rotations in HW.

I agree with you on the second part about HW pretty bad. The items were "difficult" on the sense that the amount of progress needed was crazily high. However, for the quality part, we had so much more CP comparing with ARR, so IQ11 was not hard to achieve. Plus, even IQ9 or 8 were sufficient to get the job done, because we could use so much HQ mats. This was vastly different from the Master Book 2 tokens, which we couldn't utilize much HQ mats.

When it comes to HQ mats, I wouldn't say that the 2-star stuff was all that easy to obtain, considering how terrible the Favor system was. While those crafts still weren't as difficult as the master 2 books tokens, you were still playing with 2-3+ million worth of mats. I felt much more nervous crafting the i170 sets, than I did going for those HQ tokens.

[MN_14]

The final success rate on the most difficult crafts, the HQ ones for the master 2 books, came down to being able to bait a good/excellent proc for Byregot's Blessing.

That's actually a myth that seems to have persisted to this day. If you built up 11 stacks of IQ and added 1 extra touch, your HQ% shot up to 50-60% even when byregot's landed on normal depending on your control stat. Adding two touches could get you 70-80%; the highest I saw when landing on normal was around 86% iirc.

You couldn't get that every time but it happened much more commonly than you would expect given the daunting quality requirements.

The difference between 30% and 60% was only 400 quality and generally only achievable through free hand crafting. Rotations could break the 30% barrier only if a touch landed on an excellent or you baited a good/excellent.

[Nezerius]

That's actually a myth that seems to have persisted to this day. If you built up 11 stacks of IQ and added 1 extra touch, your HQ% shot up to 50-60% even when byregot's landed on normal depending on your control stat. Adding two touches could get you 70-80%; the highest I saw when landing on normal was around 86% iirc.

You couldn't get that every time but it happened much more commonly than you would expect given the daunting quality requirements.

The difference between 30% and 60% was only 400 quality and generally only achievable through free hand crafting. Rotations could break the 30% barrier only if a touch landed on an excellent or you baited a good/excellent.

Maybe it wasn't a myth for you, if you crafted them with the Lucis tool, as well as a full melded artisan's offhand, which was already overgearing those crafts.

Which wasn't the case for me, since I liked trying to HQ them as I crafted the tokens for the Supra tool.

[MN_14]

Maybe it wasn't a myth for you, if you crafted them with the Lucis tool, as well as a full melded artisan's offhand, which was already overgearing those crafts.

Which wasn't the case for me, since I liked trying to HQ them as I crafted the tokens for the Supra tool.

I used the artisan's mainhand and offhand. With a lucis tool, you could get an extra touch compared to the artisan's tool or supra. It also had added control so a bare bones 11 stacks of IQ (10 touches only) would give you 60%+.

To effectively craft the tokens, you wanted to use 13 touches if you had the artisan's mainhand and offhand and you could muster 14 touches with a lucis.

[Nezerius]

To effectively craft the tokens, you wanted to use 13 touches if you had the artisan's mainhand and offhand and you could muster 14 touches with a lucis.

That amount of touches still required a good amount of luck, just as much as baiting a good condition would.

[MN_14]

That amount of touches still required a good amount of luck, just as much as baiting a good condition would.

Not exactly. If you optimized your CP use, you generally got enough good procs to do that around 50% of the time. Skills like ingenuity 2 were a waste of CP so if you used that to save a progress step, you usually messed up your chances for durability restores. For me it was basically 11 stacks of IQ almost 50% of the time and a good proportion of those would be 11-12 successful touches, eliminating the absolute necessity of a proc at the end.

You went with additional durability restores even if it wasn't guaranteed that you might finish your craft with SH2 up (failure to increase the number of touches would result in pretty much a guaranteed failure, eg so it wasn't much of a dilemma).

It's not like you didn't bait for procs even with the additional touches. You did that too to improve your HQ% if possible and in the event that you only landed 10 touches, you also needed to bait.

With the rotation, it would be 11 stacks of IQ 15% of the time, plus the need to bait for a good since your number of touches were topped at 10. Each bait step would give around a 20% chance for a proc. That's how myths about heavy reclaim use and proc baiting are born.

[Nezerius]

Not exactly. If you optimized your CP use, you generally got enough good procs to do that around 50% of the time.

Which is still luck based, since it's possible to not get enough good procs.

You went with additional durability restores even if it wasn't guaranteed that you might finish your craft with SH2 up (failure to increase the number of touches would result in pretty much a guaranteed failure, eg so it wasn't much of a dilemma).

But not having SH2 up to finish the craft wasn't a big deal, since the mats of those items weren't too expensive. Even more so in my case, since I was crafting tokens for the Supra tool, and trying to HQ them at the same time. Meaning even NQ token wouldn't go to waste.

It's not like you didn't bait for procs even with the additional touches. You did that too to improve your HQ% if possible and in the event that you only landed 10 touches, you also needed to bait.

So you're agreeing that if you get unlucky, you'd have to bait for a good proc?

With the rotation, it would be 11 stacks of IQ 15% of the time, plus the need to bait for a good since your number of touches were topped at 10. Each bait step would give around a 20% chance for a proc. That's how myths about heavy reclaim use and proc baiting are born.

I never mentioned heavy reclaim use, although I still used it a few times, in situations where I'd end up failing 5 hasties in a row. But let's just agree to disagree on whether proc baiting is a myth or not.

[Cleanse]

There was a huge difference in ARR end game crafting compared to HW...

I have to disagree with your first part here...

To me it sounds like you had less techniques in ARR, CP was limited, and RNG made you rethink your game plan as you went through a craft (though to be fair this is always the case until you over gear it). This may have been more difficult, but now you need to add to the system with each expansion...

In comes HW with a lot of new abilities that they tried to make enticing. With the hit and miss (specialists), the hits made things macroable due to being overly strong. Rath's rotation worked 99.9% of the time without needing to think. The only punishment in the rotation was poor Hasty RNG.

With SB, it feels like more of the same, inflated power. They would probably need to add another gameplay addition on top of durability and quality in order to satisfy the hardcore. More durability, and/or quality, per recipe will lead to throwing more gear at it or throw more luck at it.

If procs were more frequent... especially Poor procs, decisions would become a lot more crucial.

[MN_14]

To me it sounds like you had less techniques in ARR, CP was limited, and RNG made you rethink your game plan as you went through a craft (though to be fair this is always the case until you over gear it). This may have been more difficult, but now you need to add to the system with each expansion...

In comes HW with a lot of new abilities that they tried to make enticing. With the hit and miss (specialists), the hits made things macroable due to being overly strong. Rath's rotation worked 99.9% of the time without needing to think. The only punishment in the rotation was poor Hasty RNG.

If procs were more frequent... especially Poor procs, decisions would become a lot more crucial.

Not a bad analysis.

The biggest difference was that ARR forced you to think if you wanted a decent shot of success. For end game crafts, you could start with around 395 CP but to craft effectively, your CP usage was probably greater than how much you used in HW. The proc rate was more like 20% so it was all about using tricks of the trade and then determining what you could do with your given CP at various points during your craft (determined by your own design). If you met required CP thresholds for say plan A, you did that. If not, you had a plan B or plan C. Or maybe an excellent proc would change up your plan entirely. You had to make use of all the CP you got and suboptimal work could give you 50% or less even for regular 4* crafted materials.

Since rotations more or less ignored the CP gained from procs other than to occasionally swap HT for BT (analogous to HW's PT and BT swaps and obviously was wasted CP 80% of the time) or buff a finisher, they gave poor results.

In HW, Rath's rotation was pretty effective because it wasn't hard to mindlessly craft from 0-11500 quality using it and the HQ rate it gave you was good. Base CP was increased considerably, proc rates were lowered, maker's mark front-loaded your CP recovery and smoothed out variability in the number of procs you got in a craft.

An optimized approach in HW would most commonly give you enough for 13187-15000 quality depending on your luck. An unlucky run meant you got 80% in most cases, unlike the toughest ARR crafts where you really ran the risk of getting 50% or less.

Imagine if the proc rate in HW was lowered a tad bit and if 11500 quality only gave you 50%, or even worse and the IQ cap was increased to 13 or so and you needed 13 stacks for 85%+ (my most common result in HW was 11 stacks plus two touches more).

In ARR, to 100% a 4* material from all NQ (max quality for materials was around 500-700/5600 but it wasn't worth the extra cost for HQ mats), you wanted 11 stacks of IQ, 1 extra touch, plus an innovation buffed finisher. An unlucky run or suboptimal use of your procs meant you would likely end up with 9 stacks of IQ or less, which was nowhere near enough (I think a bare 10 stacks of IQ without innovation gave me 50%). You had to respond to your procs and make the most of them otherwise you were sunk.

Of course, all of this has been done before so to change things up, they'd need to add brand new mechanics and conditions, otherwise it'd still be a case of been there done that.