Is Prudent Touch too much?

[MN_14]

I just don't feel like the highest level crafts should be super easy and accessible. They're our endgame, just like raiding is the endgame for battle classes. You have to work and invest to get into higher tiers of raids, so I feel like the same should be reflected for crafters. The lower level recipes can stay how they are, I just want something to challenge me for the time and investment I put into crafting.

I think Maker's Mark is going to die this expansion; it's going to take far too long, and the time invested in a craft affects your efficiency as well. I've been using Muscle Memory forever, in HW I was pairing it with Ingenuity 2 and Rapid Synth and finishing crafts a lot faster than the people using Maker's Mark. It's fine if you want to do it that way, but I find it to be a horrendously inefficient waste of my time.

Agreed about challenge being required. I don't think they can make all of the highest level crafts challenging though otherwise there'll simply be a huge drop-off in crafters after a certain patch (can look at ARR as an example or HW after favors came in). But they could always release two versions of a similar item: one with a slightly lower item level but easy HQ requirements and the other much harder craft with things like higher item levels and extra meld slots or something. They could use the same item skins so that they don't need separate gear designs.

The only truly difficult crafts released so far have been the master 2 tokens from ARR, but I don't think we'll be seeing anything like that again anytime soon anyways. Those are the only crafts that they've released where 11 stacks of IQ alone did not give you anywhere close to enough quality for a reliable HQ. In fact, you generally only got 30% unless you did one of two things: baited for a good proc (semi-reliable) or pushed additional touches. One extra touch beyond 11 stacks gave you 50-60% depending on your control and 2 extra touches gave you 70-80%, all while landing Byregots on normal. That's why freehand crafting was so important. Using the popular 2 RS and 10 HT rotations around that time, it was a 15% chance just to build 11 stacks of IQ and you put yourself in a position where it was impossible to get >30% without baiting for a good. However, freehand crafting could give you 11 stacks of IQ possibly up to 50% of the time and often eliminated the need for proc baiting (made baiting a bonus to get an even better result).

Whether Maker's Mark dies or not will depend on the tuning. In HW, Maker's Mark was the best method because you could clearly tell that crafts were tuned around it. The only way to get the required CP to craft from 0-100% reliably was if you went through all of the FS baiting steps. On average, you got just enough CP for that 0-100% run.

A 50 step synth is longer than a 30 step synth, but for the 30 step alternatives, you likely had to run it multiple times to HQ some intermediate materials, particularly for the i250 weapons where even individual crafted 4* materials did not give you that great of a starting quality boost.

I think that in the future when progress requirements becomee higher and higher, they'll make the appropriate adjustment to flawless synthesis or introduce new progress skills to replace all of the current options.

[StouterTaru]

The only truly difficult crafts released so far have been the master 2 tokens from ARR

The Lucis turn-ins were also somewhat rough, mostly because they were 40 durability.

[MN_14]

The Lucis turn-ins were also somewhat rough, mostly because they were 40 durability.

Yeah, I forgot about those. They were the 2nd hardest crafts in ARR.

Easy to get 85%+ on those but also easy to end up with only 15%. Results were variable.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

The only truly difficult crafts released so far have been the master 2 tokens from ARR, but I don't think we'll be seeing anything like that again anytime soon anyways. Those are the only crafts that they've released where 11 stacks of IQ alone did not give you anywhere close to enough quality for a reliable HQ. In fact, you generally only got 30% unless you did one of two things: baited for a good proc (semi-reliable) or pushed additional touches. One extra touch beyond 11 stacks gave you 50-60% depending on your control and 2 extra touches gave you 70-80%, all while landing Byregots on normal. That's why freehand crafting was so important. Using the popular 2 RS and 10 HT rotations around that time, it was a 15% chance just to build 11 stacks of IQ and you put yourself in a position where it was impossible to get >30% without baiting for a good. However, freehand crafting could give you 11 stacks of IQ possibly up to 50% of the time and often eliminated the need for proc baiting (made baiting a bonus to get an even better result).

And those were the good 'o times when crafting was the most fun to me! I did all those Master 2 Books while I was still on Militia Offhands instead of Artisan Offhands!
I ended up finishing all the books within 2 to 3 days... They were addictive... I just couldn't stop crafting!

[Cleanse]

The challenge comes from knowing how to meld efficiently and where to find a rotation. This seems easy to us because it is our focus. I am sure it was the same during ARR and rose tinted glasses are fogging your guys' views. Unless ARR was all about lucky procs, then that is not more difficult but luck based.

HW was pretty bad outside of a few things. This expansion seemed to have added some nice new abilities and quality of life changes.

[MN_14]

The challenge comes from knowing how to meld efficiently and where to find a rotation. This seems easy to us because it is our focus. I am sure it was the same during ARR and rose tinted glasses are fogging your guys' views. Unless ARR was all about lucky procs, then that is not more difficult but luck based.

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

The skill element in ARR crafts had to do with your management and handling of RNG. The fundamental flaw of a rotation is that it treats procs as bonuses, whereas they are not. Crafts are tuned and designed for you to utilize procs and manipulate the probabilities through free hand work. Designers know full well how many procs you will see on average, so crafts have been balanced so that on an average optimized free-hand run, you will get 100% (for normal crafts). With a rotation, your average result is not going to be 100% because you aren't efficiently using your CP (PT swaps aren't bad but BT swaps are a mega waste of CP) so if a craft was tuned to be harder like the master 2 tokens (where an average free hand run did not give you 100% even when you fully optimized your strategy) or even the ARR 4* crafted materials where below average runs penalized you with low HQ success rates, it was a major fail.

This created a huge division in crafter proficiency because the masses (to this day) just follow rotations, hence the changes in HW.

Every time you get a proc, you should be asking yourself what you can do with it. Use PT? Or maybe if you used tricks, you would have enough incremental CP to add three extra touches.

Adding three touches, for example, improves your expected IQ by 2.4 and is therefore more powerful than 2X PT or in the case of ARR, several (12) shots of BT. So why save up a ton of CP and wait for good procs that might not appear? Failure to use PT multiple times will result in wasteful BT swaps.

The take home point is that these procs are not bonuses so they can't be treated as such like how a rotation operates. Rotations work fine HW and beyond because crafts are simply tuned to be universally easy.

Once you've mastered the crafting and RNG systems, you should always be considering the following when crafting free hand:

- incremental CP costs of additional durability restores and other abilities
- Expected IQ stack changes due to your on the fly modifications to your synth (as a side note: replacing 2x cs2 with 1x rs is as powerful as 3x BT/HT swaps at a cost of 2 stacks of SH2; very powerful). I've already mentioned the effectiveness of durability restores vs waiting for PT opportunities. You should be using both.
- Expected number of misses that you will see on an average craft plus the spread. You have to make sure that your strategy is robust enough to absorb even an above average number of misses.

These are just a few points off the top of my head. There are tons of ways of optimizing on the fly.

You're dealing with binomial probabilities so these are predictable and can easily be incorporated into your design. It isn't about looking at your base starting CP and then coming up with the most efficient and powerful sequence of abilities. That's a beginner's approach because you're ignoring RNG mechanics (like ignoring battle mechanics in raids that players love complaining above). It's akin to coming up with a universal "battle strategy" on a striking dummy.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

The challenge comes from knowing how to meld efficiently and where to find a rotation. This seems easy to us because it is our focus. I am sure it was the same during ARR and rose tinted glasses are fogging your guys' views. Unless ARR was all about lucky procs, then that is not more difficult but luck based.

HW was pretty bad outside of a few things. This expansion seemed to have added some nice new abilities and quality of life changes.

I have to disagree with your first part here. I gave my rotation to a lot of people back then, but they just couldn't HQ the items (talking about Master Book 2 tokens here). Indeed it was very luck-based in ARR, mostly depending on successful Hastys and Good procs. But the final success rate depends a lot on "when, where and how" you utilize the Good procs. Basically, if you're just gonna pray for a lucky streak of Hastys, you're surely gonna be doomed. Because a streak of 9 to 10 successful Hastys just rarely happens. So you gotta take the Tricks at the right spots, redo your calculations, and really tweak the rotation along the way to buy more touches.

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.

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 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.

In this expansion, they have added some nice abilities to throw RNG off the table. We also gained a even bigger pool of CP. These are fine changes, but they need to come up with something for us veterans that requires a ridiculous amount of quality for the game to be fun again.

[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.