Is Prudent Touch too much?

[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]

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


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.


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


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.

I'm not sure why we are arguing over objective numbers. The myth was that it was impossible to break 30% without proc baiting. That's been proven false.

Anytime RNG is involved there is a luck element. It's how you handle it and change your probabilities that determines your success. Since it's impossible to get 100% each time with RNG involved, you maximize your HQ yield. A rotation based proc baiting strategy definitely yielded far worse HQ yields so a ton of crafters reclaimed like crazy and blew up dozens and dozens of fc3s.

I did the same as you and used NQ tokens to get my supra.

[Nezerius]

I'm not sure why we are arguing over objective numbers. The myth was that it was impossible to break 30% without proc baiting. That's been proven false.

Probably because you brought the myth thing up, when I never mentioned anything about it being impossible to break 30% without it. Of course it's possible to break 30% without it, but I had a much higher success rate whenever I'd bait for a good proc at the end.

[MN_14]

Probably because you brought the myth thing up, when I never mentioned anything about it being impossible to break 30% without it. Of course it's possible to break 30% without it, but I had a much higher success rate whenever I'd bait for a good proc at the end.

Ok, it seems I misunderstood your point. But to me proc baiting is always something that should be done for any craft whenever you're unable to hit 100%.

It's not a primary strategy for me and I consider it to be a secondary backup measure. It did become very important for a decent shot at HQs for the master 2 tokens if you didn't manage at least 13 touches though.

[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.

[magnanimousCynic]

I think we're getting off-topic now. No need to keep talking about the horrors of Master book II when it has little relevance for SB crafting, when we don't even have 2-star unlocked yet!