There's no point in getting the 61 or 63 HQ set when I'm going to replace it at 65.

As far as the melds, I was simply tired of not having enough GP to do anything, so I melded max GP. *shrugs*

The thread is more about the Crafting side than Gathering anyways, because everything has such ridiculously high Progress and Quality meters that I don't understand how they could expect anybody to get anywhere near the HQs without having ridiculously awesome gear from the previous expansion's endgame, BUT I still posit this question:

What about players who are just now arriving at Level 60? Are they expected to stop, drop everything they're doing, and grind up Scrips before they can start on trying to get to 61? Or are they expected to pay millions of gil to get several different suits of armor, what again, 12 tools, etc before they can start on trying to get 61?

And when they DO get 61, they are faced with another ridiculous money-sink, in trying to get the HQ 61 set which seems to be required to do anything in SB, because no, the NQ just can't be good enough, nope. We can't have NQ-wearing "scrubs" being able to make anything, can we?

And I looked at that rotation someone posted above from reddit, and it's basically same song and dance... build up IQ stacks, buff up, dump Byregot's on it... it's just the numbers are set way too high on Lv61 stuff, that you blow most of the durability on JUST trying to get the progress meter to almost done. The fact that everything in SB is 61 instead of 60* is also punishing because you need to somehow get 62 before you can even start trying to reliably craft anything in SB or you get hit with crushing penalties, on top of wearing NQs.

HQs simply cost too much on Marketboard on my server to go that route, especially for gear you are expected to replace every 2 levels. I'm not going to want to dump 50k melds into 100-200k gear (for single pieces) which all add up to a million+ maybe closer to 2 million gil for a whole outfit, only to go through it all 2 levels later.Maybe if the prices were more reasonable, I would think about getting HQ gear, but not until at least 68, if not 70.

Now that said, I will admit that Gathering in SB is not as punishing as Gathering was in Heavensward.... I'm starting to see 80%, 6% naturally with no buffs and the Gather+ nodes are actually activating now. In Heavensward, it took quite a bit longer until I could finally start gathering junk at a reasonable rate.