Are you happy with the current state of crafting?

[Caimie_Tsukino]

I very much concur with what the OP had said. That's how I feel throughout Stormblood too.

That said, the game does have to accommodate casual crafters / learning crafters too.

The Ala Mhigan set was quite fun at the beginning, but then they nerfed it so much in 4.3 and made it seemingly "worthless". However, I don't see this as necessarily a bad thing.

Here's my opinion, I think SE can adopt either of these two strategies (or a mixture of them) to make crafting challenging while accommodating casual /learning crafters:

(1) Just like what happened with Ala Mhigan set from patch 4.1 to 4.3, start off the newest items at very high difficulty so the veteran crafters like myself can have some fun and make some cash. Then nerf it 2 patches later, so that casual crafters can do them too.

(2) Keep all functional items at macro-able (a.k.a. easy) difficulty so everyone can do it, but design really nice glamour crafting tools/gear (including tools that literally SHINES immediately when unsheathed) that are "real challenges" for veteran crafters. Perhaps if you fail to get these HQ, then the item doesn't shine. Liam Harper had raised this possible strategy earlier, and I think it's quite a nice idea. This way, casual crafters cannot complain saying "crafting is too difficult", because these are just glamour items. You don't "need" them to play the usual crafting game.

(1) would at least give veteran crafters an edge with gil-making before everyone can massively macro them and crash the market, whereas shiny tools in (2) is just long-overdue for crafters.

[Zeldt]

That's another thing though. We do indeed all share tools, guides and theorycraft together over macro's and ideal rotations and share our knowledge. Which is great to see the crafting community come together.

How much of this did you see for 4 star? One or two threads popped up which basically boiled down to "use your 3 star macros" and that was it. That really says a lot.

We actually had decent amounts of theorycraft happening over at the balance discord, even with rotations predicting specific stats and so on. That was pretty fun, atleast until the datamine happened. Everyone knew that 4.3 macros would work just fine and even then, more optimized macros for four star recipes for near minimum stats were out and confirmed working before the patch went online.

That said, the game does have to accommodate casual crafters / learning crafters too.

I agree, but isn't that already kinda the case with yellow scrip gear? Obviously it will never beat crafted gear with minimum melds but it does the job just fine for anything I'd consider casual. To be fair, the current set even allows for four star crafting in combination with food and free company buffs. CP might be a bit short but this is nothing you couldn't fix with some hq materials so it is not like people are exactly forced to have the best gear right now.

I agree on everything else though. While the blessed tools are nice, I wish there was more to work for, perhaps something akin to relics. In my opinion they have missed out on a lot of potential with the eureka zones, imagine if they introduced both eureka exclusive recipes and materials for DoH and DoL to play with. They could do so much more to keep this kind of playstyle busy, something to work for in long term other than stockpiling gil. Sadly this probably won't happen.

[Kaurhz]

I'm going to go out on a whim and say I am happy with the difficulty of crafting at this current time. That being said I do think Prudent Touch should have the success rate reduced by 10-20%. My issue, and only real issue is the lack of content for those that truly enjoy crafting, and not just as a means to make easy gil.

[Risvertasashi]

And this is my gripe with how crafting was handled for the most part of SB. I feel it became way too easy, up to a point where you can mostly disregard any factor of skill, knowledge and rng. In some ways it is nice to have the content namely crafting more accessible, but for me it somewhat lost a bit of its novelty being a decently skilled omnicrafter.

I'm not happy with crafting, but for different reasons...

- Gatherers are still effectively mandatory. That's on top of having to level 8 crafters. Too much level grinding.
- Despite being made 'more' accessible, you still have to read 300+ page highly technical manuals to do much with crafting. Or put in similar effort via other means.
- Inventory. Other MMOs have ingredient banks you can craft from automatically, why don't we?

[Thatusernameistaken]

I never had a max level crafter until a few weeks ago. So my only experience with end-game crafting is SB, and I have to say it is quite easy. I have decent gear (475 CP, 1650 craftsmanship, and 1590 control all unbuffed), and I can reliably 100% HQ my 4-star Infusions with only 3k starting quality. That said, I still find crafting enjoyable and it's actually one of my favorite parts of the game.

[Millen1]

Nope, don't like it for a few reasons. I have been crafting since beta and the skills required to craft have been really dropped. I couldn't believe how easy the 4 star gear was to make at 4.4 release. Going way back, the i70,i90 adn i110 crafting required a new book for each to even try and the books were a bit of a challenge which was fun to see how many players you could bet to market on the server. The only down side to ARR crafting was the tool progression, it was slow and didn't feel rewarding like the books. If they made changes in 5.0 I would remove gear as a reward option for all quests, make it, buy the nq, or buy the HQ on the MB, bring the books back for the star crafting and last I like making all my own gear so I would prefer to make my tools but if they went back to the ARR tool progression I would be fine with that.
Though at the end of the day, the biggest killer for me is all the quest gear polluting the MB. It drives crafters out of it. To this day I still craft far more ARR gear for level 1 to 40 than any other type or range of gear and it sells well. Plus I do like seeing players running around with my name on their gear knowing my crafts are going to good use.

[ChameleonMS]

The balance in difficulty between casual/specialist DoH (CUL & ALC being the most common) and Omni is the core of the problem.
Make the crafting mini-game accessible to the casual/specialist group and the Omni's get buffed way beyond the base point and have no challenge (OPs) premis.
Make the crafting mini-game difficult and return us to the days of forum outrage which permeated until SB.
I am guilty of being an Omni which was very critical of the lack of viability of the single crafter until SB.
Sorry OP, my opinion has not changed, single crafters should be viabily able to complete those crafts HQ with some RNG, not the HW whistle system + Hasty fail RNG level that used to exist.

If we take Roth's (not Rath's) idea of a Specialist gains access to all cross class abilities. And we can extend it slightly.
Give DoH the DoW treatment and make them into Role Actions. Specialists would be able use them, and Omni (not specialists jobs) would still have them naturally.
This would then put casual/specialist on equal footing to Omni in any one particular crafting discipline.
Once we have equal footing, difficulty can be increased fairly across the system.

[Risvertasashi]

The balance in difficulty between casual/specialist DoH (CUL & ALC being the most common) and Omni is the core of the problem.
Make the crafting mini-game accessible to the casual/specialist group and the Omni's get buffed way beyond the base point and have no challenge (OPs) premis.
Make the crafting mini-game difficult and return us to the days of forum outrage which permeated until SB.

One thing SE could do without messing up balance: Copy the cross role system they revised for battle classes. Making "role actions" that are available regardless of what other crafters have been leveled would go a very, very long way towards increasing the viability of having just a few crafters leveled. And it wouldn't upset specialist vs omni at endgame.

[KageTokage]

Crafting in its current state feels way too easy. Going back to the HW style where you can't rely on a single rotation all the time would be a good idea, IMO.

I'd also like specializations and desynth to be more meaningful, because the current "Everyone can craft everything" mindset they've adopted does not make for a healthy economy, especially one that's so heavily infested by bots.

[Sylvain]

- Inventory. Other MMOs have ingredient banks you can craft from automatically, why don't we?

When it comes to inventory management FF14 is easily 15 years behind.