Crafting requirements.

[Thamorian]

Umm yea... the problem is your "Most People", like you, have every job at 50 with all level 90 gear when they hit HW, cause they've been playing since launch. So no they don't have a problem with it. Of course you don't even consider the new people who have no idea about the beast tribe quests, etc. Who want to experience end game content without having to grind through old, outdated content for gear that is out level in 4 levels.

You're not looking at how mind boggling stupid it is to make new level 51 gear lower Ilevel then level 50 gear. Let me spell it out for you. To get the green Ilevel 70 level 50 artisan gear you need to be 2nd Lieutenant in your GC which requires getting your squadron to a state where they can do the flagged mission. By which time you're near level 60 in your combat class. OR you get them from Mor Dhona with HQ turn ins that require at least two or three crafting jobs high enough to get cross class skills and items needed to HQ a three star craft. This would be fine if HW was still end game... It's not. You Idea that "Most people" don't have a problem with the bump is only including people that have those jobs already leveled. Not new players who don't want to have to grind through leveling fishing to 50 just to be able to HQ a piece of armor they need. Your "I ground through it so they must be lazy if they don't want to" stems from the fact that you're looking at it through a level 70's eyes. Try this; start a new character. Give yourself absolutely no advantage from your other characters and see how "easy" the bump is. Try HQing a piece of mythrite armor with only armorer at level 50. Given the fact that you won't have money to spend on the 10k HQd mats from the marketboard because HW mats are more freaking expensive then SB mats for some reason and will have issues gathering the HQ mats yourself, with no FC or friends to help you and no cross job skills like comfort zone, steady hands 2 or innovation to help you... Yea then come back and tell me how easy the "bump" was.

So the only option new players have is to stop leveling their combat class for 2 months to grind out the crafting and the gathering jobs and get their squadron up to snuff. OR SE could have planned ahead and streamlined it........

Funny you should mention about starting a new character from nothing and getting to 70 because that is EXACTLY what I did with this character in my forum profile with the exception of using jump potion to skip ARR and HW MSQ and get a lvl 60 combat job which is offered for new players who just started so they can jump right into Stormblood. This character I started to work on from nothing January of last year. I didn't obsess about crafting ilvl 115 gear with patrician gear. Instead I kept using my patrician gear and got to leveled up a bit more with lower level leves, daily beast tribe quests, and daily GC turn ins so I could get to where I could use HW crafting gear. You want to know how I got my materials? I gathered what I needed to and bought the dirt cheap stuff on the MB. Making some materials and gear to sell so I could buy a few more materials. I was debating to mention that before and I guess I should of.

Your problem is you think you need to buy HQ mats and you need to make HQ stuff. You don't. It's convenient but levequests accept NQ turn ins too. And if someone really really REALLY wants to be able to make HW ilvl 115 gear after only getting level 50, they could gather what they can and buy what they need to and have another player craft the artisan gear. Artisan gear isn't all that expensive these days and it was the best gear people could have before Heavensward dropped so that is the gear people would of used to craft the first ilvl 115 sets.

And some point responses:
>It's well accepted that crafting is mostly an all or nothing. That you need to level all crafting classes to become a successful crafter for HQing.
>Yes, most people do use leves to level crafting. If you think otherwise, you are delusional. People like taking the easy way out and the easy way is leves.
>Again, level up with lower level leves if needed and then get gear from a shop or from another player. You are insisting that a fresh lvl 50 crafter without the gear should be able to craft gear way above his ilvl.
>Final Fantasy 14 has a full fleshed out crafting system unlike some other MMO's you may have played. Yes, it requires time to level up and isn't some side activity that you might feel like doing. You commit to it like you do any battle class/job. Should you stop working on your DPS job to work on your crafting job is as valid question as should you stop working on DPS to work on Tank job for a while.

Also leveling fishing to 50 for armorcraft is not required, that was as stupid statement. But really here it sound like your complaining players have to level gathering to be able to level crafting. If you don't have a lot of gil then of course you are going to need to level up gathering to get the materials needed to craft. What? You just want all the materials just handed to you?

I'd rather gathering and crafting not become a worthless side thing like it is in WoW.

[Adren]

And some point responses:
>It's well accepted that crafting is mostly an all or nothing. That you need to level all crafting classes to become a successful crafter for HQing.
>Yes, most people do use leves to level crafting. If you think otherwise, you are delusional. People like taking the easy way out and the easy way is leves.
>Again, level up with lower level leves if needed and then get gear from a shop or from another player. You are insisting that a fresh lvl 50 crafter without the gear should be able to craft gear way above his ilvl.
>Final Fantasy 14 has a full fleshed out crafting system unlike some other MMO's you may have played. Yes, it requires time to level up and isn't some side activity that you might feel like doing. You commit to it like you do any battle class/job. Should you stop working on your DPS job to work on your crafting job is as valid question as should you stop working on DPS to work on Tank job for a while.
I'd rather gathering and crafting not become a worthless side thing like it is in WoW.

You're laboring under the assumption that I'm the one having problems with crafting things. I'm not. SO let me clarify for you. I have level 70s across two accounts one with level 70s on mateus and 60s on excalibur and the other with 70s on jenova and mateus. I've been with this game since beta. My account still has the beta tag on the mog station that reads; FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - Beta Test Windows® is registered to this service account. My problem is the difficulty gap for the new players between expansions that are now considered "Leveling" is causing new players to quit the game. There is a flow with arr crafting that is rather enjoyable. Then once you hit that peak at 50 the difficulty spike goes through the roof. Why? Because SE didn't plan on there being a HW because of the debacle with FF14. As the game picked up steam they threw in extra content for ARR (the 6 billion quests for the seventh astral era line for example) and the item level went from 70 to 90 in crafting. No problem there. You have to keep people interested after all.

The issue that new players are having is because as they designed HW they made the completely illogical decision to make the starter level 51 crafting gear for HW Ilevel 65. BELOW ARR level 50 greens. So new players are given a choice. Stop leveling their combat class and go through the trudge of leveling every crafting class just to be able to get the ARR gear needed to HQ a HW item or ignore crafting until 70 because HW level 51 items suck for crafting. Most people do the later. I remember being told "welcome to the REAL end game" once I hit 70 in crafting.

You said "I'd rather gathering and crafting not become a worthless side thing like it is in WoW." Well in a way it is worthless to new players. They can't HQ craft their own gear so they just get them from the vendor for their combat classes once they hit HW and forget HQing a leve item.

As for my reputation I write game reviews so my reputation means something to me. When I look at my feedback page and see 2 messages like "Dude you said (insert game name here) was good but it sucks because (insert reason here)" I usually ignore them. But when it comes to FF14 more then just several people left me a quite a few messages that, when I took the time to think about it, have merit. My IRL friends have tried the game before due to my recommendation, I even paid for their subs and the game, just to help the game grow, and they had bad experiences. Not because of the same reason but it seems this game is getting less and less recommendable.

[RenAshdoll]

IIRC at the end of ARR and HW, the crafters who have been updating their gears will eventually have gears that will at least last thru half the expansion leveling cycle; my Ironworks crafting gear from HW lasted the entire SB leveling process without the need to change gears. For ARR, the end game crafter gears was the Artisan and the Lucis tools, which requires either significant time or gil investment to obtain, with the result being gears that will last longer for levelling later as a reward. This also works the same manner for players who spent time to upgrade all their gears via grind or raids.

[NanaWiloh]

OP take a good look at the images below. Look long and hard at the lvl 50 4 star!! Hate to break it too you, but lvl 50 4 star gear is not worth it. One extra materia slot and One extra stat are not worth the time,effort and gil need to craft them to NQ or HQ or even try. That lvl 51 White is cheaper and eaiser to craft to NQ or HQ and can be done a lot quicker.

Crafting leve items to HQ while leveling is not easy and requires more then just slapping on HQ crafting gear. You need melds, overmelds, a good rotation along with food and medicine, other crafting classes have skills that make hitting HQ easier so leveling them is advised. You can craft HQ leves with the lvl 51 stuff but you will have to due what I just mentioned. Also getting 4 star AAR crafting gear or HW 2 star crafting gear now is pointless and waste of time!!


(Difficulty:586 Quality:5783) Control +29 cp +2 3- Materia slots



(Difficulty:421 Quality:4561) Control +30 2-Materia slots

[Nezerius]

Why? Because SE didn't plan on there being a HW because of the debacle with FF14.

Uh, what? You realise that the release of ARR was well above their expectations, right? To the point of server issues.
You honestly think they didn't start planning HW at that point?

The issue that new players are having is because as they designed HW they made the completely illogical decision to make the starter level 51 crafting gear for HW Ilevel 65. BELOW ARR level 50 greens. So new players are given a choice. Stop leveling their combat class and go through the trudge of leveling every crafting class just to be able to get the ARR gear needed to HQ a HW item or ignore crafting until 70 because HW level 51 items suck for crafting. Most people do the later. I remember being told "welcome to the REAL end game" once I hit 70 in crafting.

They designed it with the idea of players helping each other (see specialization).
Even still, it's a non-issue, since there's plenty of ways to get from 50 to 51, which makes it easily possible to craft the HW recipes.

You said "I'd rather gathering and crafting not become a worthless side thing like it is in WoW." Well in a way it is worthless to new players. They can't HQ craft their own gear so they just get them from the vendor for their combat classes once they hit HW and forget HQing a leve item.

Whether crafting is worth it or not, is up to the new players themselves. Besides, new players will generally get their initial combat gear through the MSQ.

As for my reputation I write game reviews so my reputation means something to me. When I look at my feedback page and see 2 messages like "Dude you said (insert game name here) was good but it sucks because (insert reason here)" I usually ignore them. But when it comes to FF14 more then just several people left me a quite a few messages that, when I took the time to think about it, have merit. My IRL friends have tried the game before due to my recommendation, I even paid for their subs and the game, just to help the game grow, and they had bad experiences. Not because of the same reason but it seems this game is getting less and less recommendable.

Never heard of you, and I can't imagine your reputation being all that high up there considering your comment in the first quote of my post.

Your thread just sounds like some kind of post to speak for all the newer players, and how they'll just ignore crafting, simply because there's one small bump going from 50-51.
News flash: newer players are just as capable to figure out if they like crafting or not, before they reach even 50.

[Avenger]

Try this; start a new character. Give yourself absolutely no advantage from your other characters and see how "easy" the bump is. Try HQing a piece of mythrite armor with only armorer at level 50. Given the fact that you won't have money to spend on the 10k HQd mats from the marketboard because HW mats are more freaking expensive then SB mats for some reason and will have issues gathering the HQ mats yourself, with no FC or friends to help you and no cross job skills like comfort zone, steady hands 2 or innovation to help you... Yea then come back and tell me how easy the "bump" was.

The crafting jobs all interlock in a clever way, so it's advantageous to level all of them to 15 for the cross-job skills, then one to 50 for the armoury bonus (ixal are your friends), then the rest to 50 for the lv50 cross-job skills, then one to 70 for armoury bonus (moogles/namazu are your friends) then the rest to 70. There are alternate paths, but that's the one that I took and it worked reasonably well.

In the case you describe, I think your best bet is to go and buy the cheap NQ gear from NPCs and then to synth the HQ versions, but I think you'll need the lv50 skills!! It may be possible to be a viable lv70 uni-crafter using specialist skills, but the tried-and-true method is to get all the cross-class skills, and omnicrafting makes you self-sufficient.

Gil doesn't seem too hard to come by as a crafter - I managed to break about even while leveling by selling low-level HQ gear and then using the profits to buy HQ mats and materia as needed for crafting gear.

Leveling a gathering job is not only fun but also incredibly useful for a crafter - you can get mats for time rather than gil, and it also unlocks gathering retainers. Even a lv1 gatherer can help if you run out of shards and they are expensive for some reason!!

[ChaseNetwork]

I've done the long grind for end game crafting gear at Mor Dhona, and I'll be happy to do it again once I get there. I already had 2nd Lieutenant before I started HW, so buying that gear isn't going to be any problem. I already have Ixal maxed out. My current omnicrafting level is 35. I'm loaded up on HQ crafting gear with decent melds (not overmelding. I'm not that nutty), that I had made myself. My main style of leveling has been to craft everything for the achievements, cause I know I wont want to mindlessly craft old crap once I've leveled past them. I knew I needed to level Ixal, since free Moonstones is gonna be nice later on for getting Lucis tools. Ixal is okay exp for the time it takes to do it. I haven't bothered with crafting leves yet.

By the way, I really want that new CRP chainsaw thing.

[InkstainedGwyn]

The purpose of crafting is not so that new players can automatically start making themselves high-quality gear, they get plenty of that through the main scenario quest line and dungeons. The main point of crafting is to give people who want to craft a long-term goal to work towards. It's not just something that anybody should be able to waltz in after one week and be able to turn out everything at once. That's what makes crafting lucrative - the ability to make things others need. If only the newest and highest gear was of any value, we'd be screwed unless we were one of the first 50 players to log in after a patch. There are plenty of things about crafting that annoy me, and that I feel could use quality of life upgrades; that doesn't change the fact, however, that I like the fact that it is complex enough to take time to master. I like the fact that there's a market for HQ stuff between patches. I like that having my maxed omnicrafter means something, so I can help new crafters in my FC. After all, everything is inaccessible in a game until you get to the character level and/or skill level to enjoy it. Or are you going to start complaining that new level 70s can't immediately run Savage alphascape for because they have to go through all kinds of annoying ilvl upgrades to deal with it?

And if your friends and followers are so upset that they can't immediately master crafting in a game that doesn't intend for you to immediately master crafting then they might just be too impatient for XIV's crafting system. If you feel that's a blow to your reputation (and if you already have a full set of mastercrafters surely you already knew about the issues and could have warned them?) then that's on you, not XIV.

[Thamorian]

You're laboring under the assumption that I'm the one having problems with crafting things.

I know you're not the one doing the leveling but you are the one advocating on nerfing requirements so it was just easier to refer to the people you are talking about as "you." Also low level crafting is not worthless to new players. There are ways to make some even with low level crafting even at level 30. Some people just won't like a game because of how the core of a game is designed. When you try to please everyone, you can end up pleasing no one.

Example: Not everyone is going to like the slow 2.5 GCD even when at max level with all the oGCDs. Doesn't mean SE should change GCD to 1.5 because then you are just going to lose the ones who play this game who like the slower GCD.

[Niwashi]

You're laboring under the assumption that I'm the one having problems with crafting things.

You're the one laboring under the assumption that anybody cares whether it's you or not. You are the one complaining about it, so you're going to see the responses to your complaints.


And basically those complaints come down to you have friends who want to get guaranteed High Quality crafting results without even leveling their crafting classes, let alone gearing them. Anybody who looks into the crafting system at all in FFXIV already knows they need to level all their crafting classes, and should ideally be keeping them pretty closely in sync throughout that process. If they haven't seen any of the hundreds of mentions of that fact online, then it's clear enough in-game once you reach level 15 and see how cross-classed skills work. By the time one of their crafting classes hits 50, the rest shouldn't be far behind, and they're going to need to finish off that bit before getting much further, or at least before expecting any High Quality results further down the road. (If someone really only wants to level one or two crafting classes, then they should always expect Normal Quality results. HQ is for omni-crafters.)

And yes, 50 was endgame long enough that there are some significant gear jumps at that point. It's nowhere near as much for crafting as for combat, but still significant. That's the reason why shortcuts were added in to ensure new players didn't have to go through the whole thing the long way, like Artisan gear that could be had for trading just a 2 star mat rather than requiring much harder 4 star crafting. (Of course, even that "simple" 2 star isn't going to be simple if they haven't even bothered leveling their crafters. They'll need enough of them leveled to have the skills for a decent level 50 rotation.)

It really sounds like your friends just want to automatically craft the best possible stuff without putting any effort into developing the ability to craft stuff. Crafting is a main focus of this game for a lot of people precisely because there's some complexity to it. Handing everything out for doing nothing would mean destroying that complexity that makes it worthwhile in the first place.

(And given your concern over whether you're talking about yourself or other people's issues, I'm also talking mostly about other people here. I haven't gone through the Heavensward portion of the leveling yet. I'm still at 50.)