Will ShadowBringers DLC Make Crafting Hard Again?

[Granyala]

Crafting was never hard. It was annoyingly time wasting.
RNG isn't hard, esp not, when you have unlimited time at every step and can think stuff through for as long as you need.

Personally, I am glad that they cut out much of the BS grind and made it a little less RNG dependent to craft stuff.

Though I wish they would cut down on the Makers Mark spam a little.

Saw the question why implement something that could result in the loss of materials. Well risk and rewards, also goldsink to control the inflation in the economy. Better yet would give real value to crafted stuff given if they are balanced to be useful with end game gear.

Loss of materials because I f*** up = okay and as it should be.
Loss of materials because of RNG I have absolutely no control over = design can die in a fire, for all I am concerned.

I don't give a rats ass about the economy, only materials worth a damn are treasure chest / Diadem or raid drops anyway. Rest is super easy to farm.

[Kaurhz]

Crafting was never difficult. RNG does not make crafting difficult. That being said, the barrier for entry into master recipes is too damn low, alongside the materials themselves, I think.

[Granyala]

Crafting was never difficult. RNG does not make crafting difficult. That being said, the barrier for entry into master recipes is too damn low, alongside the materials themselves, I think.

I disagree. It is good that you don't have to no-life the game in order to craft top end stuff, esp raid food / pots.

[MsQi]

Its not a DLC

It's content that will be downloaded. It literally will be DLC.

[KageTokage]

I don't mind if the difficulty of crafting doesn't change in SB, but they seriously need to speed up how quickly crafts can be done and/or increase quantities certain items are produced in, particularly consumables like infusions that you can potentially burn through dozens of in a single play session.

Time is the biggest advantage craft botters have over legitimate players, and speeding up crafts won't benefit them nearly as much as it would legitimate players as they're already outpacing the demand for the items they sell. If they're not going to ban them they can at least take measures to reduce the influence they have on the economy.

[Mansion]

That being said, the barrier for entry into master recipes is too damn low, alongside the materials themselves, I think.

Well you technically need to farm all crafters to max level and buy all books. It's not hard indeed, but it's a lot of time involved.
And getting those books and all does not mean you can craft those items either. Gearing takes time too. I think the game puts a lot of steps before being able to do high level crafting and it is fine that way.

[LineageRazor]

Heavensward ramped up the difficulty for crafting in order to promote its new specialist system - which the players then promptly ignored. Rather than subject themselves to performing every craft manually (which RNG-laden buffs like Whistle While You Work pretty much require), players FOUND A WAY to craft reliably using other skills. In particular, they abused the way Maker's Mark basically provided dozens of turns' worth of "free" Observes to hold out for desirable materials conditions (while providing a not-insignificant amount of progress in the bargain).

HW also increased the difficulty in another way - by making high tier gear stupid difficult to get. Tier V materia was very rare for most of the expansion, and crafted gear (as always, the superior crafting and gathering option) required harvesting Ooids and such. Either you spent hours gathering, or you spent a crapton of money.

On top of all of that, the initial set of high-level crafted gear was TERRIBLE. It was strictly inferior to other easily acquired gear. Not even the progressing raiders wanted it. And the cherry on the cake was that even HQ leveling gear was at best a niche market, since the Main Scenario quests provided at least two sets of HQ gear for each gear tier.

Heavensward, on release, nearly killed crafting. People left crafting behind in droves, and the ones who remained had no one to sell to but each other. It was basically a disaster. Stormblood did SO much to bring crafters back. it could be argued that they overcompensated, with how easy crafting is to get into now, but I doubt they'll make the mistakes they made in Heavensward again.

[Kaurhz]

I disagree. It is good that you don't have to no-life the game in order to craft top end stuff, esp raid food / pots.

I know, the system for getting Master books in A Realm Reborn definitely required no life.

[DrWho2010]

personally i don't want the crafting/gathering to be difficult.

[TalithaSolarien]

What they actually need to do is prune/streamline the whole crafting system. There are a whole lot of skills that (for a newbie) look all very much the same and it's not always easy to know what to use when. A few other things that might be worthwhile:

• remove the the cross-class system and change it a role-system similar to the combat classes
• make the old level 1&2 Master Books available for red scrips
• change the class quests to the system introduced in SB where the quest giver provides the mats

Currently it's a huge time and/or gil sink to level the classes from 1 to 70.