Crafting shards, crystals and clusters...

[AlliciaCapulet]

I don't see a problem with shards and cristal, and I often need to buy some. I guess it depend how much you craft. Or the recipe just doesn't take enough of those. If you find those useless, we could tell the same about the materia, since melding is not really needed anymore.

Removing stuff from crafting is a bad idea. They should come back to what crafting was in ARR and HW, in SB crafting became way too easy and boring. There is no need to pentameld anymore. You can HQ anything with a simple macro (about 26-28 actions, so 2 macros) since there is no RNG anymore in the craft. They wanted to simplify the crafting so everyone could craft 4 stars items, but by doing so, they made the crafting boring af and it's kinda useless to want to sell 4 stars items now, you make way more money by just selling the raw mats now, because anyone can make it and undercut you... Even collecting the mats is easy now, I miss the time in early 3.x where you had to uses bluescrip to get a special item that will give random chance to spawn a special node, to get the items needed for crafting the end game gear. It was a true challenge back then. Not something easy...

[Derio]

It depends on how much you craft. If you are crafting tons of items especially before the raids release you can run pretty low on them.

[Barraind]

I do a TON of crafting and still I gain them faster than I use them.

How?

To put it in perspective, I've used (at least) ~4k shards, 2k crystals and 600 clusters in the last 2 days of crafting. And thats only been ~300 items plus subcombines.

I buy them multiple thousands at a time when I get low.

[Tiraelina]

I wish we could break crystals into shards.

That was actually the purpose of all of our now completely useless sand that was removed in 2.0.

[Caitlinzulu]

I always run out

[RareItems]

Maybe in 5.0 when we can do "gardening/farming" we can finally have 100 slots to plant seeds. And maybe have the vendors sell the seeds too xD.

Or maybe mobs will drop shards/crystals/clusters just like in FFXI on defeat.

Maybe trade 5 GC seals for 1 shard, 10 GC seals for 1 crystal, 20 GC seals for 1 cluster. Apply the same with Poetic tomes.

[Bsrking5]

Mobs do drop shards and crystals. Not sure about clusters. They are the sprites running around. Even with just a fc house room and an apartment you can get a decent about of shards daily for very little effort. I'm normally sitting on a caps worth of each shard and 8k of each crystal.

[Liam_Harper]

I've run out of Shards, Crystals and Clusters all the time. Particularly right now Fire and Water clusters, I've gone through well over 10000 of each.

You're probably not crafting very much. Even at my peak I was only doing a round of crafting for 2 retainers every 2-3 days.

[enthauptet]

I wish it was easier to gather them in a meaningful quantity, I can go get some but it is just so time consuming along with everything else. I'd rather not give gil to RMT sellers on the marketboard either :|

[Gemina]

If you gain them faster than you use them, and they also don't take up any inventory I have zero clue why you're even griping about them. Are you just looking for something to complain about?

If you don't need those shards/crystals/clusters send them over to me. I go to the MB 2-3 times a week to buy crystals by the thousands. My gardens are used for shards when they are needed, when I could be growing more valuable crops. Clusters are the only ones I have in abundance because gathering mats for masterbook recipes is very time consuming.