Square Enix, please think about both Casual AND Hardcore crafters..

[Cleanse]

The player base at large is also largely irrelevant when considering the needs of the people who focus on particular types of content. Savage is likewise going to be niche content that a relatively small portion of the playerbase will ever engage with, yet it's still developed three times per expansion, not to mention Ultimate fights, and stocked with appropriate rewards for those who choose to pursue them. That many players will never fully commit to crafting is not a good argument against letting players who focus on crafting be rewarded for their commitment and investment, just as happens in other areas of the game. Crafting needs to be accessible, but it's already extremely accessible. It doesn't need to be trivialized.

Comparing crafting to Savage raiding is interesting considering the Crafter's "Savage" mode is coming in 5.1. Hopefully the challenge, rewards, and prestige meet your expectations. Also using your comparison, would it be fair to say that Crafting being as accessible as it is for everyone is similar to the accessibility of Normal Mode Raid content?

No. I mean like crafting actually in and of itself rewarding investment in it by opening up a wider selection of crafts, rather than the situation that existed in SB and will almost certainly exist in ShB where you can hammer out a few ezpz scrip turn ins and get casual gear that will still let you 100% HQ top tier crafts. If you are wearing vendor gear, you should not be able to make the current highest star crafts. Period.

If you're wearing the latest casual gear and using tedious craft rotations (Maker's Mark), I see no issue.

Those of us who craft and meld (max CP) our own gear can afford easier rotations which in turn means more profit, more time to do other things, etc.

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What would you feel is a fair system?

[Nixxe]

Comparing crafting to Savage raiding is interesting considering the Crafter's "Savage" mode is coming in 5.1. Hopefully the challenge, rewards, and prestige meet your expectations. Also using your comparison, would it be fair to say that Crafting being as accessible as it is for everyone is similar to the accessibility of Normal Mode Raid content?



If you're wearing the latest casual gear and using tedious craft rotations (Maker's Mark), I see no issue.

Those of us who craft and meld (max CP) our own gear can afford easier rotations which in turn means more profit, more time to do other things, etc.

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What would you feel is a fair system?

The issue arises in the differences between the two systems: Part of raiding's reward package is the content per se (in addition to gear, titles, mounts, and minions), while crafting is pretty much entirely about resource acquisition, since there's very little actually limited to the crafters themselves, so you can obtain anything crafting can get without ever having to craft. Additionally, while everyone who plays this game could wake up tomorrow and decide to do Savage without taking anything from anyone else on account of instances being effectively limitless, increasing the number of crafters increases competition and makes crafting less effective. If you then go even further and make it easier to become a high level crafter, that reduces the value of new items right out of the gate, again increasing competition so that you have to spend more time babysitting the marketboard for lower prices, resulting less effective resource procurement. While there's an argument to be made that this isn't actually a problem because with reduced prices comes increased purchasing power, I don't believe for a second that the increases in purchasing power are on par with the loss of absolute income, though I will come back to this point later.

Normal mode raiding doesn't result in as good of rewards as Savage or Ultimate. It's a step under them. This is precisely why I say that if you use scrip gear you shouldn't get to make current max star crafts. In this view the scrip gear is the accessible gear, and the crafted gear with millions of gil of pentamelds, along with access to additional content (ie current top tier crafts), is a reward for the investment. This reward is greatly undermined if it doesn't provide enough additional functionality compared to the scrip gear, which it was already on the verge of not doing in SB. Why spend 20 mil on pentamelding when you can just spend half an hour doing scrips and then craft all the same stuff with slightly longer macros? The scrip gear should primarily serve as catchup gear for people who missed previous rounds of crafting, either because they weren't playing or didn't care. Likewise, crafting was already incredibly accessible with beast tribes basically being free levels. Rest assured, any serious crafter will be omnicraft/gather long before those are released. Those are very much catch up mechanics for casual or new crafters. Cross-class abilities have repeatedly been pushed to the back, and now Steady Hand II and Byregot's Blessing are no longer class specific (and tbh I'm completely fine with that change). They also added abilities that were similar to prominent cross-class abilities in SB and again in ShB, many of which were kind of overpowered and served to make crafting quite a bit easier in SB than HW (and probably about as easy as it should ever get at endgame). The Crystalline Mean quests give a ton of XP and are incredibly trivial crafts that basically don't scale at all with level. The quest items for that have much lower requirements than any actual craft of the same level.

As for what I think is a fair system, I don't think fairness has much of anything to do with it. Crafting simply needs exclusivity to have value because its value is entirely wrapped up in resource acquisition. For an example of what happens to it if that exclusivity is lost, look at what happened to professions in World of Warcraft over the course of several expansions. Blizzard repeatedly made things more accessible. First, they normalized recipe acquisition, eliminating genuinely rare recipes almost entirely. Then they removed the need for a lot of old gathered materials in the leveling process. Old enchants were limited to ensure they became obsolete and the entire profession design was shifted to make professions self-contained within each expansion. Blizzard eventually more or less eliminated the need to even level the professions at all, while also nerfing the power of crafted gear, which led to the almost total devaluation of virtually all items. A handful of items needed by raiders retained value shortly after first released because raiders need them and won't be deterred by price. About the only other items that retained value were those that were somehow limited, whether they were like the Sky Golem which took 30 days to craft or they were like the Felsteel Blade (that may not be the right name), which was a unique model weapon that could only be obtained via an extremely rare world drop recipe in obsolete content. It certainly wasn't impossible to make money, but the best parts of crafting were the archaic content that hadn't been completely undermined in the name of "accessibility." This is also why I said earlier I don't think increases in purchasing power will keep up with loss of value: because I've already seen this happen before and they did not.

Now, crafting has been a big part of this game in a way that it simply wasn't in most contemporary MMOs when this was new. SE had a very good system with crafting and gathering classes being treated with the same care as battle classes, which was certainly a novel experience for me back in 2013. Other decisions, such as using old mats for new crafts, are extremely good, as that allows crafters and gatherers of any level to produce things of value so they can make money while leveling. Crafting received a lot of love in ARR, with a bunch of quests and items for it, but that love has been waning. We didn't even get new tool models in SB for the BiS set, instead getting a second round of the Ironworks stuff. We don't get special tool crafts for glamour like all of the primal stuff battle classes get, and we haven't even gotten anything like the Luminary tools again. This repeated push for "accessibility" is going to come at a cost, and it probably won't even be that effective at getting more people into crafting. Instead of gutting crafting to make it available to people who just aren't that interested in it and at the expense of people who are, SE should spend more time reflecting on what made crafting so engaging in this game in the first place.