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

[Ryaz]

Honestly I find the whole idea of hardcore crafting laughable. What is hardcore anyway? Someone who dedicates a lot of time to crafting? Someone who enjoys face slamming into RNG failure over and over again until he gets lucky?

Now, I'm a dedicated crafter myself. I gathered and crafted all my own facet gear. The only thing I bought to make the sets were a few goetia tome items. Even put off the new Ex trial for it (which I sort of regret now because all the good players have cleared and I keep getting stuck with players who can't do simple mechanics).

Crafting in FFXIV, while deeper than most MMOs, is still a secondary thing. You don't go through the MSQ by crafting, you don't beat primals by tailoring them a new suit. Crafting in this game, as with any MMO, is used for a few things: making a decent set of gear for alts, consumables, cosmetic, items etc.; saving money by making your own stuff and making money by selling crafted stuff to other people. There's never been items that only crafters could use, outside of gear glams (due to role restrictions) like engineers in WoW who were the only ones who could use the bombs they created or some of the mounts they made.

And I can understand the want to have something cool you could make and call your own that other non-crafters couldn't get. For example, they could add craftable mounts, minions or cosmetic items that require massive amounts of mats from each craft that you couldn't just buy and have to dedicate time to actually making, which you could show off and say "Yeah, I'm a super omni-crafter with a bad*** mount."

But as for actual "difficulty" in crafting, I am vehemently against the false difficulty of RNG. There's nothing engaging about a system where you can do everything right and still fail because of bad luck. It would be like people fighting Hades Ex and him only having a 50% chance of casting the circle AoEs the DPS need to eat to survive and the raid fails because RNG decided it shouldn't happen this time, despite no errors on the players part. When you fail because of things outside of your control, that isn't fun or difficult. It's just tedious.

If they wanted to change the crafting system up and actually add real skill to it that doesn't rely on a random number generator, that's fine. But forcing good crafters to fail because of bad luck isn't. Theres no sense of accomplishment there.