Increasing Rarity of Crafting Ingredients and incorporating Expert Crafting

[tdb]

It it's bad enough that us crafters are being forced to spend millions overmelding just to craft the new stuff. I've already overmelded by 460 set and I can't craft the new equipment until I overmeld again?

False. I've not spent a single gil on materia and I was able to macro-craft the i480 combat gear and hand-craft the new i490 crafter gear when the patch hit. Both give 100% HQ results from NQ raw materials. Once I'm done upgrading my gear to i490 I can probably macro-craft the i490 stuff too. My melds for the i460 items were VIII in the guaranteed slots, then VI+IV+IV for overmelds because those grades give an around 20% chance of success and are much easier to obtain than VII and VIII. In some cases I used even lower grades because of stat limits. For the i430 accessories I had VI in the guarandeed slot and some lower grade materias for overmelds. At the time there wasn't much use for yellow crafter scrips so using them on the IV and VI materias was a cheap way to get those melds. Grades I through III are available from the Ixal.

[Sqwall]

False. I've not spent a single gil on materia and I was able to macro-craft the i480 combat gear and hand-craft the new i490 crafter gear when the patch hit. Both give 100% HQ results from NQ raw materials. Once I'm done upgrading my gear to i490 I can probably macro-craft the i490 stuff too. My melds for the i460 items were VIII in the guaranteed slots, then VI+IV+IV for overmelds because those grades give an around 20% chance of success and are much easier to obtain than VII and VIII. In some cases I used even lower grades because of stat limits. For the i430 accessories I had VI in the guarandeed slot and some lower grade materias for overmelds. At the time there wasn't much use for yellow crafter scrips so using them on the IV and VI materias was a cheap way to get those melds. Grades I through III are available from the Ixal.

I would agree with this to a certain degree. I spent maybe 1.2mil on materia and was able to meld up to req. for i480 crafts easily. Now yes I did spend a large chunk to just START crafting i480 Neo-Ishgard, but I made that back in an hour. I think it's all in how you look at it for crafting really. The stat requirements for the i490 was really me adding +65 craftsmanship and +45 control, and +18CP. Then I was off to the races with only 2 pieces of new i490 crafting set being used. Didn't even have to change my macros. Then I made an ENTIRE Gathering left side for myself. And then made Crafting LEFT and RIGHT side for myself from base mats. Only using 1 HQ mat for i490 (levinstrike was easy to get HQ and I could HQ the i480 mats easily)