The Exarchic crafts are significantly too hard.

[Arkevorkhat]

Don't play MMO then

That's super toxic to say. If I don't want to waste heaping piles of in-game resources on something that was intentionally locked behind a significant time and money investment, I should just cancel my sub and stop playing at all?

On the other hand, I guess I shouldn't expect anything else from someone who plays a Lalafell, you are the bloodthirsty capitalists in the lore after all.

[Packetdancer]

it's frankly ridiculous that there should be crafts that are sequestered to the top 1% of crafters.

This is frankly just a transparent attempt to make the rich get richer in this game, to the detriment of those of us who don't enjoy putting on a movie and pressing a macro over and over.

The sheer quantity of HQ Exarchic gear on the marketboard of my server suggests it's rather more than 1%. The sheer undercutting of prices that happens on said marketboard suggests that ain't nobody getting rich since about 36 hours after 5.4 dropped. (I sure as heck am not; I just make the Exarchic gear for friends when they need a new set for a job that just hit 80 or whatever.)

That said, I think that the fact that they are difficult is reasonable, since they are meant to be "master crafts". Moreover, they are meant to be the single most difficult master crafts of this expansion, as they are the final tier of crafted combat gear. If the most difficult crafts of an expansion were trivial to do without gearing up, that feels broken to me.

That said, I understand the frustration people feel; even partially melded (or even entirely unmelded) Aesthete gear was more than enough to make the Neo-Ishgardian gear and the raid pots/food for last tier. So when 5.3 hit, we got the crafting gear meant for this tier, while all the combat-related crafts and whatnot were still the ones for last tier from 5.2, and even Aesthete gear was possible to make relatively easily with Aesthete gear (since Aesthete had to be possible with HQ melded Faceted, after all). So jumping to the stuff for this tier and being functionally "undergeared" almost certainly feels like slamming into a wall after having been able to make the top crafts without breaking a sweat.

(If it helps, though, overmelded HQ Aesthete will probably remain the best-available crafting gear literally until endgame crafting gear at level 90, so once it's overmelded it'll probably get you through the crafting leveling content of the next expansion. At which point, yes, it will be outdated and need to be replaced.)

[TurtlesAWD]

Ishgard restoration isn't a bad source of materia if you're looking to gear up a little at a time. It can also be a valid source of cash in and of itself, possibly to a greater degree than the new combat gear to be honest - if you're in it for the money, you could consider focusing on ishgard for this expansion and pooling some gil for 6.0. I found myself in kind of a similar situation with the gear before aesthete's - didn't want to pentameld it since I knew new equipment was on the way. I would say 6 months or more is probably a long enough time to consider pentamelding some of the higher impact pieces, or the pieces that have more slots in the first place. Also the relic tools are also comparable to aesthete stat-wise, and if you value your gil more than your time...

[Arkevorkhat]

...
That said, I understand the frustration people feel; even partially melded (or even entirely unmelded) Aesthete gear was more than enough to make the Neo-Ishgardian gear and the raid pots/food for last tier. So when 5.3 hit, we got the crafting gear meant for this tier, while all the combat-related crafts and whatnot were still the ones for last tier from 5.2, and even Aesthete gear was possible to make relatively easily with Aesthete gear (since Aesthete had to be possible with HQ melded Faceted, after all). So jumping to the stuff for this tier and being functionally "undergeared" almost certainly feels like slamming into a wall after having been able to make the top crafts without breaking a sweat.

This is really the core of what I'm getting at.
The crafts themselves are master crafts, I agree, and they should have a level of difficulty on par with that tier of play; Master crafts should always be harder, both in gear requirement, and actual mechanical difficulty, than normal crafts.
The issue at hand is that the level of challenge is beyond the scope of the relevant gear that is currently available; if I want to craft the new items, I need to do Advanced Melding, which by its very nature is something that the developers have tried to discourage mechanically; they have made the process expensive, and prevented us from using top-tier materia for it.

Regarding the availability of Exarchic HQ gear, I think that's a symptom of a overabundance of hyper-qualified crafters, moreso than a sign that the crafts themselves are at a reasonable difficulty level.

[Rilifane]

I had Aesthete gear with mostly regular melds (some cheap overmelds low tier materia), Chili Crab HQ and Syrup plus specialist stone and it worked fine. Not 100% and I crafted it manually before I got my pentas but with HQ mats manually crafted into as much HQ precrafts as possible and then crafting the final piece manually again. I only botched 1 or 2 pieces and had to redo them, rest turned out HQ.
It was more time-consuming than anything else and I probably would've been faster had I just spammed collectables for materia, pentamelded and had another go at it but they're not unreasonably difficult.
Maybe look over general rotation again, work better with procs and get some cheap low-tier overmelds on the pieces you can't overmeld with current-tier materia yet?

[TurtlesAWD]

Something you can additionally look out for are times when materia prices are going to be lower by virtue of being at a time when demand is reduced - pentamelding the week before a ranking period would have been an expensive idea for instance, but with no future ranking event on the horizon and the introduction of new combat content on the schedule, I think we're very likely to see crafting materia prices drop as time goes on, probably 40-60% of what they were right before ranking.

[Aronos]

The minimum requirements to craft Exarchic gear are frankly too high. I have head-to-toe Aesthete gear, some of it melded, and I can't even attempt to craft any of the gear, nor any of the pre-crafts. I understand that Exarchic basically exists as a way for pentamelded crafters to try and make back the tens of millions of gil they burned to meld their gear, but it's frankly ridiculous that there should be crafts that are sequestered to the top 1% of crafters.

This is frankly just a transparent attempt to make the rich get richer in this game, to the detriment of those of us who don't enjoy putting on a movie and pressing a macro over and over.

I'm sorry, but if you got into making the i510 gear for the gil, 2 months late than you have grave misunderstanding of how to make gil in this game and how the economy works.

Is there a reason why crafting the highest ilvl gear in the game shouldn't be difficult? Is there a reason why having "some of it melded" should mean that it's easy? The fact that the highest crafted gear available is 100% HQable with macros using only one or two HQ mats is honestly laughable as is.

“I didn’t even put the minimum expected effort in and can’t do it, this game sucks," is a pretty piss-poor argument honestly.

Adressing this in general, because there's a common theme between many of these replies:

I have full normal (non-advanced) melds on all of my aesthete gear, which is all HQ, including my tools, plus some overmelds.
Using High Quality Chili Crab, I can only meet the minimum requirements to attempt the crafts.
Having spent an hour in the shed on Teamcraft, I was only able to manage 14% HQ on precrafts, with HQ materials where they are available, on one of my specialist jobs.

If I want to have a statistically significant chance at receiving a high quality final craft, I need all of the materials that can be obtained as high quality, to be high quality.

If you're truly struggling to make HQ crafts with the gear you state you have, then there's something very wrong with your rotation.

[HyoMinPark]

So basically the answer to "I don't want to waste all of my gil overmelding gear that will be outmoded in 6 months" is "Meld your gear, waste your time and money like the rest of us did."

If you don’t want to overmeld your crafters, then either buy the crafted gear you desire from the marketboard (they aren’t that expensive anymore due to ease of crafting them), or wait for the final round of scrip gear. Those are your options now. Keep in mind that pentamelded crafted gear will likely be enough for you to power through 6.0 leve-leveling to level 90, so you will still get additional use out of them after ShB ends.

Max level crafts should be more difficult than leveling crafts. They should require effort, and actually make HQ mats valuable instead of unnecessary overkill. They certainly aren’t nearly as hard as they used to be pre-SB, but they shouldn’t be click-a-button-and-win, basically.

[KageTokage]

If anything, endgame crafting is too easy and that's partly why it becomes scarcely more expensive then NQ vendor gear within about a week of a new patch releasing.

[Arkevorkhat]

"Things shouldn't be made easier because I did it the hard way" is a pretty piss-poor argument honestly.

Besides, I never said this game sucks, nor did I say I did the minimum expected, I've already gone above and beyond, I have overmelded some of my gear, spent over a million gil pumping materia into it, and still it's genuinely impossible for me to even manage HQ precrafts with food and potions because these crafts were balanced to be a challenge for pentamelded crafters, because the community complains constantly that crafting is too easy, and no matter how hard SE makes it, unless they make it literally impossible to use macros, people are still going to complain.