How will Endwalker make crafting more of a brain dead activity like Shadowbringers?

[Liam_Harper]

I don't see what a simplification of crafting has to do with MB bots?...

That should be obvious. Leveling a crafter is many times faster than in the past, with exp pretty much tripled and things like Ishgard making it easier than ever. The materials are all easy to obtain or cheap to buy. Endgame gear is cheap to buy. Materia is all but worthless. ...Combined it makes it miles easier to set up a DoH/L bot which has been a big incentive. There's less risk if you were banned because it's not too much investment to make a new lv80 bot. Not to mention cross-world enables a bot to cover multiple worlds on a Data Centre.

This incentive lead to an increase in botting. SE being unable to do anything about these player bots then made the botting community aware that it was risk free and easy to set up which opened the floodgates.

TBH crafting macros have been a thing ever since forever, you don't even need to learn how to use your skills, you just copy a macro provided by a guide.

Who makes those guides? They don't just appear out of thin air.

I remember when we used to have theorycraft discussions on the forums for new gear rotations that could go on for weeks, fine tuning, adjusting for different stats and discovering new additions. That's what made crafting interesting. There was also the fact that just macro crafting high end gear was a privilege you earned with the best gear, which took a lot of work, progress and research to make, obtain the materia and so on. Not to mention materials weren't also all dirt cheap and easy to obtain. It was a journey before you could just plug in your macro and start churning out good crafts.

[Shadygrove]

I'm confused... what about it was difficult in the earlier versions? ...

The difficulty was never in the crafting, the difficulty was in getting to max levels. Materia costs for the pentamelding you so despise was a significant barrier as well.

[Styrmwyda]

Personally I like how simple crafting is since I'm a crafting casual, don't really care about making money via crafting.

[Nabril]

Why do "casual crafters" want things to be easier? Greed. You want the items without having to work for or pay someone else for them. You label effort as "tedious" when for crafters it's what made it satisfying. Why do you deserve the best items in the game on a plate for little work?

Crafting wasn't about skill, correct. Crafting was about patience and game knowledge. The leveling process making you feel like you were learning a profession, gradually improving over time and had that feeling of immersion. There was the satisfaction of making your own items and seeing them put to use. The theorycraft and research. Where do I find materia, how do I adjust this rotation to my stats, where do I gather these materials and putting the sum of your knowledge together. Sure you'll say it's "tedious" but many loved it and happily sank hundreds of hours into it.

Crafting has also always been about selling items. It's an endgame in itself, because what else are you going to do once you finally have that max level crafter decked out in fully melded endgame gear? In Stormblood and HW even casual crafters could make a large amount of gil selling furniture and non-master recipe items. There is no shame in enjoying making some gil from a profession you sank a lot of time into and labeling it as "greed" is ridiculous when you consider the "elite crafters" back in the day used to pour their time into writing guides, sharing rotations and trying to help the community join in.

First, it sounds like you're labeling me as "casual crafter". Care to define that term? What exactly do you think is a casual crafter? I craft all the time. I recently joined a new FC and took over the airships and submersibles. I crafted all new equipment and upgraded them all with new parts. I've crafted lots of workshop walls and I've made a lot of gil off of them.

So... what's a casual crafter in your mind? Someone who doesn't bitch about crafting being "easy" when crafting was always easy? Hell, all it takes is an investment in overmelding and one can craft anything he or she wants. I don't even need HQ mats because I threw in a few million gil into cramming 5 materia into each piece of equipment. It's that easy. One can simply buy ones way into endgame crafting. Overmeld=100% success with HQ items.

Funny how you "elite crafters" keep leaving that part out. Don't overmeld and you'll still get 100% success with HQ gear- you'll just need HQ mats.

And I leveled up all of my classes before the Firmament made that fast and easy. And I still think all these threads about making crafting harder are silly. All you have to do is petition SE to remove the ability to overmeld crafting equipment.

[Nabril]

The difficulty was never in the crafting, the difficulty was in getting to max levels. Materia costs for the pentamelding you so despise was a significant barrier as well.

Pentamelding isn't that expensive. It really isn't. One makes money so easily by selling low level furniture or workshop housing walls that pentamelding expenses are a joke and you know it. If you're half the crafter you're claiming to be then you know that. You know that as well as every other crafter in this game. I can earn the money to pentameld in a single day's work.

So what exactly is this barrier you speak of?

And I don't hate pentamelding. I'm just pointing out that it's not hard to do and doing it makes crafting an absolute joke as far as getting that 100% every single time.

[Jojoya]

Pentamelding isn't that expensive. It really isn't. One makes money so easily by selling low level furniture or workshop housing walls that pentamelding expenses are a joke and you know it. If you're half the crafter you're claiming to be then you know that. You know that as well as every other crafter in this game. I can earn the money to pentameld in a single day's work.

So what exactly is this barrier you speak of?

And I don't hate pentamelding. I'm just pointing out that it's not hard to do and doing it makes crafting an absolute joke as far as getting that 100% every single time.

Pentamelding isn't expensive now because extraction changes have made materia plentiful. It was very expensive in the past when it was hard to get, making it a barrier to entry for end game crafting. When you're going to need over 600 materia to pentameld a full set and the materia you need is selling for 100-500k each, it gets expensive fast.

Crafting becomes an absolute joke the moment someone figures out the solution to the math problem and shares it online with other players. Pentamelding has nothing to do with it.

[Liam_Harper]

So... what's a casual crafter in your mind? Someone who doesn't bitch about crafting being "easy" when crafting was always easy? Hell, all it takes is an investment in overmelding and one can craft anything he or she wants. I don't even need HQ mats because I threw in a few million gil into cramming 5 materia into each piece of equipment. It's that easy. One can simply buy ones way into endgame crafting. Overmeld=100% success with HQ items.

That's one reason why it's so easy. You say "crafting was always easy" and use overmeld as an example when overmeld used to be a rather high gate to overcome. There were times during early Stormblood where grade 6 craft materia were selling at 1.5 million each and grade 5's 50k. Imagine pentamelding a full set like that.

Crafting used to involve far, far more time to level because exp was much less and we didn't have Ishgard collectibles to spam, nor would 100 leves get you as far. Gatherer's too, which impacted the availability of timed node mats. Scrips weren't as easy so master books were a grind. Materia didn't rain from the sky via spiritbond and yellow scrips. Rotations weren't as straightforward. The sum of all those things meant crafting took time, patience, investment and research before you could just slap a macro on and churn out endgame items. There was a journey to it. If you weren't rich, you'd need to tailor your macro to your stats too and this could vary considerably. As Camie used to say “The best crafter is not the one with the best stats, but the one who makes the best use of one’s stats”. That used to be very true, but sadly doesn't mean anything nowadays because everyone just turbo's to 80, buys a Pentamelded Aesthete set and has the same stats.

[Kaurhz]

It was always braindead, regardless of the outlook you had. RNG, or elongating the whole process didn't exactly make for the most spectacular complexity in the world. Well done you were lucky enough that Rapid Synthesis hit; well done you got a good condition and your CP is >18 of what your baseline rotation requires, enjoy your Precise Touch. You were dealing with very mundane and simple situations, let's not kid ourselves that it was actually hard.

Considering it's fairly reasonable to say bots can do 'expert' recipes. You can reasonably infer that regardless of what approach they'd have taken, the bots would have got there either way. They've simply just developed more over time. - It was just inevitable. The extreme rampant botting has about as much to do with how developed they are as to how 'oversimplified' crafting currently. But largely it's down to Square Enix really showing a lot of people that they don't seem to have a proactive approach to the matter. So as far as people see it, it's a no-risk situation.

I think they can do more to make the whole process more engaging sure. There's no need why we can't have a unique expert-grade recipe to unlock the master tomes, instead of the traditional grinding a couple of scrips whilst watching an episode of anime or something on Netflix. Or even a combination of both.

We can argue about the whole process and cost of melding too, but let's not kid ourselves on that front either. The need for it was hardly necessary, it's something that made your life a little easier; it wasn't a barrier to entry. The entry was far lower, even in regards of having a modicum of efficiency. I found back in Heavensward that really regardless of your stats nothing was saving you from whether hasty touch simply did or didn't want to play ball on that craft. Stormblood really gave you a little more mileage, but you didn't really get much with it until the later recipes anyway - Stormblood 2* was just a doddle regardless of stats; they were drastically under-tuned, as much as ShadowBringers ones were too, in fact. Back then the price of the gear you crafted itself already turned to peanuts on Wednesday. The price of materia significantly plummeted before the materia was even really ever considered necessary or even nice to have.

This oversimplification has not just been something exclusive to ShadowBringers. It has been a thing for around 1445 days since 4.05. I have just seen a continuation of the trend that they really began back in Stormblood. So anyone that didn't really foresee this until recently, or even in Stormblood for that matter; shame on you.

There's not a single tool that beats the Skysteel tool without pentamelding unless I'm missing something. So it was best in slot unless you pentamelded. So obviously pentamelding is making crafting easier if it makes a substandard tool better than the Skysteel tool.

People here were drastically overestimating just how much the tool would in fact matter. Looking at the tool with a narrow mind will give you the impression that it's not very good, but you need to consider it with respect to preexisting stats. 17 control doesn't really have much of an impact with respect to our current macros, you can make an argument about expert recipes with this one, but then as far as master recipes were concerned the additional 48 craftsmanship that you'd get has the potential to significantly impact your rotation, both from step-count and CP cost perspective. I think overall for master recipes the Skybuilders' tool has a much greater potential, but alas it really released at a fairly poor time.

Calling a tool by itself is really just a folly since you need to take into account your stats already when you're looking at making any reasonable comparison between the tools, and really speaks to what has been stated here verbatim - “The best crafter is not the one with the best stats, but the one who makes the best use of one’s stats”

Why do "casual crafters" want things to be easier? Greed. You want the items without having to work for or pay someone else for them. You label effort as "tedious" when for crafters it's what made it satisfying. Why do you deserve the best items in the game on a plate for little work?

Arguably there's more greed in wanting exclusivity of crafting and cutting out the competition, or the 'little guy' as it would be so eloquently put so that you can reap larger rewards and profit, by definition actually is geed. So this is a two-way street. Let's not go around calling people greedy. Now, if you want to complain and include botters here, that is a different discussion entirely which has as much to do with Square Enix's lack of apparent proactivity in the matter.

Some people are inherently lazy and wanted everything on a platter, and in the end some other individuals just want more gil. Both are greedy.

[Sylvain]

Tbh a simple way to kill macro is to make much more prof related skills / effects.
Currently procs are rare enough and related skills are weak enough that you can ignore these and still manage your way.

Just make proc more common (with different prof if you will) and increase their effect.
This way macroing simply wouldn't work unless you'd use a very long set of that would try to use every proc rated ability after each non proc related ability. And you could go even further. Make that proc related abilities aren't grayed out when the proc isn't available but simply very weak skills (or that they have 75% chance to fail) like the second/third part of a melee combo that is always available to use even if you're not at that step yet

That would definitely solve the macro issue. But probably not the bot one as I suspect they'd be able to simply read the combat log and make choice accordingly with a more complex alogorithme.


As a side note, I'd like them to reduce the animation duration because it's really long to craft one thing when all you doing is waiting for each skill to finish their animation

[Liam_Harper]

Arguably there's more greed in wanting exclusivity of crafting and cutting out the competition, or the 'little guy' as it would be so eloquently put so that you can reap larger rewards and profit, by definition actually is geed. So this is a two-way street. Let's not go around calling people greedy. Now, if you want to complain and include botters here, that is a different discussion entirely which has as much to do with Square Enix's lack of apparent proactivity in the matter.

Some people are inherently lazy and wanted everything on a platter, and in the end some other individuals just want more gil. Both are greedy.

It depends. High end crafters rarely wanted exclusivity which is why there were theorycraft threads and many put countless hours into making guides, sharing macros and answering questions. They wanted it to be an activity that was satisfying to reach the high end, but that anyone could join in if they liked crafting.

There are also benefits to having tiers of crafters, such as the maxed pentamelded crafters, the budget endgame crafters, the crafters who just hit 80, the crafters in the leveling process and so on because it creates different markets. Gear and furniture of all levels becomes useful and worth making. Currently a combination of crafting being so easy that everyone has a max geared lv80, and retainers churning out crafted items right up to and including current expansion, means there are far less viable markets while competition in those limited markets has skyrocketed. In past expansions even the little guy could make far more gil than nowadays.

I don't feel it's greedy to want to be able to make lots of gil if you put a lot of time, patience and effort into something. Very few people want to eliminate competition, but at the same time you can't give the entire playerbase a slice of a single pie. It's not a viable design. It has devalued many items to a point that I doubt even the devs intended.