If crafting was still inaccessible and difficult like Heavensward Patches, you’d quit

[SugarPuff]

I've always enjoyed crafting, both then and now. I played FFXI for years and compared to that it was a nice change just to be able to level crafters without dedicating my life and all my gil to the endeavor. It's definitely easier and faster now but to me it never seemed extreme to the point of being inaccessible.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

HW crafting was definitely harder than modern crafting.

The requirements were tighter and we had a far lower CP buffer than we do today. Some abilities (Whistle While You Work and related skills) were more complicated than anything we have now and others, including some of our most powerful abilities (Ingenuity, Maker's Mark), had effects you couldn't even make sense of just by reading the tooltip. HW crafting was all about optimally nesting buffs (Comfort Zone, Steady Hand, Manipulation, Innovation, Waste Not, Ingenuity, Great Strides) and abusing percentage-based progress abilities (Muscle Memory, Maker's Mark, Piece-by-Piece), both of which required a deeper understanding of game mechanics than anything you're going to do when you're making ilvl 580 gear.

Not really. In the age of the internet with guides everywhere, even annoying mechanics are simplified.

I am terrible at crafting and I did fine in 3.0. Just looked up a guide, melded, and crafted away.

[Rufalus]

- A very obnoxious system to obtain certain materials I don't even remember now.

You spent your weekly capped scrips on favors, which was temporary access to hidden nodes, then gather as many items as you could before your time expired. The amount you collect is subject to RNG and it's basically just tokens that you exchange at a vendor for a small amount of actual usable materials.

Due to the caps and amount of time/effort required the market prices started out at like 1m+ gil for a single ingot on my world. They hadn't worked out game balance yet so the armor you made with those limited materials was even 10 item levels less than normal raid gear, 170 vs 180 iirc.

A lot of topics on the forums were saying crafting is dead around that time, and I was just like chill out guys, it's a game that updates often, they will ease things. They started making those mats drop in dungeons like Arboretum, then dropped scrip weekly cap and added all the mats to straight up purchase at spoils npcs.

[Kaurhz]

No I wouldn't. For as many flaws as HW had with the crafting system it was something that encouraged a modicum of intractability and engagement with the system. Personally, I'd prefer to go back to those days, simply because of the longevity the system actually had, versus being fully geared in a couple of hours, and then farming sufficient amounts of materia within a 10 minute to 9 hour timespace, depending on the spectrum you fall on.

With crafting, personally, I feel like they have decided to counter their flaws and feedback in the initial system in ARR/HW and elected to go the complete opposite end of the spectrum with drastic oversimplification of their own system. They didn't need to do that. Simply just removing the weekly cap on items would have been sufficient enough.

[NanaWiloh]

Crafting is a general feature of this game its not ultimate savage which is aimed at specifc demigraph. ARR through Stormblood walled to many players. When such a thing happens with a major game feature devs scrap it or fix the feature to attract more players.
They are not going to raise the difficulty to a point thay players are driven away. You like challenge you have experts.

[NanaWiloh]

Bit of humor.
FF14 hardcore crafter: I grind my life out doing experts.

Eve online player: Hold my beer novice..

[Kakure]

Not really. In the age of the internet with guides everywhere, even annoying mechanics are simplified.

I am terrible at crafting and I did fine in 3.0. Just looked up a guide, melded, and crafted away.

I mean, sure. I can complete any trust dungeon in the game by standing on top of Y'shtola and pressing one button over and over. Does that mean the EW dungeons are no more difficult than Sastasha?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I mean, sure. I can complete any trust dungeon in the game by standing on top of Y'shtola and pressing one button over and over. Does that mean the EW dungeons are no more difficult than Sastasha?

Crafting is generally a static thing with some procs tho. Even in heavensward it was. You just had to look for a good or excellent, and hit a button. It wasn't anywhere close to hard.

It was simply tedious.

[Dogempire]

"If you make a system burdensome and inaccessible with large gil sinks then a casual audience won't use it"

[Zfz]

Crafting had never really interested me up until this expansion. Have been leveling crafting and gathering initially just because it's there to be leveled, and then for repairs and melding.

Honestly I don't think my renewed interest is going to last. I don't like how eventually no crafts ever present any fun. I think too little is happening during crafting. I don't mind all crafts tuned to be successful, that's how games like this should be. But the conditions and so on just doesn't matter and it's clear the gear is balanced so that everything can be macroed.

I don't like how every crafting job is the same. How every craft is also the same. Why can't there be differences like how combat jobs generally have a different gameplay feel?

For example, CUL skills could be a mini-game about controlling the temperature and handling, you get skills like turns, flips, stirs, with combos that raise or lower the temperature, etc. CRP skills could be about shaving and cutting, and you move a cursor and use skills to control how much you shave and cut off to match a goal pattern, with harder crafts having more complex patterns. WVR could be about stitching and you use the mouse to aim where the next stitch goes in while using skills to swap thread colors and thickness etc. BSM mini-game could mimic folding steel and hammering away the impurities indicated by a gradient map, with skills to control strength and temperature.

The mini-games for material crafts could be more standardized, for example for lumber, fabric, threads, salt, ingots, leather etc. it's all about cutting things to fit a pattern. And the final products of each crafter class would use the unique mini-game of that class. This way it's easy for people to still be self-sufficient with materials, but you have to learn and practice each class if you want to be a true omni-crafter.

I'd definitely prefer that than the current state of macros being the best way to do crafting.