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

[Kaurhz]

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.

I disagree. The accessibility and ease of crafting rotations now can largely be attributed to a wider wealth of resources which weren't necessarily entirely accurate, and a stronger community with much higher collaboration than previously exhibited.

Barring some minor nuances with how ingenuity worked, and getting comfort zone to fit around the general rotation. The rotation itself was arguably never that complex to begin with. Almost entirely being attributed to the fact that RNG created a false sense of difficulty. When ultimately the logic derived from such RNG essentially boiled down to:

Ok your rotation requires 436CP. Yet your available CP is 456. For every chunk of 18CP you have remaining you can compensate a hasty touch with a precise touch or a basic touch.

Further, for each tricks of the trade proc you get, you can compensate a hasty touch with a precise touch or a basic touch. There is very little change with regards to the nesting of buffs barring the fact that now instead of ingenuity you're using veneration. Similarly you no longer have comfort zone nor steady hand. Which arguably for the former was just about optimising their uptime with regards to your step count and making sure that you utilised as many touches under steady hand. Not much unlike the utilization of innovation now. Except instead of the advantage being success rate, it is now efficiency.

Personally, I'm concluding that in terms of rotation design and execution there's just as many nuances now than before, and that the simplicity has always been key. With the large differential being success rates are basically tossed out of the window. Which the success rate itself has very little impact on the difficulty of something in the first place. Hasty Touch didn't slap as many times as you were hoping? Bad time bro, try again.

[Hanaya]

I agree. I said in an earlier comment that I prefer when stuff like crafting/gathering is grindier and more difficult, but I really don't think crafting and gathering should be like, high level content. Especially when I think it's something that really appeals to more casual players (speaking from experience playing on crystal lol). I do wish there was more high-difficulty high-reward stuff, like ishgard restoration ranking phases and stuff (though I'm hoping they'll add something similar in future endwalker patches, since I personally lived my life in the firmament in shb), but I'd also much rather the majority of the playerbase be able to enjoy content they find thematically appealing. Though I would say it's just generally difficult to make actually challenging crafting content in this game. Even expert crafts didn't really take any brainpower, you just had to manually craft instead of macro crafting. The only real difficult part was just the amount of expert crafts you had to make under a time limit to get saint of the firmament.

My only real gripe is that I do think the stat requirements for the current expert crafts are too low. They definitely feel too easy to 100% hq right now.

[Lonkkis]

Crafting has never been hard, even back in the day. Only thing that was tedious was the initial leveling.

You had macros for crafting too, often you had to split it into two or three buttons.

[Liam_Harper]

It was "hard" in terms of the combination of research, time investment, gil investment, market knowledge, restrictions, limitations. Hard doesn't only mean it took skill, because crafting was never about skill, it's about calculation. If it was as easy as today, we'd have had more high end crafters back in the day. Also calling it "tedious" is completely subjective.

Nowadays, it's easy to buy a cheap set, mid or high tier meld it fairly cheap and plug in a generic macro. In the past, materia was extremely expensive and being a good crafter was about working with the stats you could afford and the markets within your scope. I used to make all my own macros, because the typical internet macro was for a set stat build that I didn't have and rotations could vary wildly with stats. I saved millions developing good macros for budget melds. We used to spend months in the crafter forums theory crafting and discovering new and more efficient macros. Macros today are very similar and the same Groundwork opener -> Prudent/Prep touches -> Brygots finisher with minor tweaks.

But yes, as I said before I don't think we need to go back to HW. Some of the design was awful. There could be a balance.

[KageTokage]

I was able to push crafted gear for 300-500K through the end of HW; a far cry from the current laughable state of things where prices tend to degrade into sub 100K values within a few weeks of a new patch releasing.

I do feel like the HW crafts took WAY too long, but other aspects such as gating crafts behind limited scrips or specialization felt like a necessary evil to create scarcity that is needed for a healthy economy.

[Listrella]

uh no, I don't craft a whole lot so I wouldn't be that bothered.

[Bsrking5]

If it was, i'd still be interested in it and doing everything in it. Its too hyper casual now that its wrecking the market.

[hynaku]

Nope I loved crafting during that time. I hate how much they have nerfed crafting and gathering. It be like any person in world could craft anything without having to learn it or having to craft items by trial and error. They need to bring back crafting to like how it was in 2.0. How it is now crafting has no meaning to it if takes no skills to have any item.

[NanaWiloh]

Nope I loved crafting during that time. I hate how much they have nerfed crafting and gathering. It be like any person in world could craft anything without having to learn it or having to craft items by trial and error. They need to bring back crafting to like how it was in 2.0. How it is now crafting has no meaning to it if takes no skills to have any item.

2.0 Did not require skill just the right stats, good rotation and luck being on your side. Biggest difference between then and now rng has been almost completely removed. Beating rng does not make you good means your just lucky.

[Moonlite]

People talk like levelling a craft and getting the master recipe books were hard. GC turn in every day would have every crafter and gatherer max lvl in a couple weeks. They are also easy recipes or vendor buyable for a huge chunk of them as well. People not know about GC turn ins? Macros worked fine for non star recipes. The only annoying thing was specialist lock out.



The only gate to crafting and gathering of any difficulty still exists today. Overmelding you would need to serious stockpile to overmeld each new crafting set. Or have the gil to say "oh well whats another 100 broken materia."