An educated rant: Why pentamelding is %@$&*!-backwards

[Shuuli]

My entire static owes our crafter friend dozens of gil for the hours they spent making our crafted gear, food and pots! And on top of that WE have to make the effort to get the materia for that gear?! We literally do not have the gil required to teleport, and now Square Enix wants us to participate in the absolutely broken Aether economy to buy the bare minimum required to complete the dps checks? It's absurd, and I believe they should delete materia completely! I play FF14 to escape my crippling debt, not to be further indebted to crafters who spend hours a day pressing two keys on their keyboard!

Or you can just craft yourself and do it for yourself

Also you can do dailies, where u get materia as achievement that you can sell. Level 9 direct hitrate materia (yes level 9 not 10) sells for 12k at morning hours and around 5k in the afternoons.

Another option is to socialize and be friends with people, you would be surprised how helpful some people are for free if you just give them two nice words...

Some people only enjoy crafting in this game and they will always be catered to because YoshiiP said he wants this game to be a palce you go to relax if you want to. The fact that you choose to stress on getting the gear as fast as possible to run savage raid as fast as possible, IS YOURS!

You can choose to wait to run raids when item prices go down, as they usually do.

[sharknado]

I agree pentamelding is a horrible system. But I'm just amused because I can only assume the people complaining are former WoW players who left partially because they didn't like the pre-raid grind and were told that FF14 didn't have one, just to find out it's actually far worse in FF14.

Never believe that the grass is greener on the other side, folks. It really isn't.

In WoW if you actually want to take part of the world first race that's like $5000 for the team, but depending on patch that could be way way higher to get one of first spots, and likely RMT there as well - wherever Blizzard one or not. If you are in normal mythic progression guild you have 1-2 nights a week, 2-3h max and you progress through easy first bosses then hit wall and wait for gear or some game systems to nerf the encounters. Here in EW right now people seems to see only 580 pentameld but not 590 gear as well...

In case of EW I would say there is to many people blindly following some guides but not really understanding why, or not even asking questions. Some say there is to many crafters and the prices collapsed. Looking at reddit daily questions people constantly ask about DoL/DoH gear, melding and whatnot, often not really having experience with it ("Can i craft patch gear with lvl 80 Handsaints?"). Melding overall is even more common - people seems to follow this like it's mandatory. Not sure if those are actually WoW players that assume pentamelding = WoW enchants = mandatory+easy.

And then people, especially WoW players, go to Icy Veins website, they click their job guide and "melding" is up there and they assume it's like enchanting in WoW so they have to do it. There is no wider message or meta "if your group isn't hitting enrage regularly at few % day 1-2 of patch with solid parses then wait for your 590 gear instead of forcefully getting crafted gear and pentamelding it".

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But in the end dumping 100 materia for a slot or two is not very "engaging gameplay". It somewhat work (hunt trains, fate trains, expert dungeons) just because the game supports it and players optimize. And then people optimize even more and take omnicrafting as player power so they "have to have it" even when likely a lot of them got burned on patch day not giving them moogtylions of gil.

IMHO they should not increase barrier to entry for savage/ultimate tiers (or WoW happens), but also they should have some good system for those mastery crafts. Like you get "sphere scrolls" and you can make your own stats for given gear item based on challenges the sphere scroll will require from you (mini relic grind or something - variant for the crafter and variant for the end user). You can customize your stats just like with overmelds but without the RNG and with sane progression path (it can be gradual and not day one all crafted gear or bust).

[Rufalus]

MMOs should have more than 1 type of activity. Crafting should exist, along with benefits to using it. Nobody is required to clear savage in the first week. Just wait more weeks to acquire raid/tome gear if you can't afford melded crafted.

[Floortank]

So the new tier comes out and you want to do damage to the bosses. Right? Wrong. The ability to pentameld is locked behind unnecessary side quests and gatekept by the gil markets. Seriously. Has anyone ever questioned why you need CRAFTERS and GATHERERS so you can overmeld on COMBAT CLASSES? It's just a timesink that punishes people who want to do real content instead of blowing away their subscription time on garbage. Imagine you have your driver's license and you want to drive a car, but before you could even step into a car you had to learn how to learn how to play the violin. FFXIV is a world where only violinists can drive cars, and the actual racers are left taking the bus. And when you dare to point that out, all the violinists say "well it's not fair! Go learn to play some Vivaldi!!!". So you go "ah well, might as well look at a youtube tutorial on how to play this thing" and you realize that the violin is more expensive than your rent. It's prohibitively expensive to even get things melded. Seriously, it makes no sense to brickwall the people who want to actually play the game instead of jumping through pointless hoops. Solutions are to

1) Divorce pentamelding from non-combat classes, and give it to people who reach the level cap of an expansion OR
2) Make materia drop from current extreme trials and normal raids. When you clear a savage fight of the tier, then you're 100% guaranteed to have the overmeld go through.

Every Legend player I personally know is an omnicrafter. I am a raider who can play any Job in the game, and I omnicraft.

I've got three characters at 80+ crafting and one at cap and able to make any gear. It's trivially easy. Just wait until you have all your tomestone gear and then you won't need pentamelds.

[Michieltjuhh]

I can only guess that you are well versed with something like WoW where crafting is indeed a useless profession. they made sure, at the request of hardcore people like yourself, that crafting be made that way because it gave, in your words "casual players" too much say over the elite players who focus only on end game raiding etc. which turned into the current system of crafting in WoW being the most useless thing anyone can ever do.

They've made professions very relevant again, though not to the extremes of FF14. And, unlike in here, it's not all held back until the raid's release, so people actually get to sort their gear in peace before the raid comes out. Significantly better system than having you replace your entire gearset minutes before entering the raid.

fortunately, or, unfortunately in your view, that is not the case here. your example is nonsensical. do the football players not need uniforms? shoes?.. a ball? those dont just grow on trees you know, it will obviously surprise you to know that they are actually crafted items, made by people who likely dont play football. huh... go figure.

The uniforms are the pre-raid grind. The ball (and field) are the raid, provided by the developer. Crafted items, especially added on release, are the steroids, which are forbidden in traditional sports, yet encouraged in FF14.

as for day of the tiers release... well, thats on you if you need things that fast now isnt it? no one is forcing you to be impatient....

The "race for world first" is as much in the developer's interest as it is in the player's. Viewers means exposure, which is basically free marketing. People talk about it, people have something to enjoy outside of playing the game, and it puts some extra interest in the raiding scene as a whole. It makes you feel like the game is more alive, gives players something to strive toward. Just like is the case in any other sport. Making it harder than it needs to be is, thus, shooting themselves in the foot.

[Sutiban]

Frankly I wish pentamelding could be done on all gear. It's a luxury maybe, but it's a luxury that I can work towards once I get my augmented funny red tomestone gear.

[ErryK]

itt: nonsense

what the hell is going on in this thread? have people really finally lost it over some shiny balls?

If I want to be able to kill bosses in this game I only have 2 choices: waste months of my life leveling crafters, or submit myself to the humiliation of begging for charity melds in Limsa from the very people oppressing me.

ok this is bait, bye.

[Skiros]

I refuse to prostrate myself beneath the crafters' boots, and thus haven't been able to make it past P4S enrage for 3 weeks.

This is bait but... Btw, for anyone who can't make past P4S enrage for 3 weeks I'm sorry to say but that is not a gear issue. That's a skill issue.

[Mika_Zahard]

The ability to pentameld is locked behind unnecessary side quests and gatekept by the gil markets

W-what? Melding is part of the MSQ. Miniifla herself asks you to go to Mutamix, the lord of melding, and he teaches you the secrets of melding. The only part that IS a sidequest, is overmelding (which is a SINGLE) quest.

And no market board is restricting you on getting materia. Do you want lots of materia? Then get spiritbond potions (purchased with GC seals), and start doing expert dungeons to grind materia. Also do your dailies and bonus job to get the clusters for materia 9/10, then WT and aim for lines so you get vouchers for materia 9/10 clusters.

You being lazy and thinking others should be accomodating their gil for you is totally wrong.

You want to meld but need a DoH? What is stopping you? Just level a DoH via firmament to 80, ez. Then do collectibles or custom deliveries to 90. EZ


Play the game.

[Illmaeran]

Start with basic ores. Once you get into higher ARR and onward crafting many intermediate products (ingots, etc) require multiple types of metal, one of which is usually something from the previous expansion. Once you can start mining CRYSTALS, not shards, go bonkers on those for a while. Crafters always need them and you can make good money selling in bulk. You may not get a whole lot of XP from them after a bit, but they're a solid source of regular income that you'll be able to tap into to buy periodic gear upgrades until you hit the collectible node tiers for scrips to get gear with.

If you're high enough rank in your GC, using the seals you get from ventures to buy the green company gathering XP buff scrolls will help a great deal. Once you have access to it (level 10?), the Diadem in the Foundation in Ishgard is great XP. I don't know how well that stuff sells for these days, but you can get some pretty cool mounts, emotes, and items with the Skybuilder Scrips you get. It can take a little while to get used to the arrangement of islands on the circuit, but once you do it's pretty smooth sailing.


Gathering in XIV is MUUUUUCCCCCH better than in WoW. Each type of material is found in a small area that has unique nodes for each player. No longer do you have to fly around the entire map and hope someone doesn't snatch the node before you. You'll be running in a pretty tight circuit hitting nodes that only you have access to.