Barrier to entry for crafting is to damn high.

[Hanayumi]

Its never been easier to get into endgame crafting, leveling is a faceroll, scrip gear is plenty enough to do the crafts and easy to especially with deliveries and crafting itself was greatly simplified with little rng. If anything its too easy to get into crafting, the market has been trash because of it...

[Sqwall]

Pentamelding is the Savage of Crafting/Gathering.

I have had 1.3million worth of materia explode in my face...in one meld!

It's not for everyone, and percentage of people that do it is incredibly low.

I put in HOURS of work saving and purchasing the mats to have someone make an HQ crafting set for me back in Shadowbringers, and that single time set me up for the rest of the game. With the money I made selling mid level mats and gathering I bought enough materia for pentamelding my crafting gear. Then 6 months later...

I made my OWN crafting gear....120 mil gil later Endwalker drops....

I made 3 million gil yesterday.....

Hell most of that was just palm sugar!

Chasing the endgame gear is a black hole imo. After you lose the feeling of HQ'ing an endgame weapon leaves you, you still have to sell the damn thing. And the REAL crafting game begins.....undercutting until your item sells for a deflated price. I stopped selling endgame gear back in 5.3...it's not worth sitting next to the retainer bell all day adjusting prices.

Crafting mats and midlevel crafted mats are where the fast sales are....I can't keep my retainers full enough with the demand so high. In the 24 hours it takes to sell a 610 weapon for 800k...I can farm and sell mats for 8 million. For me that's where the money is and the time investment is MUCH more relaxed.

You gotta put in the the work and be very resourceful as a crafter/gatherer. Find someone on the forums that can make you a new pact set if you aren't willing to put in the work...put either way...you're spending some gil.

[Illmaeran]

Unless you're looking to get into the very top-tier competitive crafting and Marketboard selling, crafted and scrip gear are plenty good enough. These days mega-crafting consortiums have the market cornered on crafted items over the long term so pentamelding is pretty risky. On my DC the cost of materia is generally greater than the profit gained from selling high-end gear. I do a lot better gathering materials and making intermediate crafted materials like ingots than I ever have on crafted stuff. The market on that's far too flashy and hit-or-miss.

Like Sqwall said, he made a lot on palm sugar. That's easy as pie to make in large quantities. It's even easier to make money on if you sell it in multiples required for raid food or alchemy recipes.

OP, I suggest using Custom Deliveries to accumulate materia for a melding push when the last crafted DoH and DoL sets come out but stick to scrip or purchased crafted gear until then.

[Avoidy]

And your reward for dropping that major investment, is being undercut massively when you go to sell anything.
You're better off waiting a couple of weeks for the price of crafted gear to drop. Barrier to entry always gets less expensive over time. Pentamelding is always awful, but at least when you're done, you have really nice gear for like 8 months and if you fail your gear doesn't blow up or anything like that.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Crafting is many people's endgame so it should not be done in 5 minutes. The entry to crafting is far FAR lower considering how fast and cheap you can level vs before.

In shb I didn't spend a penny on materia for melding I grinded scrips to penta meld my gear. It took ages and once I was done I felt like I just finished climbing everest. But I was happy too. Crafting already does not earn you as much anymore due to being so much more accessible. For the duration of shb I just hoarded materia and this time around I had enough stockpiled to not need to buy much more. If you wait to buy materia when new gear drops you fucked up. Buy it in content draught when people sell it cheap.

If you never hit over 30mill you just were not trying. You have been playing longer than me and I have easily made 500-600mill across my time here. 100mill of it was just spent flipping things from the market board, no crafting involved in any way.

Crafting having some friction to get into is what keeps it somewhat profitable still. If you want to be entirely self sufficient ( I am ) you should be prepared for a bit of grind. This is not a solo game.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

Crafting was stupidly easy before to do, the fact I was kicked in the chuckies to get me into shape was a refreshing surprise, I got VERY complacent on it before.

[ICountFrom0]

Perfectionist is the "new purple stuff". It has the same stats as unmelded HQ Pactmaker gear. The only difference between the two sets is you cannot overmeld the Perfectionist gear. It only has the standard materia slots.

It works perfectly well for making the new 610 gear. You just need to spend more time making more HQ materials than needed with pentamelded Pactmaker.

An augmented version of Perfectionist should become available in 6.4 when it's time to make the 640 combat gear. It's hard to say how difficult it will be to make the next crafted crafting/gathering sets, which will probably be added in 6.3 as usual, but then those who use the scrip gear usually have no interest in those crafted sets.

See, that just tells you how confused I get trying to follow along at this without the game open. Thank you. I probably AM going to make pactmaker and overmeld it JUST a little to improve my odds.

[Denji]

i honestly have never had a problem crafting even with gear that's 10 levels below my current. at most i've had to affix a couple pieces of materia and chug some crafter's syrup but that's pretty rare.

that said, i hate gathering. especially collectibles. it's so tedious and honestly puts me to sleep and in the end it might not even be something you can turn in OR sell to others which is... honestly really frustrating.

[Bsrking5]

Lol, what? The barrier to entry is accept lvl 1 quest and boom. Crafter, even endgame crafter is a joke with how easy it is.

[Arrhin]

Lol, what? The barrier to entry is accept lvl 1 quest and boom. Crafter, even endgame crafter is a joke with how easy it is.

Define Endgame crafting, because it certainly is not i610 PvE gear nor is in cranking out Raid food to flood the market. That's normal crafting.