Barrier to entry for crafting is to damn high.

[kaynide]

Just an opinion, but bleeding edge crafting has always meant to be a bit of a bear to get into with melding etc.

If you don’t care about doing the newest new stuff, you will never need top shelf stuff as there is always new gear coming as the game ages.

So, that’s kinda the point I think- make endgame top line crafting a bit of a puzzle to figure out to allow top end crafters to make some money doing it. If everyone and their grandma could just do it, what’s the point.

For OP, it sounds like you have a good idea what’s up, but need just a little more to get there, via melding, soul of blah blah and food etc. that’s the price of entry to the bleeding edge. Good luck figuring it out!

[Packetdancer]

Unless you're looking to get into the very top-tier competitive crafting and Marketboard selling, crafted and scrip gear are plenty good enough.

As you note, there's plenty more effective ways to make money on the marketboard; making stacks of commonly-used but irritating-to-gather materials for consumable recipes, making stacks of the materials used for scrip turn-ins... heck, selling the materials used for the lower-level quests to level crafters, or even the fish that you need to turn in for fisher quests. (I used to do a pretty solid business in selling raincallers in perfectly-sized sets for the fishing quest turn-in...)

Despite that, I do have pentamelded HQ crafting and gathering gear. Why? Because I raid... and more specifically, while I don't feel a need to dump gear/pots/food on the marketboard, I do make that gear/food/pots for myself and my static. And being able to hit a macro and 100% guarantee that I'll HQ the result is really useful if I'm making a stack of 100 tinctures or Garlean Pizza or whatever.

So I do think there can be benefits to overmelding, even aside from the top-tier competitive marketboard field. But I do agree with you 100% that pentamelded crafting gear is not going to be the fastest path to making a ton of gil; as many people have joked before, the best way to make a small fortune pentamelding your crafting gear is to start with a large fortune (and then buy all the materia necessary).

If you expect pentamelding to be the path to Money, you will be disappointed and will almost certainly come out poorer than you started.

Most crafted raid food requires scrip farming. These mats can be sold on the MB One just has to simply look up Garlean Cheese and see how to make that...it's work.

I do feel a momentary need to correct here; while you're not wrong that crafted raid food requires scrip-farmed mats, Garlean Cheese isn't one; it's a level 84 recipe that only requires ovibos milk (easily obtained via a retainer). The raid food this tier that uses Garlean Cheese is Garlean Pizza, and the scrip food for that is the Piennolo Tomato (at 15 purple scrip each).

I know this off the top of my head mostly because I literally just made a stack of 102 HQ Garlean Pizza for myself, which -- gods willing -- will last me a good long portion of the raid tier.

ANYWAY.

That said, people get impatient and don't want to bother getting the ovibos milk and then making the cheese and so on; you're spot-on that I'd make considerably more profit selling my leftover HQ cheese on the marketboard -- and even more selling leftover tomatoes -- than I would selling the HQ pizza I'd make using those ingredients.

(Which may be what you meant in referencing Garlean Cheese, rather than specifically scrip ingredients, but I figured it was worth clarifying for anyone reading the thread who hasn't been trying to act like a branch of Papashan's... er, Papa John's... Pizza.)

The scrip gear is not that good because it can't be melded.

Minor correction: the most recent set of scrip gear -- the i590 Perfectionist set -- can actually be melded. It cannot be overmelded, but it can be melded, and it's quite possible to reach the 3600 perception required to gather the materials for the new crafted combat gear/food/pots.

(It is not, I grant, possible to reach the 3700 perception required to even collect Prime/Sublime collectables in the first place, and also hit the 3700 gathering needed for a decent chance at Sublime collectables instead of Prime -- and thus a guarantee of it reducing to glioaether. For that, yes, you do need crafted and pentamelded gear.)

You're correct that the previous job-specific i570 "-soph's" sets could not be melded.

[Rilifane]

Pentamelding is a comfort choice these days, not a hard requirement if someone is going for everything up to and including mastercraft recipes.
I do it because I can and because I like 1 button macros - I find it annoying to have an extra macro for the last 3-4 step. I also want to use Spiritbond potions and skip on the food because more often than not I forget to check if I have it stocked when going into a crafting session. Pentamelding lets me 1 button macro without food and tincture for 100% HQ chance. Can't get more comfortable than that.
It also speeds up the process of marathon-crafting.

Is it a agin, financially and time-wise to pentameld? Nope. While marathon crafting collectables to pentameld doesn't take long (farming mats included), I don't think I craft enough within one gear cycle for the shorter macros to offset the time spent. And I could sell the materia (bite-sized, to avoid flooding the market) and would likely make more money than whatever small edge pentamelding gives me through higher spiritbond from tincture/ food etc.
But I'd rather spend 1-2 days on farming, collectable spamming and melding than deal with something I personally find annoying for an entire gear cycle.

That said, there were times when I only had the cheapest of melds and I substituted the lack of stats with food and long-ass Whistle handcraft rotations. It was easy enough, just took more time and I found it fun.

[Azuri]

I just wanted to say I just tried this. And for anyone wondering 20 short. The picture is missing soul of the carpenter.

There is no soul in that set. You were using normal quality food would be my guess.

[Ronduwil]

Correction here - the 570 scrip gear can't be melded. The new 590 purple scrip gear CAN be normal melded, however it can't be advanced melded.

The fact remains that purple scrip gear is a waste of scrips that could have been used to buy materia. I made the mistake of buying the Alembic, and I quickly realized my error when comparing the stats against its HQ crafted counterpart. While you don't have to be pentamelded, you really should at least aim for three or four materia on each item. The first two melds are practically free, and the third meld isn't that costly. By the third meld, you've already improved your gear beyond scrip gear level.

I believe that going heavy Craftsman melding, along with HQ food, should let someone with all 590 ilvl scrip gear craft the 610 ilvl gear.

Possibly so. I wouldn't recommend it, though. The time you spent gathering the scrips necessary to max out the 590 scrip gear would be better spent crafting your own, IMO.

[NekoMataMata]

It's not really as bad as OP makes it out to be. It's just more so that end game crafting has never been comfortable unless you've min-maxed everything.

It's not really supposed to be super accessible either but at a base level it still somehow is. If you do your weekly deliveries you can stock up on purple scrips and essentially get everything but crafting accessories for those. The i590 gear can't be advanced melded but with some melds it is good enough to craft in-game items.

[Iyrnthota]

I was pretty chuffed to find I could both gather and craft the new crafter gear ingots without pentamelding my gear. I managed to get the HQ gear relatively cheap last patch (probs < 500k after shopping around the servers), and with some materia adjustments (and HQ food on my crafter) I was able to make the requirements.

It's still a bit of a gil investment, but I reckon I've made my money back several fold at this point. Especially having never paid for materia.

The way I figure, it's the more you invest, the more you make

[Oizen]

Crafting in general is a slog in this game lmao

[Liam_Harper]

Threads like these are proof that no matter how easy you make something, someone will always come along and complain that it's not easy enough...

[Leifei]

My answer to your post.....Git gud.