Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
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I will 100% agree with the more casual minded players here that crafting has a very high inbuilt floor of what you need to make it even functional. By and large scrip gear just doesn’t cut it like it used to, as far as I’m aware current orange scrip gear with food can’t even see 7.2’s raid gear meaning ONLY everseekers can see it. Pentamelding can either be very expensive or require a lot of time investing in different things that aren’t immediately obvious. IS provides materia, so does custom deliveries and beast tribes, but constantly doing them every day to build up a stock of materia can be hard to understand what activities are worth doing and how often to do them. On the gatherers side spiritbonding is generally your go to but nobody tells you that the lower ilvl gear in the same bracket spiritbonds faster (so thunderyards will always spiritbond faster than everseekers) and the rate of spiritbonding while reliant on how overmelded you are is agnostic to what is actually melded (so having BIS melds gives the same spiritbonding rate as having 5 tenacity materia)

Expert crafts as well are in my eyes a fantastic system built on a flawed base. Every single condition on experts besides normal is functionally a different version of exactly the same thing; a conditional CP gain based on action priority. HOWEVER the flaw comes in the fact that base crafting doesn’t actually teach you why any of the actions work the way they do and why. I can think of a few actions absolutely core to expert crafts that normal crafts don’t care about at all

1) prudent touch- it’s your main method of inner quiet stack generation in experts but is basically completely unused in normal due to prevalence of waste not
2) rapid synthesis/hasty touch- to someone who’s never done experts why would they ever think actions that can straight up fail are remotely useful?
3) observe- observe as a combo action into advanced is unused in normal and good omen only existing in experts is another highly useful action that doesn’t get used in normal

It’s hard to expect people to learn experts when normals don’t teach you why crafting skills work the way they do