whats the point of crafting...

[Vortok]

That said, if they did actually want to make HQ'ing more difficult, all they need to do is nerf Inner Quiet. e.g. reduced it's effect by 50% or something.

Aye, it depends on what their design goal is overall. Reducing how strong Inner Quiet is would certainly be one method if a change were to be made at all, though it would effect 40 durability crafts as well, which currently feel fine (to me, at least) in terms of effort needed to HQ them.

I feel you're muddling your point about RNG by talking about how people find an RNG-based crafting system annoying in one breath, and then mentioning how much you preferred crafting when Tricks of the Trade -- which 100% relies on the RNG popping Good -- mattered.

It's basically perspective and how the RNG feels, but I put the short version in another post.

Random chance to suck is not all that fun. Random chance to do better than expected though, is a bit more pleasant.

When I was initially leveling before I had lots of abilities (GSM was my... 6th 50 I think, so no Innovation for quite awhile), I could generally get a 40 Dura mat (stuff like Linen when made at level) to around 80% or so. Guaranteed, no Hasty Touch. If I had a few Good procs, I could do much better and often get it all the way to 100%, but I could always get a pretty decent chance at HQ with the stats/abilities I had at the time even with bad luck. That's what I mean by enjoying when Tricks of the Trade was relevant. The RNG was a bonus (and required me to react to it, so not macro'd), without which I wasn't guaranteed a HQ result if I didn't start with any HQ mats.

The Hasty Touch method (aka, similar to what would happen with a weaker Steady Hand) has a chance to just fail horribly every now and then and there's nothing you can do about it other than find a method that doesn't rely on touches not missing more times in a row than seems reasonable.


Being able to guarantee HQing something with some method is fine (otherwise we basically just have Hasty Touch spam), but doing so without at least some HQ mats has several effects. For one, it incredibly weakens the HQ mat market which hurts Gathering professions and mainly makes them about farming quantity rather than quality or a balance of the two. Avoiding botting (to obtain HQ mats through sheer volume) shouldn't be part of a class design process, but I think we all know SE has room to improve when to comes to their anti-bot measures.

The other major impact of HQ from all NQ is that it shortens the time to create a piece of HQ gear by a ton (making it far easier to flood the market in general). Rather than spending the time to HQ the 4-6 1 star mats before making a standard lvl 70 item someone can just spend 2 steps on each mat quickly completing the progress bar and utterly ignoring quality altogether on every craft but the final one.


Obviously with RPG stat progression there will be a cutoff where someone can HQ a piece of gear without any HQ mats, but it seems that point should come before the most 'difficult' crafts in the game. Another thing to consider is CLN, as sometimes they can't just spend the time to HQ most of the mats used in their final craft. They also aren't doing crafts worth several hundred thousand either, though. Devs also had to make a decision of where to draw the line on someone having a reasonable chance of HQing stuff if they only had one crafting class at 50 (much like they said up through HM Ifrit is balanced without cross class abilities factored in). Lots of factors to consider.