Clusters and Crystals and Shards, Oh My!

[Raikki]

Why can't we break down clusters into crystals and crystals into shards anymore? They seem to have been trying to make low level gathering somehow meaningful, but particularly in the case of shards, they're far too scarce and too expensive, and worst of all too tedious to farm. I can think of few things as mind-numbingly awful in this game as farming shards and crystals. Nobody wants to do it. If we have high level gathering classes, why can't we be allowed to just farm clusters and break them down?

[Anapingofness]

This would be useful.
Maybe they'll let us grow our own shards/crystals/clusters with housing?

[Ksenia]

I'm not sure what the objective was but I know what the result is.

I've done rough math and if you wanted to farm all the shards you would need to level the craft classes, you would need to farm shards for 3 hrs a day, 7 days a week for 5 weeks to get them. It worked out to around a week per shard type using information based on what I use to put together enough 3/3 turn in leve's in each level group for Weaver.

That's 5 weeks of unmitigated, grind. It no longer qualifies as a valid time sink when it gets to that extreme.

[charlemagne]

errrrr clusters sell for decent gil don't they? Just sell them and buy shards. Not that shards are particularly time consuming to gather. It's not that time consuming with botanist.

[RyuujinZERO]

My concern is that the setup as it presently stands is playing RIGHT into the gilsellers hands. Here we have a level 1 item, that can easily be farmed by bots, and is in huge demand - it's like printing gil for them. A single teleport bot left for 24 hours can probably farm in the region of 18k shards, which sell for 20-30 gil each (on Balmung), yielding around 450,000 gil a day. It's no surprise a whole swarm of bots could easily bring in millions daily for the RMTs.

[Roris]

Just make fish craftable into crystals and enemies drop shards again, hell make them only drop with Signet or whatever even though we didn't need it in 1.0

[Velev]

These little touches which were fixed back in FFXI were great back then. Instead of having some sort of newer system for crafters like many of us on here including myself would appreciate, SE has stepped backwards.

I've had to stop in mid crafting more times than i can count because of a low count of shards. And farming those is like watching paint dry. 1 per swing for mining and same for the bot unless you have your 400GP available in which case you get more but then have to wait again for GP.. and round and round we go...zzzz

Some of the synths as you get closer to 50 require 4-5 shards per synth and that's not even the finished product, that is JUST for the mats to make the final product.
And here i thought that SE learned from their past mistakes and corrected them for ARR.
I guess i am mistaken..

[CatofNineTails]

when buying shards it should be the player who chooses not to buy from the obvious bot user who has 10-20 entries of 1k shards on all the types of shards.

its so obvious which players are not doing legit mining/lobotany to sell shards yes a player can gather a few thousand shards to sell but its unlikely even the most dedicated gatherer will have 25,000 shards up for sale all the time.

[Slatervonjager]

wondered why we weren't able to do this.

[Virtuso]

It's such a shame. Shards dropped like candy on Halloween in the old version. No idea why they made it so much more tedious in 2.0. I'm just going to buy them when I run out. Grinding leve's should net enough money to get by for shards at least. Assuming your not spending it on other things like endgame repairs.