Maximizing your gear! Is it worth it? ilvl 70 sets > DL!

[Adamar]

And those are horribly overpriced and no one with a brain ever buys those. I've leveled up a few crafting classes to 50, wanna know how much it costs me to make those pieces? Almost nothing in terms of gil. Literally. What it cost me is TIME. Time to have leveled up the crafting classes and time to get Philosophy stones from speed runs to make the pieces. But as far as in game gil costs? Usually the items aside from the Philo items needed are cheap throwaway items, maybe a couple thousand gil at most. And even if you don't have any crafting classes leveled, there's an abundance of crafters in towns that are willing to make it for you for a small tipping price which you can haggle if you need to save money. So it's totally possible to have 300k in the bank and start melding your crafted items.

Time is money, though. On my server 18 tome items are about 540k, although it's obviously it's going to vary from server to server.

That said, the profit margin on 2 star crafts is TINY compared to pretty much every other item in the game. Disregarding everything else selling an 18 tome item for 1 mil is less than 200% of the material cost, most everything else goes for 500-1000% if you HQ it.

The time required to level multiple crafts to 50, money required to meld the gear up, food, and time to HQ the side mats (if you're not confident to 100% HQ from NQ for two stars, which is reasonable) all add up. Unless you're making two stars regularly, the cost to fully meld up crafting gear to hit the tiers without food is not a negligible expensive in the slightest - we're talking hundreds of thousands of gil.

[Bardo]

not really, my bard with craft stuff and max crit in every piece of gear has ~35% crit rate (parsed about 100 boss fights) while other bards with dl/ilvl90 only reach ~20-22% crit, which makes a significant difference in the end

The most widely accepted data for crit chance so far has the formula as:
Crit Chance % = 0.0693 x CRT – 18.486

You have 501 crit chance.
501 * .0693 - 18.486 = 16.23
With Straight Shot buff up 100% of the time that jumps to 26 and a quarter percent... WAY off of the 35% you're claiming.
Even giving you the benefit of the doubt and including max uptime on Internal Release, it would top out at under 33%.
But straight shot and internal release are available to all bards and have nothing to do with gear.

I have mostly DL with 2 pieces of i90 and 483 crit chance.
483 * .0693 - 18.486 = 14.98
A difference of 1.25% chance to crit... Again, WAY off the 13-15% difference you're claiming.

Either you're playing with Bards that are never using their buffs while simultaneously ignoring straight shot completely... or your story is full of hot air.

[Bossmoney]

Time is money, though. On my server 18 tome items are about 540k, although it's obviously it's going to vary from server to server.

No, time is time. Time is fake game money if you're too impatient to get the philosophy yourself and are buying items off the auction house. In my experience, 18 tome items is 0 gil as I've never spent a single gil to buy philo items.

The time required to level multiple crafts to 50, money required to meld the gear up, food, and time to HQ the side mats (if you're not confident to 100% HQ from NQ for two stars, which is reasonable) all add up.

Yeah, sure does cost a bit of money and will take a bit of time. That's why it would be dumb to do it for the sole reason of making 2 star items for yourself and I wouldn't advise it. You don't start up a factory to create a pair of jeans for yourself. But you do open up a factor to create a bunch of items en masses to sell to make gil. So if he's leveled up a crafting class anyway, then it'd be nearly free in terms of gil to make those items. And if he hasn't, then he can contact a crafter shouting in the cities to do the job for him, I don't know what going rate for tip is for 2 star items on your server but it shouldn't be more than 50k tops if you're supplying all the materials.

My point was to just illustrate how little money it actually takes to make these two star items and how a million for a piece is a ludicrous price that anyone who knows anything about crafting would never pay. Also btw to your other comments, I can reliably 100% HQ 2 star items and not use any food (which btw even if you needed is ridiculously cheap since Cawl Cennin NQs are perfectly fine and they sell for almost nothing) and can start with all base mats. Even when the recipe asks for another item that I can craft as an additional item, I usually don't even bother HQing those even though they're easy to do so because I'm lazy and I don't need to bother.