What is exactly is the point of crafting?

[Gamemako]

The following actually have some use:

LTW: Gryphonskin accessories are great -- arguably BiS for some jobs, only replaced by ilvl90 in any case. Unlikely to be challenged by ilvl80.
GSM: Rose Gold accessories are fine too
WVR: Vanya is good stuff -- will probably be comparable to ilvl80 gear with no loot limitation
CUL: Food. Food? Food.

The following need work beyond their tiny niche:

ARM: HDS chest/legs takes fewer tomes than HDL, can be better. Mainly just costs fewer tomes. Will be cheaper for other pieces in 2.1 as well. Will not be better than ilvl80 in any case.
CRP: Presently useless crap, will soon make furniture... which is kinda silly when there's no market for it (unless your FC has a house and no CRP, which is hard to do)

The following are utterly useless:

BSM: Useless for endgame except to supply other crafters and meld pre-relics. Ilvl70 weapons are handily bested by ilvl80 and take much longer to get than just farming Garuda for ilvl70 weapon. Will be made exceedingly useless in 2.1 with easier ilvl80 weapons unless it finds some ilvl80 recipes.
ALC: I don't even know what the point of this job is at present. Junk weapons, junk potions.

How would I address the problems? Add equipment reforging and dedicated equipment crafting through leves. For ALC, rebalance potions.

1) Reforge equipment to add materia slots. Require expensive materials to attempt, cap at 20-30% from max quality. Failure to meet progress results in loss of base item.
2) Use leve allowances to do party-only challenge content to acquire materials for high-level items. These are innately time-limited and would make leves that much less useless.
3) Potions in general need to be rebalanced. You want a larger effect (why the hell do healing potions cap so damn low in the first place?), shorter cooldown, and remove some of the silly cooldown timer groupings. A Fire Warding potion might be useful for Ifrit if it were 30s and 1m cooldown. It's not a large reduction and doesn't apply to all attacks, but it has value. You know how many people make Fire Ward Mega-Potions right now? I mean, seriously, who the hell thought it was a good idea to have these at all?

I must say, I find the RMT defense pretty funny.

The RMT defense is funny because they created a crafting system which requires absurd numbers of shards, and shards are acquired pretty well solely by RMTs.

[Djeserit]

If I'm not mistaken the plots for houses are sold in an auction. Hmm, that's not going to encourage RMT or anything!

It's going to be dutch auction, so it probably won't. Anyone who can't afford it now just has to wait for the price to drop. Of course there will be some crazies who can't wait a week, but a fool and his money are easily parted.

[myahele]

I feel sorry for carpenters. Its pretty sad that lumber cost almost the same as the logs they com from.

Which is why I'll stick with botany to make most of my gil, maybe pickup a craft to refine some of the mats I gathered during my downtime

[Thunderz]

It's going to be dutch auction, so it probably won't. Anyone who can't afford it now just has to wait for the price to drop. Of course there will be some crazies who can't wait a week, but a fool and his money are easily parted.

Bots farm gil and sell it to players...

What encourages player to buy gil...very expensive stuff...

what will be expensive... plots

the more you know

[Valhinjin]

Stuff

Yeah, I knew someone would try to refute it. Regardless of how you feel, it was asked what the point was and those are some points. Should you choose to do things another way, that is your choice. But the option is there and it's viable.

[Luso]

Here's why:

1) In the time it takes to level all crafts and gatherings to 50, you can level all combat classes to 50
2) Almost all HQ 1-star gear is matched or beaten by drops in WP or AK
3) HQ 1-star gear is outclassed by Darklight gear, except in rare cases with penta-meld
4) HQ 2-star gear is equalled by Darklight gear. Penta-melded HQ 2-star will generally beat Darklight, however see point 5)
5) It requires 23 runs of WP/AK to earn enough Phil tomes to buy the materials to make a single piece of 2-star gear (HQ or otherwise). In that time, you will have earned 690-820 Myth times, which is enough to buy Artifact 2 gear, which outclasses penta-melded HQ 2-star gear in almost all scenarios barring a few examples

You are undervaluing HQ 2-star gear by a lot. Sure it says i70, but it is some of the most useful gear to have in the game. Getting the right materia melds into those gear will fix problems you might have trying to gear out for Turn 5.

[Djeserit]

Bots farm gil and sell it to players...

What encourages player to buy gil...very expensive stuff...

what will be expensive... plots

the more you know

Yes, plots will be expensive....

at first.

They will get cheaper over time. The only reason to buy gil to buy a plot would be if you have to have it NOW. Which only fools would.

The more you know.

Post-Patch-note edit: Welp, Guess I was wrong on this one, though you would still have to be insane to buy gil just for FC housing

[Darkshneider]

Are you kidding me.have you not seen how powerful i70 things are with materia? you dont even need all IV materia to do it.in fact,5x melded things with just 1 IV materia and rest 3's 2's 1's have over 10+ more stat points than i90;s.The i90's are better cause they have more of your "main stat" bt it makes them VERY close to them.
Thats how good they are.DD's and healer benefit more of this tho than tanks.but still.you can chek my char my melds are not the most expensive but they are quite good and it didnt break my bank((im re meldin my gloves tomorrow))

[Galliano]

I see crafting as making yourself self sufficient.

[Asiaine]

All crafted equipment is good.
All crafted equipment can be easily beaten by dungeon drops or items you buy with tomes.
Best case comparison is some of the top (2-star) crafted equipment can match some of the top dropped items (for example, 5 melded rings).

From this, it looks like crafted gear is good. But once you calculate the cost of materials (and therefore time needed to acquire the material or to acquire the gil needed to buy the materials), it looks less good.

The end result is, given time (T), user can either spend xT to farm equipment (drops, tomes), or yT to farm materials (to buy or make crafted equipment). Typically, y > x, thefore it is more efficient to not deal with crafted equipment and simply get Mythos related equipment.

In fact, given how easy it is to get mythos gear, I do not even bother with darklight gear and save those stones to buy other stuff.

I think it may be fair to say that the new 'intention' from SE is:
Equipment will be gathered form dungeons (directly or via tomes to buy it).
Crafting will be used for Vanity equipment.
Crafting will be used for PvP equipment (there was a hint on this).
Crafting will be used for Furniture.

So in this sense, we need to get out of our heads the 'traditional' purposes of crafting: That it will create good weapons/armours for us. And accept that it has a new and different purpose in this realm.

(Personally, not thrilled about that, I liked customizing my effective gear).