Pointless Crafting?

[Shirai]

While I agree the prices have dropped considerably, I still make more gil than I need with what I consider minimal effort. (Emphasis on gil I need.)
Sure, with the housing prices I would like to be able to make a bit more. But the FC has other efforts going to raise funds for that as well.

[Reishi]

For us as far as I can tell only the weapon prices dropped a lot. iLv 70 weapons in HQ sell round about 200k less than beforehand.

[Archona]

Nothing sells currently because nobody needs to buy anything. There are multiple people with all professions at 50 on each server that will craft and meld anything for anybody for very minimal fees (since they're already multi-gillionaires). There is absolutely no use to leveling any crafts at the moment, nor is there anything worth crafting. Hit 50, farm Darklight/WP/AK/CT, then enter Coil.

As it stands, a new player right now would have to invest weeks of their time and hundreds of thousands of gil to become a crafter, and it would take them months, if not years to see a return on profit. It isn't enough to just level one profession to 50 when your competitors have all of them at 50, have all the cross-class skills and are able to guarantee HQ on every craft. Every big FC on each server will have at least one "builder" with everything maxed that can craft anything for a house. The only thing that consistently sells are relic precursors and the materia needed to be melded to them. Food buffs persist after death, so people don't need as many of those. Potions are useless outside of Twintania progression and are becoming more useless as players get gear to compensate. All else is fluff and does not warrant the gil costs or time investments. Most are a complete waste of time and/or vanity related.

The only way to make gil regularly right now are dailies, dungeons, and sale runs. Don't count on anything to sell on the Marketboards. Every crafting material is < 100 gil each, so its not worth your time to farm or sell.

Personally I have Alchemy at 50 and stopped caring about crafting professions. I'm sitting at 3.4mil gil as a non-legacy player, and I haven't sold or bought anything on the Marketboard aside from a relic precursor for an alt in several weeks.

[Crimson-Falcon]

the main purpose is have gil enough to cover ur needs

u dont need 100 million gil

i have 4 million gil with me now and i still cant find any real thing that i need to buy with it

all my needs doesnt reach 10k weekly and i can get these 10k back and more in that week without selling anything just by doing dungeons

[TomTom1968]

I see the point of having problems earning GIL with DOL and I agree that you can't make much money anymore with crafting because of the new 2.1 options to receive philo tomes. But do not forget about the advantages of your crafters. I do not know how much GIL I have saved just by not buying armor for all my classes but crafting the gear for my classes instead. Helping out your FC mates is another valuable way to make use of your crafters. And once you reached a certain level, you should at least be able to HQ your own DOH/DOL gear which saves you a good fortune as well. So crafters may not make you rich anymore but they surely help you to save money for other things you would like to have (any maybe can't craft on your own yet like 2 star HQ recipes).

[Seif]

To keep it short: there's way too many items costing only 1 gil at the moment. I think the community could suggest SE which recipes seem unbalanced for given level in the leveling curve.

Example:
"For fishing I think Red Coral is way too valuable considering how low level it is. For balance that catch could be hiked up to be a lvl 40 fish."

Example:
"Mineral water is such an important element that it could be a drop from some mobs instead of a vendor item."

[Gevvy]

Crafting is more or less useless.
Pre cap, every item you need is from dungeons/quest rewards. Post cap, tome/dungeons. And items that could be good inbetween sets cost 70k+ each.
Any item worthwhile in a dungeon is untradable, so there is no reason to buy any gear.

The gear in dungeons is mostly undyeable... Meaning the market for that is limited, and everyone ends up the same.
Crafting and gathering needs to be a viable alternative by far... The hardest to make sets need to completely rival that what dungeons offer, allowing people alternative means to get gear other than farming.... Allowing customisation end game.
But remember, regardless of what happens, bots will always control the markets... They will always flood markets with large amounts of HQ items for cheaper as they can afford to. They can afford to create artificial demand for items, and they will harm the economy in more ways than one.

If crafting become useful, they need to be looked at thoroughly.

[Artemiz]

THe value of Gil has changed since 2.1 but that doesn't mean you can't make profits from crafting, my retainer's are always full and usually I have stuff to replace what sells, so if I can find 40 items to sell at a profit then I'm sure other can find plenty to sell too.

[CYoung187]

There is always opportunities to make money. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Why? because by the time you see it, everyone else has too.

Bingo. Everytime I find things I can sell for a profit, I make them. Guess what, so did 6 other crafters and in a few hours that item went from 2 for sale to 20 and the item will sit on your retainer for a week. So many crafters selling to so little buyers. I'll keep doing it, hoping others give up first.

[LloydShade]

I levelled armourer as I was levelling so I could craft my own gear. I was expecting to make some gil once I brought armourer to max level. I also levelled miner to 50 to be able to craft without losing too much gils.

Unfortunately, making gils with armourer implies:
1. study the market to find the highest selling items of the moment (that changes everyday and sometime within the same day).
2. Find items I can craft which won't cost me more in resources than what they sell (even with miner 50, most of the recipes requires elements which neither miner or armourer can provide).
3. Hope my items will sell before somebody undercuts me.
4. Hope for a tiny profit.

The effort, time investment and gil cost to acquired recipe items is just not worth it for me. I would get a better profit by selling mining items, but that's very long and time consuming to get enough to make a decent profit.

In the end, all crafting is good for me now is materia melding (on the very few gear piece I can do it) and crafting leves (which awards a quick, safe and decent amount of gils).

Is crafting useless? No. Level your crafting (and gathering) before or as you level a job and you get almost free gear as you progress. You can also help gearing your friends. Sometime you also get lucky and make decent profit.

Is end-game crafting useless? Yes for every gear crafts. It's so easy and quick to get Darklight gear, it's not worth the efforts and the required gil investment to craft something equivalent (which is the best gear crafted and not even close to the best gear in the game).