A solution to the Crafting/Gathering/Economy crisis.

[Zantetsuken]

By now, most of us are familiar with these quotes

Greetings,

There are currently no plans to add any end-game style content for Disciples of the Hand.

Once free company housing becomes a bit more widespread we expect the demand for furniture to increase, and as the maximum item level is increased, we will of course be introducing new recipes to create higher-level items.

Confirmed with Disciple of the Hand lead

Currently there are no plans to add any new low/mid level crafting recipes.
We designed FFXIV so that gear obtained from dungeons is more effective than crafted items.

For their first class, players can gain equipment from the main quests so we don't think they should face any problems. But we believe there are other chances to use low-level gear, such as creating materia or equipping them when leveling a second class.

From this, it looks as though crafting is dead-in-the-water as dungeon gear is far more plentiful, free, and quickly horded by players for leveling their other classes.



But there is a way to revive the crafting and gathering jobs, and it involves a type of gear that appeared near the end of FFXIV 1.0 (and was subsequently removed in ARR):


Class-Exclusive Gear.



Simply introduce (and/or modify) recipes from iLvl30 - iLvl90 that are meldable with higher stat caps, but are only Class-Exclusive (that is, Jobs cannot equip them).



This accomplishes several things that are sorely needed in the game:

1. The 'Armory System' will regain relevance by giving Classes an actual role in endgame.
2. Players will find more enjoyment experimenting with the cross-class skills sandbox for endgame content.
3. More people will focus on the 1-50 content in order to unlock more cross-class skills.
4. Gatherers and Crafters will have a new market to work within without disrupting the dungeon-based gear progression for jobs.
5. It opens the door for more rare crafting material drops from dungeons, bosses, Treasure Hunts, Beastman Quests, and Gathering (ie 'bloody' items, 'abjurations', etc.)
6. A brand new avenue for the materia market.

Potential issues:

1) Balancing - most content is balanced around the Job system, not Classes.

The classes are likely the baseline for job balancing, so this might not be a real problem.

2) Inventory/Armory chest space - things are already a bit tight.

A real concern for players with most jobs/classes capped and implementation would have to be paired with improved storage space.

3) Players ignoring endgame content in favor of crafted items

This can an be counter-acted by:
A) restraining the designs of Class Exclusive gear to be less flashy/more realistic than Job gear.
B) Using a cursed-abjuration (FFXI) style system for high-level endgame gear (buy the crafted 'cursed' gear, use the abjuration dungeon/primal drop to 'uncurse' it).
C) Class Exclusive recipes are always introduced at -5 vs max iLvl of Job gear. (ie current max iLvl of Job gear is 90 for armor, and 95 for weapons, Max iLvl of Class gear would be 85 for armor and 90 for weapons.)