Why is Crafting still in the game?

[Ddmk]

Ok lets take this example. you can buy darklight hands waist and feet for the cost of crafting 1 of these items.
Yes you can pentameld the crafted items if you have a few million Gil to waste to do it.
I agree crafted can be better but the cost of mats and materia is too high for such a small gain.
Thus the improvement should start with base stats and be improved even more with materia IMHO

Crafting gear will always be 20ish levels lower than best gear,but due to the cost I still think it should be better .

[Ooshima]

Personally, I felt that PvP gears could be a turn around for crafters but it doesn't seem to be the case.

If SE had made all PvP gears, (i55, i70 and i90) obtainable through crafting, then I think it would have made the crafting scene more lively again.

i55 gears could be made through current mats, then players wear them and get into PvP, earn wolfmarks where these wolfmarks can buy new crafting mats specifically used to craft i70 and i90 gears.

[Hayward]

Being able to create your own gear and accessories is definitely a plus. Melding them to make them more effective is even more satisfying. Besides, a penta-melded LV. 70 weapon still fetches a good deal of coin.

[Athol]

I don't get all the qq about crafting in this game. It's the best crafting in any mmo I've played. I craft because it's like a mini game to me and it's fun to collect and make hq mats and then make hq items to sell or use. There are plenty of things in this game to qq about but crafting isn't one of them in my opinion.

[Felis]

I don't get all the qq about crafting in this game. It's the best crafting in any mmo I've played. I craft because it's like a mini game to me and it's fun to collect and make hq mats and then make hq items to sell or use. There are plenty of things in this game to qq about but crafting isn't one of them in my opinion.

We don't complain about the crafting system.
We complain about the best ilv gear we can craft versus the best ilevel gear we can find in a dungeon.

[Nekodar]

We don't complain about the crafting system.
We complain about the best ilv gear we can craft versus the best ilevel gear we can find in a dungeon.

Compare aquisition time for dungeon gear vs crafted gear in current version (pre-2.2).
i70 crafted HQ with optimal meld vs i90 Allagan or Myth...
If you can afford the i70 crafted, you'll have enough to take on pretty much everything, if you have the skills. With "only" darklight, you'll have a much harder time... But the point here is that you don't have to be lucky with RNG for Allagan, and don't need to farm ad nauseum for myth...
Sure, Allagan and Myth are both in general better than the i70 crafted, but the i70 crafted lets you take on stuff faster than if you have to wait for drops/myth...

Next up we'll have i90 (likely) crafted, HQ with melds that's going to spank the myth/allagan i90, making it easier to take on the new stuff while you gear up to the next top tier...

[Zplinter]

I don't get all the qq about crafting in this game. It's the best crafting in any mmo I've played. I craft because it's like a mini game to me and it's fun to collect and make hq mats and then make hq items to sell or use. There are plenty of things in this game to qq about but crafting isn't one of them in my opinion.

Disagree, crafting here is no where close to what SWG had (prior to those 3 letters). Mind you it is better then 90% of the crafting systems I have encountered in my mmo years.

In regards to someone a few pages back asserting the having gear player made on par to drops would lead to more RMT transaction for the "win." That frankly is already happening, it is called buying your primal, coil carry. I could be as lazy as a (insert something lazy here), buy RMT then buy all my primal carries (I see the advertised in Mor Dhona all the time and you get the drops), the same with coil. So lets not blame the boogie man, a.k.a. RMT.
While I can understand some bigotry about crafted gear versus "earned" gear, I think get that twisted over pixels is a bit silly.

Some things that could help creating a bottleneck so we are not any more over ran by crafted gear versus "earned" gear:
a. Someone described specialization: make is so that no matter how many 50 DoH you have accomplied you can only specialize in one, then make is so that one specialization would have one or two items that you could make and only self wear that were comparable to bis.
b. Bind mnaterials: Make it so that the top end items require an item that drops in a top end 4 man run, but the item that drops bind to the toon that picks it up. This would frankly suck for the OP that wishes to avoid dungeons, but it would lock out speed rund for items that you in turn sell on the MB, and the price wars that in turn would make your "good" gear cost trivial.
c. While it would cause 90% of the player base a heart attack (in some cases in the real world), have item decay, by this I mean you items take damage, you repair them and they take less damage, in other words repairs of an item give you diminishing returns until said item eventually turns to dust and you need to get a new item. (least viable option in this game granted).

I really was a fan of the SWG system. this one is not bad, but it is not and will not be a player based economy.

[Tetsaru]

my question playing for having played Final Fantasy 11 and World of Warcraft seems to be this having played both those games and 14 of course never that I saw never was crafted gear better than dungeon or tomestone gear. granted and 11 live in you could make your that was pretty much on par with the engineer but it was never better than in the dungeon hear from like Empyrean or Abby. good morning Warcraft I'd say about uninstall crafted gear was almost as good as dungeon gear but dungeon gear is always better than what could and can be crafted.

So I guess the question is why is everyone upset the craft gear not as good as we're even better than done that seems to be the gist of all the arguments?

Back in 1.0, the best gear in the game was relics (which actually took a long time and were difficult to get) and darklight gear, which if I recall, both required doing speed runs through dungeons (note that tomestones didn't exist back then). Under that was Militia gear, which came from hamlet defense and was not crafted, then AF, which was actually useful both stat-wise and due to effects that boosted the potency of your job's moves.

All that aside, crafted gear (such as HQ cobalt armor) could potentially compete or surpass that gear through the use of materia melding, which didn't have stat caps in 1.0. For a while, I remember having an HQ Lightning Brand with 2 or more INT/attack magic potency was preferred over some of the primal weapons for BLM. The thing was, if a forbidden meld failed, then the item you were trying to meld was also destroyed along with the materia and catalysts, and you'd have to start all over from scratch. It required a lot of money, but it could also potentially give you a lot of money if you ended up selling a nice piece with some unique melds on it. Also, crafted gear remained tradeable after spiritbonding with it (giving it to someone else just reset the spiritbond), so you could still sell something off if you didn't need it anymore.

Fast forward to ARR, and now all the gear has very cut-and-dry stats with stat caps on materia (many that can't be used at all because the gear already has that stat on it), and no special abilities. It really removed a lot of the customization and variety between character builds.

[Inosaska]

I mold stuff in real life as it is and sure as hell don't want to continue crafting in a video game that's for sure.