Crystals

[Wulfyn]

I would like to see clusters breakable into crystals and then those breakable into shards.
It would be nice if mobs also dropped shards according to their elemental affinity. As it is I am sure the shard demand is being partly filled by rmt and botters.

Looking at some of the recipes it kind of gets ridiculous the amount of shards used.
It seems like in your attempt to stop rmt you have only hurt legit players and not stopped rmt.

[KinnisonArc]

I like the idea of breaking down the clusters to a smaller variant, if they really going for that one I think they should only give a random amount of 2-5 per breakdown and require a catalyst or sort so as not to be abused severely.

As for mob dropping shards, having them drop only from the sprites are good enough right now. Having them drop elsewhere means more archer bots running rampant across Eorzea.

[Fizzie]

I would like to see clusters breakable into crystals and then those breakable into shards.
It would be nice if mobs also dropped shards according to their elemental affinity. As it is I am sure the shard demand is being partly filled by rmt and botters.

Looking at some of the recipes it kind of gets ridiculous the amount of shards used.
It seems like in your attempt to stop rmt you have only hurt legit players and not stopped rmt.

This. All of this!!

[wannabesuperman]

Breaking crystals seems so intuitive that it leads me to believe they have a specific reason for not doing it, and I can't believe that it's just RMT.

However, I definitely do not want other mobs dropping shards, etc. We don't need that many flooding the market.

[krazyrs]

idk i feel the crafting jobs that get the specific brand for X element should be able to break down X crystal

[Sparky]

I dont think shards are particularly hard to come by tbh - all you need is a 30+ gatherer and you can get all the shards/crystals you need. In my progress towards 50 in all crafts (currently 40-45 in everything), I have never, ever bought a single shard or crystal. Just hit the level 30 nodes, using wards on the yield +1 nodes, and you can get shards quite quickly. 6-8 mins per 100 shards, and about an hour for 1000. It's really not that bad, even with the 5+ shards per craft recipes.

[TomTom1968]

I heard there was an option in 1.0 to break a crystal into 10 shards. This option was removed, no clue why it happened. Dunno how chances are to get something back SE has already removed.

But I agree, although we now have a bigger shard supply thanks to treasure maps and beast tribes, you still need far more than you get so you either spend hours and hours on farming or feed RMT because they sell at lowest price. I recently play an alchemist and did not have much leves left when I started so I tried to speed the levelling up with mass synthesis. Now I am level 38 and so far I have spend more than 4.000 shards already lol. Insane number if you ask me.

If you try to get the luminary tool for DOH, the shard numbers are really ridiculous. Level 41-50 you need 3.000 crafts. Assuming that you need at least 5 shards for a recipe (most need 2 kind of shards), you need 15.000 shards alone to make the 3.000 crafts from 41-50. That's a ridiculous high number when you compare it with the availabilty of shards.

Either SE should lower the shards you need in higher levels or let us gather more or re-implement the shard breaking.

[Sparky]

People are trying to achieve what are intended to be long term goals over a short term period. Take 15,000 shards and stretch that over one year. Just one year. That's a couple of hundred a week. Now even 1000 shards a week isnt hard to farm - hell that can be an hour's work if you want it to be, maybe 2 if you are slower. 15-30k shards in a few days? It's boring, but it can be done.

Im sitting on 8.5k fire shards and 2-4k of the others. All farmed by myself, because I refuse to buy shards of the market because of the prevalence of bots. I'd be lying if I said it wasnt dull as hell getting a tonne of shards, but its not difficult. It takes a bit of time, but its easy work.