Crafting Needs a Place in Endgame Raiding

[Sylve]

better question is why does SE keep wasting time developing crafting and gathering stuff when they keep insisting they want it to be pointless.

Pointless for Raiding Endgame Content, yes. Look at Crafting in nearly every other MMO. It's all just for making gear to wear into Raids.

XIV is changing that up a bit. Change is scary. I like the direction of Crafting, and I've always hated Crafting in MMO's. Vanity options, Housing stuff, entry level raid gear and useful consumables is what Crafting should be about. I never want to play an MMO again that forces me to buy my gear at massively inflated prices just to be allowed to into a Dungeon. The Combat Content should not be held hostage by the Non-Combat crowd, which will happen if Crafters could make Allagan equivalent items.

If that was ever true, Vanya and the like would have always been more popular than darklight.

However, you must always figure out the the path of least resistance. The majority of people may simply get Mytho/Coil for 90, then jump to 100 with Soldiery and ignore crafted ilevel 90, no matter if they beat the 100 or not.

Min/maxer might be all over penta-melded ilevel 90s, but for the majority, that won't even register as a viable alternative.

The problem was that while Vanya was a BETTER choice than Darklight, Crafters made it unrealistically expensive and thus out of reach for the majority of players.
Hell, i remember getting my SCH to 50 and wanting the Vanya Robes.
At 450k Gil for a NQ Robe, and 600k+ for the HQ one, going all the way up to 1million Gil for a HQ with some useless Materia Melded in.
I even farmed up the mats for the Robe myself, started asking around for Weavers who could make one with my Materials, of the 7 who responded in the week i was asking, 5 would only make it if i paid them the full market price for buying it off the Boards, and the other 2 demanded 'tips' of 100 - 200k gil or they wouldn't do it.
I decided nope, bugger that, I'll just get Darklight, Free and only inferior on side stats.
Now that Vanya isn't in demand anymore, as the progression focused players all have their i90 kits now, the price of Vanya has dropped down to as low as 10k and is now affordable as an alternative for new Jobs to Darklight.