I'm in agreement. The requirements are very high, and just getting on the ladder is difficult as you need to HQ 5 items which require 'tome' materials for the recipe book. This would be less of an issue if the philosophy tomes were still in place, but they've moved everything to seals which are slower to gather up and now cost twice as much. Maybe the intention was to force us to craft tons of ilvl 55 gear to trade in for a few hundred seals a piece...

Worse is the fact that even once you've gone through the expense of crafting 5 HQ Vanya (for example) and your 60(!) HQ silver brocade for your weapon and headgear (requiring no less than 240 crawler cocoons) you still won't hit your target values without some insanely complex melds.

Had they been smart about it, they would have given us some new crafting gear which could actually be CRAFTED by ourselves, perhaps as an extension of the master recipe books so they could keep the 5x HQ Vanya requirements. That way, at least there's still a strong cost association, but we have more options on how to raise our skills to a high enough level to make the 3-star synths.

At the very least, it would give us a more solid base for improving our HQ chance on those same crafts.