Thread: Crafting changes since 2.0

Here's what you missed:

2.1 made philosophy tomes plentiful and introduced FC housing. Everyone started squirreling away their money for houses, significantly depressing the economy. The buying power of your six million gil probably jumped six-fold in early 2.1. This was offset somewhat by reduced repair costs, gil drops in dungeons, beast tribe dailies, and duty roulette (with a bonus of 4500 gil for needed roles).

SE had been touting FC housing as a panacea for a sluggish crafting economy. To no one's great surprise (except for SE, I suppose) no one made any money off the new housing items because any free company that could put together hundreds of million gil to buy a plot already had the means to craft their own.

The market eventually became flooded with philosophy tome items because everyone ran out of other stuff to spend their tomestones on. When I stopped playing a few months back, the crafting market was well on its way to bottoming out. I could spend 20k gil on materials to make a two-star item that that might sell for 30k gil, but eight other people were trying to sell the same thing and only one or two were going to sell each day... or I make the same amount of gil by healing a couple of dungeons in duty roulette.

Oh, they improved the droprate of tier IV materia too.

That pretty much brings us to 2.2 and SE's very indelicate efforts at game balance. You know, like a chainsaw.

Problem: Alchemy is useless.
Solution: Give alchemists all the new weapons and a new reagent - Terminus Putty - that is required for every single high level craft.

Problem: Every level 50 crafter can HQ everything 100% of the time from NQ components.
Solution: A tedious two-tiered upgrade system and three-star items that require fully melded gear to craft. After that, you'll need (mostly) HQ components and most of the level 50 crafting affinities if you want to HQ.

Problem: Gathering is too easy. Few people even bother to meld their gathering gear.
Solution: A lengthy and tedious upgrade system and three-star nodes that require fully melded gear to gather.

Problem: They added new dungeons in 2.1, but everyone just ran Wanderer's Palace and Amdapor Keep for easy tomestones.
Solution: Reduce max-grade (previously mythology, now soldiery) tomestone drops by 60-80% everywhere except the three new instances.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Anyway, most of the old BiS gear is still BiS. Almost all of the difference between the old stat maximums and the new stat maximums comes from the new mainhand weapons. To craft three-star gear you need fully melded class pieces for the hands, chest, legs, and feet; fully melded accessories; the new mainhand and headpiece; and four control on the offhand. That leaves you three or four offhand overmelds to make up for any suboptimum melds on the rest of your gear.

On the plus side, your six million gil is probably worth more than it was before you stopped playing. Prices on the new gear were grossly inflated in the first week of the patch, but the prices of everything else -- Fleece and Iron Ore and Fire Crystals and minions and so on -- should all be less than you remember them. As with 2.0 crafted gear, the new three-star stuff is all pretty trivial to make except for the mythology tomestone items, which will ultimately determine their price.