Suggestions for making first set of hq items for artisans?

[SirPercival]

Since all but 2 of my crafts are now sitting at 50 and soon all will be... I'm looking into the artisan weapons and specs. I have melded a bit of materia into my armor and accessories but still I find hqing 2 star item required a 50/50 process.

Suggestions on what melds I should be inputting and/or suggested craft/control to hq steadily?

I mostly started crafting to make 1 star items and can hq without issue on any crafts I have but this is now foreign to me so any input is greatly appreciated.

[LineageRazor]

First off, you should know that the token items you have to HQ for artisans are VASTLY more difficult than any other 2-star recipe. When they were released, crafters who could reliably craft HQ 2-star items with half-melded gear found themselves struggling to craft the token items.

My first recommendation is to have a full set of HQ gear, and then meld it to the fullest extent possible, with the exceptions of your headpiece (which you will be replacing with Artisan's Spectacles, so any Materia used there will be wasted) and your off-hand (this piece cannot be fully melded, so you will need to choose very carefully what you want to meld there). You come to 50 at a difficult time, as crafters have recently gotten three new crafting accessories (Dodore Belt, Mosshorn Earrings, and Rose Gold Choker), and purchasing these right now will be pricy. You could go with the old Best-in-Slot accessories (Raptorskin Merchant's Purse, Red Coral Earrings, and Electrum Choker), but fully melding these while knowing that you're going to be replacing them could be painful.

Note that Best-in-Slot armor pieces for any given craft are that craft's craft-specific armor. This means that you'll have to fully meld sets of armor EIGHT TIMES. You could choose to meld Patrician's armor instead which is usable across all crafts, but understand that Artisan token items and most 3-star recipes are not 100% reliable even with every possible stat advantage - any shortcuts you decide to take will make them that much more difficult.

Sound expensive? It is. Very. Especially with the recent release of new crafting equipment getting all the crafters buying up materia by the boatload. Still, if you leveled your crafts wisely you should have made quite a bit of money doing it, as well as stockpiled a large amount of materia from the equipment you spiritbonded while leveling. So, at least to start with, you should be able to meld at least one class to maximum.

If you're curious as to what the stat meld caps are, here's the thread for it: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...p-for-crafters

This thread doesn't include the stat caps for the new Best-in-slot accessories, so here they are:
- Rose Gold Choker: CP 32 (Meldable: +4 Control, +4 Craft, +6 CP)
- Mosshorn Earrings: CP 32 (Meldable: +4 Control, +4 Craft, +6 CP)
- Dodore Belt: Control 31 (Meldable: +5 Control, +4 Craft, +3 CP)

To give you something of an idea of what you're in for in the case of the token items, if you start with all HQ ingredients, you still have to get as much quality as it would take to reach 100% quality on a normal two-star reciepe when you start with all NQ ingredients - token items have double the quality requirement that a two-star recipe does. On top of that, the Craftsmanship required is also doubled, or possibly more, meaning you have to use that many more Synthesis steps to get the job done.

Once you've gotten your gear melded, there are many, many threads in this forum discussing how best to HQ token items and three-star recipes, so I won't waste time rehashing them. Just browse the first couple pages of the Crafter's forum, and you'll find them easily enough.

[Krafty]

I would strongly recommend taking culinarian to 50 (if that is not one of your 50s) and using culinarian to get your glasses. The craft to unlock the culinarian master book is an 80 dur craft compared with 40 durability for all other classes. With the pre 2.3 fully melded accessories, after you get your book you should be able to comfortably HQ the culinarian token craft to get your glasses. Getting the glasses is key because it's basically another fully-melded item to be used by all classes. On top of that, it has more control than the max melded individual head pieces. Prior to the new 2.3 accessories, without the glasses, you were looking at having only 5 control to spare (from the perfect melds on all slots) in order to hit the control minimums for three star crafts. And you don't want to have to screw around with a bunch of expensive off-hand forbidden melds.


But yeah, be prepared to spend a lot of gil. I have crafted and fully melded and sold several of the new accessories, and on average you are looking at 600-800k gil to do so. I'd recommend watching materia prices closely for a couple weeks to pinpoint when they are usually lowest, or better yet, bond your own.

[Darksword]

I'm still prepping for my first three star crafting set. Just to put it in perspective, what I still need is the Artisans tool (almost 100k just in shards, before the turn in mats and failures), and just last night I bought the last of my materia I needed to hit my caps. A Control IV, a Control III, 2 Control IIs, and a Craftmanship III. All but one of those is an overmeld with a good chance of failure. That set of materia cost me over 400k, and I'll likely lose at least 1 or 2 of them, possibly much worse.

My AF is already sporting about 400-500k worth of melds as it is. I think SE has realized that allowing everyone to be a master at everything was a bad idea. It results in market flooding, a lack of crafter interdependency, and a depressed economy. But rather than say "you can't have more than 2 crafts at 50", they've just raised the cost of maxxing a craft out to so high a point that 90% of people can't AFFORD to to have more than 1 or 2 top level crafts.

[SirPercival]

Thank you all for the input. Between this and also some other posts about skills and macros I was able to get my weaver its artisan weapon and specs. Good ol' crafter community. I appreciate it. I'm not sitting at 393 crafts / 376 control and 325 CP.. now the fun really starts. All my other crafts artisans and crafting 3star weaver stuff... haha.