Suggestions for making first set of hq items for artisans?

[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.