How to catch up?

[Divine_Intervention]

Okay, so i took a break of just under a month when 2.4 was released, and came back to a whole new world of crafter gear and gatherer gear.

Now, I'm 3 star in Leatherwork and Goldsmith, and all other classes (minus armorer which i've to finish), are level 50 and at least in their green gear.

Where do I go from here to catch up to 4 star crafting?

Any help appreciated, thanks for your time.

[RiceisNice]

Getting the master II recipe books (4* crafting) requires a good amount of RNG and luck. You need to HQ the materials that were previously used to trade in for supras (the ones that use the 2* material and FCIII). They're 3*, so if you have stats to meet that, you just need to be lucky with the TotT procs and BB on a good with 9+ IQ stacks.

Getting the stats to do 4* crafting will require the new artisan offhands (made by 3* BSM and CRP, from their master I books). These offhands require x6 ehcatli sealants. These cost 8 oaknots and require rank 7 with them (8 days to acquire 6 sealants assuming you're max rank). Also requires a bit of luck to reliably HQ because the starting quality as a 3* craft gets pretty diluted by the sealants.

If you can straight up buy the new artisan body pieces, they'll help greatly because they're shared between the crafting classes and have 3 meld slots. Otherwise, these are 4* crafting items and also have a bit of RNG, in requiring the mastercraft demimateria (which is a RNG to acquire, or at the very least, expensive), x3 sealants and these 4 items diluting the HQ quality pool as well. However once you meet the stat requirements of 4* crafting, it more or less handles the same as 3*.

[Divine_Intervention]

oh holy crap that's painful. well, grind here i come lmao

[giantslayer]

Wait and make money doing what you can already do. There may be some changes coming in 2.45 or later. Currently, gearing for 4-star is prohibitively expensive (like tens of millions of gil expensive).

[Divine_Intervention]

Yeah, it's crazy money on phoenix, 2.5 million per HQ piece. insanity! Add in the fact i'd also want to gear both my level 50 gathering classes and it's bordering mental.

[giantslayer]

They just made changes that will improve mastercraft demimaterias drastically. Ehcatl sealants will get better with time. The old artisan main hand tools just got a lot easier to get if you need some of those.