Thread: Idea for Improving the Crafting Process for 3.0

With the expansion on the "somewhat distant" horizon, this may be a good opportunity to propose some adjustments to the Crafting System, in light of 3 and 4 star crafting, and future crafter progression. This idea is based around Conditions, and how we could leverage them to make crafting more interactive and skill based.

Right now we have conditions which influence the effectiveness of Quality Gain.
So why not add other conditions to influence Progress and "Effect" Gain? Granted this would required a reworking of the current conditions, and maybe adjustments of success rates for HT and RS, anyway...

New Synthesis Conditions
Malleable - Increases the effectiveness of Quality actions by 50%. (Basically the current Good Condition)
Expedient - Increases the effectiveness of Static Progress actions by 50%. (So every progress action except for PbP, which is percent based)
Insightful - Increases the effectiveness of Augmentation actions by 50%. (This is the interesting one, more on this later)

New Condition Effects
So we got rid of Excellent... no more Excellent fishing... Instead we have a Good for Quality, Progress, and Buffs. The Quality and Progress are self explanatory, but Buffs is where "skill" comes back into the equation.

Firstly, Tricks of the Trade would work on Malleable and Insightful, but not Expedient (or maybe all). ToT on Malleable gives you 20 CP. ToT on Insightful gives you 30 CP, since ToT counts as a buff.
(In essence if it does not give progress or quality, it is a buff)

Now, what exactly would Insightful do? Well it basically multiplies the effect of a buffing skill used on that condition by 50%.
So SH1 becomes +30% chance. SH2 becomes + 45% chance... Hello 95% HT!
GS goes from +100% quality to +150%... so no, not triple, 2x -> 2.5x.
Waste Not and Waste Not 2 would go from reducing Durability costs by 5 to reducing by 7.
Master's Mend would restore 45 durability, and Manipulation would restore 15 per tick.
The tricky one would be Master's Mend 2, which would restore 90, meaning we would need to allow for recipe durability to go over 80... lets say to 100 at most.
Ingenuity 1 would lower the recipe level by 15, Ing2 by 30.
Reclaim would be unaffected... or it'll get you back the shards/crystals/clusters as well.
Comfort Zone would restore 12 CP for 10 steps.
Inner Quiet is not affected.

Condition Order and Observe
To facilitate the proper tactical use of these new conditions, we will require a new logic regarding how conditions appear during a synthesis. The proposed logic is as follows: *Alternative logic after post*
The synth starts on a Normal Condition.
Any action performed on a Normal Condition will cause it to change to one of the 3 new Conditions.
Any action performs on one of the 3 Conditions will cause it to change back to Normal.
You cannot have the same non-Normal condition appear twice in a row.

So we basically alternate. Step 1 is always Normal, Step 2 is some new condition, Step 3 is Normal, Step 4 is some new condition BUT NOT the same one from Step 2, and so forth.

Now what about Observe?
Observe should be changed to cost 20 CP. It counts as a step, so it will result in a condition change. However Observe "locks your buffs", meaning that if you have 2 turns left on GS and SH2, you use Observe, the Condition changes, but you STILL have 2 turns on GS and SH2, BECAUSE you used Observe instead of an action.

In effect Observe is the new "fishing", but the CP cost is fairly high, and you cannot use it to gain CP, as it would take 2 Observes to potentially get an Insightful Condition for a 30 CP ToT, at the cost of 40 CP, so no exploits there.

Conclusion
With these new conditions in place, and perhaps raising the success rates of HT and RS to 55% (100% with Insightful SH2), we can make crafting a more decision based process.
In particular the Insightful Condition would allow players to make more important decisions about how to best utilize their buffs to improve their chances at the all important HQ. While other Conditions, such as Expedient would offer an opportunity to save on Durability in the long run, by reducing the total number of progress actions required to finish the synth.

Of course with enough stats over the item requirements, one could still macro-craft, however for items of value, the player who actively, and thoughtfully crafts will be greatly rewarded. More meaningful decisions and less reliance on RNG will yield a better crafting system for years to come.

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* Alternative Logic to Conditions *
We could have every 4th condition be Insightful, as this condition in particular is what gives the player true control over the crafting process. This would mean we no longer have a repeating restriction on subsequent conditions.
So we would have something like:
Step 1 - Normal
Step 2 - Malleable or Expedient
Step 3 - Normal
Step 4 - Insightful
Step 5 - Normal
Step 6 - Malleable or Expedient
Step 7 - Normal
Step 8 - Insightful
Step 9 - Normal
And so forth... This structure would give the most control to the player, while keeping some RNG in whether you get an Expedient or Malleable when you really need/want it.

Originally Posted by Lyrinn

I like your ideas.

I have two alternative ideas for Insightful that I wonder if you've considered yet. One is instead of increasing the effectiveness of buffs by 50%, increase the duration by 50%. The other is instead to reduce CP cost of any ability 50%. I need some time to consider edge cases for each to see which would be the most "(un)balanced" but just thought I'd throw those two out there too.

I had considered increasing durations by 50% as well, though it would not work for certain abilities.
Namely Master's Mend 1/2, and for Manipulation, would you raise it to 4 turns, or 5?
Great Strides would also see minimal benefit, since we tend to use a Quality ability almost immediately after it.
Comfort Zone would be unaffected in the long run, but may be more difficult to use, same for Steady Hand (which would lose the bonus of being able to do 95%-100% HT's)

Cutting the CP cost of abilities in half would also be a possibility. Though I feel that it slightly takes away from the decision making aspect, since it would in effect almost double your functional CP without really making the individual decisions any more meaningful.

Apply these new conditions to Level 50+ Synthesis Recipes? That way Crafting isn't too overwhelming for new players?

I love the idea for the advanced crafter.

I wouldn't mind having certain recipes enforce ability restrictions like some of the ixali quests do. It would force a lot more creativity and variety when it comes to rotations/methods!

Originally Posted by chrillix

I wouldn't mind having certain recipes enforce ability restrictions like some of the ixali quests do. It would force a lot more creativity and variety when it comes to rotations/methods!

That has been suggested before, and the consensus was that if we had class-restricted recipes, they would been to be very specific.
Much lower quality requirements since only CRP gets BB.
MUCH lower progress requirements since only ARM gets PbP, and only BSM gets Ing1/2, but everyone suffers from a progress penalty on multi-star items.
Then we have the question of ALC recipes, since ALC has 2 extra tools for CP regeneration.

Simply put, the notion is nice, but proper implementation would either be extremely skewed, extremely easy, or absurdly time consuming as each class would need different progress/quality/durability requirements for each recipe.

Originally Posted by Kenji1134

snip

The issue is that it seems they designed the recipe progression with the idea in mind that you'd be cross classing every skill. They could take advantage of different traits so that the classes function a little differently. Perhaps they could implement this into Standard and Advanced Touch, as in when you use these abilities you get a secondary effect that varies between crafting class. I'm not a 4* crafter, but I have yet to find a use for these skills outside of Ixali quests.

It'd be nice if they also looked at poor skill implementation. Ingenuity I/II and Careful Synthesis I/II stand out. Once you get the "II" version there really isn't any reason to use the previous iteration. Waste Not I/II probably fit here as well. I've already touched on Standard and Advanced Touch getting a rework... did you see what I did there.

It'd be nice they quit with the Flavor of the Month style crafting updates. Three Star crafting gave PbP a purpose. The most recent update gave Reclaim/Rumination. Don't get me wrong, forcing a shift in the meta is a good thing, but they aren't doing this. Hasty Touch spamming is still required to do anything end-game related for crafting. I thought it was idiotic in 2.0 that Hasty Touch and Byregot's completely trivialized 2* crafting. I still think it's idiotic that this same approach dominates.

If 3.0 brings anything it should be a way for crafters to get HQ recipes through a means other than just getting IQ as high as possible for Byregot's.

Also, they don't have to necessarily remove cross classing out right. Even DoW/DoM jobs get two classes to cross class with. It'd make a hell of a lot more sense if they had designed crafting this way as I think it's really asinine that you are required to level up all of the crafting classes to 50 solely for cross class abilities. You might argue the whole gimmick of the game is you can be all the crafters, but the current implementation is telling us that you must be all the crafting classes. Really kills the novelty if you ask me.

Originally Posted by Kenji1134

snip

I didn't mean restricting recipes to only one classes abilities, rather restricting individual abilities from being used. For example, recipe A doesn't allow Hasty Touch/Byregots, recipe B doesn't allow careful synthesis I/II etc...