Thread: Future of Crafting In 3.0 - Trends and Value

*Caution, long narrative ahead*

So after blowing through about 600k for the new ears, neck, and belt, with perfect melds... Im once again starting to wonder whether there will be some magic gear reset in 3.0...
The new artisan stuff is I60, and at lvl 50, we had 1 star recipes to make I55 gear. So could the same thing happen again? Where the current Artisan 4 star gear becomes the new Patrician's set, and we get another round of class specific equipment, craft-able shortly after hitting 60?

Have the devs said anything about the future of crafting in the expansion? Or will we continue with the current "trend"?
- Get to cap, easy to make baseline class specific items, top end combat gear reliably HQ-able with enough melds.
- New raids added, ilvl increased, no new recipes to compare w/ raid gear (cept occasional 5x IV Overmeld cases)
- New ilvl cap, same gear, new recipes partly rng based, can get ~80% hq rate reliably starting with HQ.
- Another new cap, new gear/food that is completely reliant on RNG to HQ, otherwise it is worse than the old gear, and more combat recipes which don't compete with raid gear. (sans belt w/ 5x IV's)

IDK, to me it seems like SE took people's complaints of "The 2 star items are too easy! Max melds + CP Food + Perfect RNG-Free rotation to HQ is TOO EASY!" And just gradually went more and more overboard.

2 star items materials were found on resources, in decent quantities, and a "master crafter" could have a decent HQ rate starting with NQ. - But that's too easy...

3 star items now require the gatherer to grind out about a week's worth of nodes, with some rng thrown in. Along with additional materials which can only be obtained using tomes. The recipe quality and progress nearly double, while all actions are less effective. So we brought back PbP, though now we MUST start with HQ materials to have a good chance to HQ. Even with HQ materials, the reliable RNG-free rotation is no longer enough, so we all go to Hasty Touch, the 80%x10-11 RNG rotation.
^ Okay... some rng, fine. Needing tome materials for everything, not good. Needing RNG and HQ materials to have a decent shot... bad. This is the origin of the Rumination-Reclaim method.

4 star items. Need desynth drops... Desynth: Grinding on top of rng to not blow it up, on top of rng to get what you want... TERRIBLE.
Also need gathered resources which require more gatherer grinding on top of the previous gatherer grinding. And tome mats. And Daily Quest mats! You can get 6 tokens per day, need 8 to get 1 mat, need 3-6 mats per recipe... "If its not gonna HQ, Reclaim and start over"
And of course, the recipe level is now so high that Ingenuity 1 has no effect, and Ingenuity 2 is barely noticeable. The progress is huge, the quality is huge, yet the durability and our CP are roughly the same. For most 4 star recipes, even an 11 stack Byregot's wont get it to 100%, unless it lands on a Good or Excellent... *I've lost track of how many different times RNG has come into this process now*

So to recap.
2 stars, claimed to be too easy since once you had perfect melds and the perfect rotation, you could HQ every time... IDK. I for one think that if someone went to the trouble of getting perfect stats, and executing a perfect rotation, they SHOULD get the ideal result... But people complained, as people do.

3 stars, significant increase in difficulty from 2 stars, demanding a rotation based on RNG to HQ, sometimes even WITH all HQ mats. So they brought back some of the RNG, but this may have been too much. Something more along the lines of NQ + RNG and HQ + NO RNG would have been more suitable, especially since all tome materials are NQ by default.

4 stars... no... just no... I understand that they want to make... MAKE, people do new content. But cmon! Requiring high lvl desynth on gear that requires 10 HQ 2 star tokens per piece is just painful. To make most 4 star items, you need to desynth Allagan gear, Artisan Spec's, or the Forager's Hat.
Then we do Ixal dailies for 0.75 sealant per day, and put it all together into a purely RNG based smashathon where if you dont get 8-10 stacks and an Excellent just in time for your Great Strides - Byregot's, your best option is to Reclaim, trash the synth, and hope your 90% chance of keeping the materials pulls though.
This is ginding + rng for demi's + rng for hasty + rng for condition + rng for reclaim... why???

At this point crafting has turned into the "Gillionaire's" commodity. The only useful equipment is in the form of top lvl HQ Pentamelded w/ Grade IV's equipment.
To be frank, most people are still buying 2 star foods. Not because 2 star foods are amazing, but because 3 star foods are significantly more difficult to make both crafting and resource wise, for a small increase in stats. And 4 star food... heh... those are selling for some 50-100k apiece, with no buyers, simply due to the excessive difficulty in obtaining the ingredients and making them HQ.
In terms of numbers, Vit on Tank food. 2 star HQ: 19, 3 star HQ: 23, 4 star HQ: 28.
An i110 tank has nearly 8.4k base hp in a group. And while the 4 star does provide ~50% more vit than the 2 star, that 9 vit equates to an extra 131 hp, on top of ~8.7k (w/ 2 star HQ), an increase of 1.5% more hp.
One and a half percent, between the now super easy to make 2 star, and the very difficult to make 4 star... Does something seem out of place here?

Okay, ranting aside, I really do hope that the devs at SE take a look at the effort vs reward of crafting in the latest updates.
The gradual progression of equipment does make sense, though it often feels like it comes in unappetizing lumps, wherein we put in a significant effort to make new equipment which is marginally better, and inevitably does little to aid us with the new recipes.
The bigger concern though, is the massive recipe and ingredients difficulty creep. The recipe requirements and penalties due to level discrepancy are growing MUCH faster than our own stats. So every time a new tier of recipes comes out, we fall further and further behind, going from perfect melds and a good rotation gives us a 90-100% hq, down to perfect melds + food + fc buffs + HQ everything along with rotations heavily based on multi-tiered RNG now giving us a 30-100% chance, depending entirely on RNG.

...Guys... RNG is not fun, nor difficult, it is simply an artificial difficulty, and when we are forced to rely on it, it just gets frustrating.

I hope that in the expansion, there will be a smoother progression of gear upgrades and recipe difficulty.
Something along the lines of a new set of cross-class gear (lets say left side in one patch, right side in the next), along with an increase in recipe difficulty such that when using fully melded, up-to-date gear, along with a sound rotation, the top tier recipes would all be around the same effective difficulty as 3 stars, if not slightly lower to account for many components not being available in an HQ form.

With an additional increase to the availability of materia, crafters, and likely gatherers would have the following progression:
Hit 60 - make class specific, or generic set.
Patch 1 - New tier of recipes, make new left side equipment using "old gear", meld, make new top tier recipes without depending on RNG given mostly HQ materials.
Patch 2 - New tier of recipes, make new right side equipment (using lvl 60's right and patch 1's left), meld, make new recipes without RNG.
Patch 3 - New tier, new right side... etc...

Every patch should bring a little more crafter progression, and a crafter who keeps up with their progression should have no difficulty in making the top tier items. Conversely, a crafter who falls significantly behind will either need to gear up again, or depend solely on an RNG based rotation to compete with crafters who kept up.

- Balance of Effort and Reward -

PS. As far as the value of crafted goods... They are for the most part decent, but the current recipe difficulty and costly materials put them far out of reach for the vast majority of the playerbase.
Granted, Lucrezia used mostly HQ i110 crafted gear with 5x IV melds on pretty much everyone to clear T13... But that would have required several crafters who were already fully geared, along with stockpiles of Oaknots, and TENS OF MILLIONS of gil, or another stockpile of grade IV materia to produce... So the things crafters make does have its uses, but it is just prohibitively difficult to produce.