Ideas for bringing skill back level with luck in 3- & 4-star crafting

[Hayward]

It's easy to see that SE has mistakenly allowed luck to overtake skill where it concerns crafting, causing items and materials to become unjustifiably expensive as supplies remain sparse.

Having burned 600,000 gil and only getting one HQ serving of Rich Tomato Relish, I am seeking to figure out suggestions for SE to rebalance crafting. Here are some ideas I want to see implemented:

*Tricks of the Trade: CP recovery needs to scale with difficulty to allow for more steps. Maybe 1*=25 CP, 2*=35 CP, 3*= 50 CP, 4*=75 CP. Frequency of Good condition occurrences also need to scale with difficulty.

*Hasty Touch: Increase success rate to 65%, allowing the combined success rate with Steady Hand II to be 95%.

*Reclaim: Lower CP cost to 25.

*Comfort Zone: CP recovered should scale with difficulty. 1*=10 CP, 2* CP=12 CP, 3*=14 CP, 4*=16 CP.

*Steady Hand I & II: charges only used when performing Hasty, Basic, Standard, or Advanced Touch and Basic or Standard, or Rapid Synthesis.

*Waste Not I &II: see Steady Hand I & II.

*Byregot's Blessing: Efficiency bonus scaling with difficulty. 1*=25%, 2*=30%, 3*=35%, 4*=40%

*Ingenuity I & II: see Steady Hand I & II

*Great Strides: See Steady Hand I & II

*Innovation: See Steady Hand I & II

These are just a few ideas I have to make star crafting less gambling-based and more skill-based.

[chrillix]

Those changes would make crafting waaaaaay too easy. You may want to re-evaluate your method if you're having that much trouble with it. 4* crafts are even easier to HQ than 3*'s were at the start of 2.3

The only synths that require a bit of luck are the tier 2 mastery books, but I don't think crafting needs a revamp to make such a small group of crafts easier.

[DarkmoonVael]

Hmmm, on paper you may think these make it so crafting more skilled, but in reality it just makes it less skilled and have lots of CP to cushion RNG not being on your side. CP is, to an extent, the be all and end all of crafting once you have reached certain stat threasholds to be able to craft things. Giving crafters so much CP on a plate would in effect mean that no real effort would have to be put into crafting apart from the gearing up.

Also the changes to steady hand etc removes more skill from crafting as it means that your eally dont have to plan carefully about when to use it etc.

That trick of the trade change on 4 star, as well as the changes to waste not, would allow me to get 5 more hasty touches in under steady hand 2 per trick of the trade proc + 6 additional CP, whilst only loosing 25 progress. Sadly this is not skill.

[Lyrinn]

Knowing how to work with randomness is a skill too. Just saying.

With that said, I sincerely hope expansion reworks some of the basics or at least gives us more unique tools to work with. The whole ToT/Restore or Extend Durability/Spam HT framework is getting really old. 4 stars were disappointingly easy to HQ; I remember 3 stars being more fun to figure out. But ... just no to the OP's ideas.

[Hayward]

Knowing how to work with randomness is a skill too. Just saying.

With that said, I sincerely hope expansion reworks some of the basics or at least gives us more unique tools to work with. The whole ToT/Restore or Extend Durability/Spam HT framework is getting really old. 4 stars were disappointingly easy to HQ; I remember 3 stars being more fun to figure out. But ... just no to the OP's ideas.

I cannot agree with this mindset at all. There's no justifying skill being invalidated at the whim of a RNG determined to give you a NQ result. A string of failed Hasty Touches would make you see this much differently.

[Squintina]

I hope you mean them doing 1-3 of the things suggested, and not all of them o.o If it's just a few of your ideas, it might help to balance. But if it's all of them, it's just too much.

[Hayward]

I hope you mean them doing 1-3 of the things suggested, and not all of them o.o If it's just a few of your ideas, it might help to balance. But if it's all of them, it's just too much.

Any combination of them would certainly help lessen the reliance on luck, certainly. I don't mean to suggest implementing them all.

[mayonnegg]

It's easy to see that SE has mistakenly allowed luck to overtake skill where it concerns crafting.

Wait, what game are we talking about here?

[Lyrinn]

I cannot agree with this mindset at all. There's no justifying skill being invalidated at the whim of a RNG determined to give you a NQ result. A string of failed Hasty Touches would make you see this much differently.

The skill lies in adjusting your rotation on the fly and maximizing your chances of success. Your mindset is the flawed one. Go ahead, tell a professional gambler that there is no skill in luck. Tell a casino there is no skill in making their profits. Tell a statistician anything he does is meaningless because random is random.

As with anything random, can everything fall apart due to that 0.01%? Sure, but chances are that's not going to happen very often.

And for the record, I've probably made more 98% NQs than you have total synths ever, so don't give me that garbage.

[Sibyll]

snip

Getting 98% NQ really isn't the complaint about bad RNG, after all if it never happened it wouldn't be 98% it'd be 100%.

The point is "skill" only goes so far when you fail 80% of your hasty touches and those 0.01% things happen more often than you think (both the good and the bad).

I think you are building up their design of crafting to be more than it is. Literally every update for crafting has taken the useless crafting skills and given them a time to shine while pushing others aside. The 3* crafts made pretty extensive use of Piece by Piece with the housing items being the most obvious examples. The 4* crafts, in particular the Master Book II turn-ins, are giving Reclaim a chance to shine with it's RNG dependence forcing you to fold a bad hand, as per your gambler analogy. Furthermore as the recipe level has increased Ingenuity's effect has become less significant. It's just flavor of the month crafting design and it gets old pretty quick. Maybe 5* recipes will have Progress bars of 40 so people will use Flawless Synthesis.

Craftsmanship and Control at this point are nothing more than glorified accuracy caps for crafters. The sad irony is that crafting was more interesting and required more skill when leveling up a crafter because stats actually made a significant difference and the lack of CP made Byregot's Blessing impractical.