o.O Overkill on the crafting Dumb down?

[MariyaShidou]

Yup.

Those will be quite important for making HQ materials. By the time you gather your HQ ingredients for your final synth, you have essentially put in all the necessary effort, thus the final synth will just be about completion.

They're making HQ mats much more difficult to obtain, but making it so crafting an HQ final item is easy once that condition is met. It's relocating difficulty.

However, only "some ingredients" will be made by crafters, and they haven't made it clear what's the processed involved in making these ingredients HQ, or if the process involves yet again HQ material.

[NoctisUmbra]

exactly. one of the biggest complaints i heard was about doing nothing more than spamming standard. well now it becomes even more useless to do anything more than standard. bold was rendered useless because finish quality would no longer matter.

Actually, like I just said, they are just as important for making HQ ingredients.

However, only "some ingredients" will be made by crafters, and they haven't made it clear what's the processed involved in making these ingredients HQ, or if the process involves yet again HQ material.

Yoshi clearly stated that the HQ ingredients > HQ product 100% rule is only effective for final products. Making HQ mats will be at least as difficult as they are now.

[MariyaShidou]

Actually, like I just said, they are just as important for making HQ ingredients.

They never said how do you make HQ ingredients.

[NoctisUmbra]

They never said how do you make HQ ingredients.

Basically, in order to synthesize an HQ final item, HQ versions of every ingredient must be used. Players are guaranteed to synthesize HQ items if all the ingredients used are HQ. However, it will be very difficult to obtain HQ versions of all ingredients.

2. HQ Revamp
We are planning on implementing the HQ revamp in patch 1.20. Following the release of patch 1.19, the current specs for HQ items will remain in place, so current HQ items will not be affected. Until Patch 1.20 is released, the current specs for HQ items will be used. Also, in the new specs, HQ items will only be created if every ingredient used is HQ. Obtaining HQ versions of the ingredients will require a mix of luck and skill. (We want to make sure that you will not experience a sense of futility when your synthesized item turns into NQ at the last moment.)

All it takes it to read between the lines in this paragraph to realize that the 100% HQ rule is not in effect for crafting of ingredients.

How difficult will it be? We shall see. There is nothing pointing out that you can make HQ ingredients with 100% success though.

[Griss]

How do you know making the HQ materials won't be more difficult? How do you know making an HQ finished item with the HQ mats won't be more difficult than the NQ version? You don't, none of us do. The rates of success can easily be altered between the two. There are many things they haven't told us. Enough crying about it, wait until implementation before passing your final judgement.

They could be jacking up the fail/sucess rate with hq mats again. I remember many, many moons ago having a high starting quality on a synth was actually quite a negative thing. using all hq mats sometimes made the synth damn near impossible to finish, even if you could breeze through it normally.

[Alise]

So Yoshida does reply to player question in his quote too, then could he answer us about how current gear will be converted into HQ?(+2+3 or +3 only?)

Also, do we need to get NM bloody Axe head+3 in order to make HQ from now?

That is all I want to know.

[Rubicon]

I am VERY interesting in hearing about this LAST STEP. Sounds like crafting will stay the same mini game for materia infusion but when you "finish", you know where you can Patch Up the product?... I think that's when you get a chance to take a risk and do the Forbidden Materia step. What do you guys think?

[Alise]

There is a way to stop all the complain about 0 +1 +2 +3 being grouped into NQ and HQ really.. I dunno why the dev bring this up when nobody ever petition about change 4 tier into 2 tier yet. I see so many petition so far, but never seen one for this yet, and doing this will get a lot of dislike no matter he give HQ to +3 or +2+3.


I think a good way to fix this would be :

1.all materials can have only 2 tier (you wanna save inventory space right?) so NQ and HQ materials.

2.the finish craft gear will still be 4 tier as 0 +1 +2 +3 (nobody dislike it being this way, and it doesn't kill inventory space)

3. NQ materials can result in crafting 0 and +1 gear, while HQ materials can result in crafting +2 and +3 gear. (This way people can make use of their craft skill better, and also not make server load with too many +3, you need both HQ materials and also skill/little luck to achieve +3 result.)

I think this could be a good mix and match and take advantage from both system, Yoshida-san.

[Swordmage]

I agree with the notion that there were some things that should be fixed in the crafting system; however, as others have said, this goes way too far.

Abolishment of Parts from Synthesis - Very Bad
Revisions to Materials and Intermediary Materials - Neutral
Removal of Secondary Skill Requirements - Neutral
Removal of Crafting Facility and Treatise Requirements - Neutral
Simplified Color Customization - Very Good

I have seen far to many reasonably good crafting systems become over-simplified as an over reaction to them being too complex. EQ2 is a good case in point, the original system suffered from a few specific glitches (like ink for spells) and an interdependence system that made every recipe for some crafts dependent on other crafters (thus there was no simple way to skill up). In an effort to make crafting accessible, they basically made the same change that is proposed here (a one step crafting system); however, that made the system seem trivial to people interested in crafting.

I find the richness of the crafting system in FFXIV to be one of the more attractive aspects of the game. I am not sure I would stay just for the questing and combat (given the control compromises made to accommodate the eventual migration to the console) unless the crafting game is interesting. (I should mention that I tend to split my time in games equally between crafting and adventuring and tend to have crafting alts to cover the whole specturm of crafting).

I do agree that the level disparity between that required to make the finished product and to make the components, as well as that between the crafting levels and optimal level to use the product, makes crafting very frustrating and needs to be fixed. I also really like the change to the color system (I can live with the different dyes for different materials; however, getting rid of colored intermediates is wonderful).

However, I think removing components is one step too far towards simplification. As long as the components are the same or lower level to make than the completed item, I will be happy. If there are particular items where the final construction is logically simple (like axes, where the blade should be the hardest thing to make), it would make game-play sense for final construction to be by the craft that creates the hardest (and thus highest level) component.

[Kraggy]

I don't think it's "Dumbing it down", I just think they're removing a lot of the bloat.

This!

Too many FFXI and now FFXIV players confuse overcomplexity and convolution with 'difficulty' .. same as they confuse endless repetition with being 'hard'.

The crafting system as released was ridiculously overloaded with micromanagement and detail, it was only 'hard' in the sense it required someone to tolerate mindless button clicking across umpteen menus and dialogs. It requires no skill at all, since the entire synthing process is basically controlled and the outcome decided by the RNG, player 'skill' is at an absolute minimum.