Thread: [dev1016] Post 1.20 HQ Crafting

I posted this in the 'threadnaught' in the general section, but will try and elaborate here.

It looks to me that one motivation for the changes to the HQ methods are to address the discrepancies between crafters and gatherers. With the current system, there is very little motivation to utilize HQ gathered materials. This severely devalues the gathered items and marginalizes the gathering classes. The only way to address this is to make HQ gathered materials make some sort of impact. If HQ gathered materials don't make it easier to HQ, then the HQ gathered materials have no value.

For example, someone wanting to make a +3 [item=10002062]Iron Chain[/item] in order to make a piece of gear, the following chain of synths must occur:

Iron Ore ~> Iron Nuggets ~> Iron Ingots ~> Iron Wire ~> Iron Rings ~> Iron Chain ~> [finished piece]

The correlation between quality and HQ is so weak (especially for materials, with no touch ups), the using HQ Iron Ore has essentially zero impact on the likelihood of getting an HQ Iron Chain. And THAT completely marginalizes gatherers.

The only real solution is to shorten the chain, and make HQ gathered materials make the process of HQing the ingredient easier. Now, when I say 'easier' I mean 'easier then HQing without HQ materials', not 'easier then it is now'. SE does need to take the step of increasing the difficulty of making the HQ ingredients. Keeping it the same difficulty as making HQ iron nuggets now would just be too easy, in my opinion.

(note: I posted this in the thread in general at first, but it's a little chunky for that venue, so I've reposted it over here to try and get some feedback)

I've been digging a bit into the example high level recipes that Yoshi-P posted (courtesy of the translation by the fearless Bayohne), and some of the results surprised me.

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■Cobalt Sabatons (Armorer Recipe)
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(Equipment Level: 49)　*High-Level Feet Gear (For Tanking)

Cobalt Sabatons
├　△Cobalt Plate　×3
├　▲Cobalt Rings　×1
├　□Boar Leather　×1
└　■Electrum Ingot　×1

Consumed Catalysts
Earth Crystal　×2
Ice Shard　×3

Key take-away here is that there are SIX (6) ingredients that must be made HQ in order for an HQ final result. Also note that THREE (3) of these are Cobalt Plates. Recall that there is no skimping any more. Every single ingredient to the recipe must be HQ!

Recipes for Ingredients
△Cobalt Plate (Armorer Recipe)
└　○Cobalt Ingot　×2

Here was the surprising part to me. On my first couple of read-throughs, I had thought that the general rule was: Raw Material ~> Ingredient ~> Finish Item. But here we see an ingredient (Cobalt Plate) made from another ingredient (Cobalt Ingot). Also, note that now a Plate takes TWO (2) Ingots. The old recipe for plates required a single ingot. This will make creating HQ Cobalt Plates a lot harder then the other three ingredients.

○Cobalt Ingot (Armorer Recipe)
├　Specular Iron Ore　×2
└　Iron Ore　×2

Here is the Cobalt Ingot recipe. A key piece of missing information is the number of ingots produced. The current recipe for ingots is 5 nuggets ~> 1 ingot, so making 1 ingot is a viable assumption. However 4 ore ~> 12 nuggets ~> 2.2 ingots, so 2 ingots is also a viable assumption.

▲Cobalt Rings (Armorer Recipe)
├　Specular Iron Ore　×2
└　Iron Ore　×2

□Boar Leather (Tanner Recipe)
├　Boar Hide　×1
└　Alumen　×1

■Electrum Ingot (Goldsmith Recipe)
└　Electrum Ore　×4

No surprises in the rest. The other three ingredients are the usual Raw Material ~> Ingredient ~> Final Item.

HQ Assumptions:
Now, we have to make a few assumptions. How hard will it be to HQ an Ingredient, given HQ materials? The harder assumption is that it will be as difficult as creating an +3 material / part result under the current system. An easier assumption would be creating a +2 or +3 result.

Using the Mooglebox HQ calculator, and assuming a very competent crafter (equal rank synth, a starting Quality of 300 from HQ mats, and 100 Quality gained during synthesis), a finish Quality of 400 yields about a 2% chance to +3 and a 6% chance to +2.

• Harder assumption : 2% chance ~> expected 50 synths to make HQ Ingredient
• Easier assumption : 8% chance ~> expected 12.5 synths to make HQ Ingredient

For the Cobalt Rings, Boar Leather, and Electrum Ingot, this is not horribly onerous, even for the harder assumption.

Hardest Assumptions:
However, the Cobalt Plates are another matter. Since we need 3 plates, the harder assumption requires 150 plate synths to generate this. However, this requires 300 HQ Cobalt Ingots (remember that it is TWO (2) Cobalt Ingots per Cobalt Plate).

In turn, to generate 300 HQ ingots, using the same harder assumptions as above, would require a staggering 15,000 Cobalt Ingot synths. This in turn would require 30,000 HQ Specular Iron Ore and 30,000 HQ Iron Ore. At 2 minutes per synth, these 15,000 Cobalt synths would represent over 20 days of synthing time. Clearly this would be HARD!! (or at least tedious).

Second Hardest Assumptions
Easing up on the requirements a bit, if the ingot synth generates TWO (2) ingots per synth, then only half the number of Cobalt Ingot synths would be required -- a mere 7,500, taking a mere 10 days of crafting to accomplish. This is probably a bit of overkill on the difficulty as well.

Third Hardest Assumptions
The next step of difficulty is if the ingot synth generates 1 ingot, but a (current system) result of +2 or +3 makes on HQ result.

In this case, to generate 3 plates requires an expected 37.5 plate synths. Doubling this (needing 2 ingots per synth) means a requirement of 75 HQ Cobalt Ingots.

To generate the 75 HQ Cobalt Ingots, a total of 937.5 ingot synths are expected. This would require 1875 HQ Specular Iron Ore, and 1875 HQ Iron Ore, and an estimated 31 hours of synthing (at 2 minutes per synth) to process. This is now entering the realm of the possible, but 31 hour of grinding ingot synths to generate enough Cobalt Ingots is unlikely to be anyone's definition of "easy"

Easiest Assumptions
If the HQ rate is the most generous (same as +2 or +3 of current system), and the ingot synth generate TWO (2) ingots per synth, then the 75 HQ Cobalt Ingots could be generated with only 469 Cobalt Ingot Synths. This would require 'only' 938 HQ Specular Iron Ore and 938 HQ Iron Ore, with a processing time of 15.5. hours.

Conclusion
This synth is not necessarily the definition of "easy". Even with the most generous assumptions (an 8% chance to HQ PLUS the new ingot recipes generating two ingots per synth), well over 16 hours of crafting time and over 2000 units of HQ materials (expected values, so subject to luck/chance) are required in order to make an HQ pair of Cobalt Sabatons.

Further, this does NOT include the time / cost for upgrading the sabatons using the recipe for dyeing them red. The dyeing recipe requires an additional Cobalt Plate. From above, each plate is taking about 5 hours of time.

On top of this, with the new materia system, the chance of this item being destroyed when attempting to socket with two or materia may be high.

This system is starting to look less easy.

Please give me some feedback and let me know if you think any of my assumptions are wildly off. At first glance I was not a fan of these recipe changes, but went through the exercise of seeing just what the numbers said, and the result surprised me.

Get +2 in 1.19. Wait for 1.20. Convert your +2 to HQ. Profit.

Amineri, what if the Development Team simply extends the 100% guarantee HQ rule to ALL crafted items ... not just Finished Products?

Originally Posted by Sorel

Amineri, what if the Development Team simply extends the 100% guarantee HQ rule to ALL crafted items ... not just Finished Products?

Yes, if using all HQ gathered / dropped materials results in a 100% success rate to generate an HQ ingredient, then the process become as simple as making an NQ item, assuming NQ ingredients. However, the following quote from Yoshi-P leads me to believe that it is not:

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.

Bolding was added for emphasis. I dug into the actual translation, and the phrase that Bayohne translated as "ingredients" was 中間素材. The first kanji pair 中間, essentially means intermediate, middle or interim, while the second kanji pair 素材 means material. So, when Bayohne says ingredient, think "intermediate material".

To me, this points out a distinction between "intermediate material" and "raw material" that is not currently in the game, and is not reflected very strongly in Bayohne's post. Following this line of thought, the creation of the HQ "intermediate materials" from "raw materials" will be challenging, and require a degree of luck. Once these HQ "intermediate materials" are created, however, the creation of the final item is 100%. All of the time, luck, and skill are front-loaded into creating the intermediate mats.

I could, of course, be completely wrong.