It's been a while since I crafted. Once I finished my ALC to 50 i stopped for a while and focused on getting my THM ranked up, and completeing quests.

When I was ranking up ALC, it was tough, I was getting like 200sp/synth by the last ranks, might have only been getting 100-200 from 48-50, I don't really remember, I just remember it sucking.

Well I decided that I better start ranking up another craft because ALC can't do materia, not sure why, or what they have planned for ALC, but I hope it's something good. So I decided to rank up leather (I'm now at r22, not sure why TAN since my CRP is already at r36... but whatever)

I went to pick up some leves in Uldah, but they are all r20 synths, sure I could do them because they wont have any material cost, but I wont really get very good sp according to the time I spent doing them. Then I remembered they changed some things up and I thought, well if I go to Grid where the tanners guild is maybe I can get better leves, so I went...and nope. I quickly realized that with the ranks my crafts are at NO leves are good for me to do, with the exception of 1 r40 CRP leve, there are no local leves that are good for me to do. I'm under the impression that these are still going to be adjusted.

So I decided to rank up by grinding some synths, my current rank is TAN 22, so I choose to make toad leather straps, which is r31 (I think). Payed about 5k/toad leather, but that didn't bother me since I have a stack of gil saved from ALC, I just wanted the fastest rank up method. I did a few test synths to make sure I could handle it without too many botches, I was getting around 700sp/synth. Not too bad. I use the skills preserve and hand of the gods right now. I went and picked up a engineers manual (having never used one)

---TL/DR---

I used the engineers manual and seen 3 hours on the timer! Not too shabby! I did a synth and started getting 1000-1200sp/synth, NICE! I was super excited... then not even an hour through my crafters grace went away. My timer wasn't up... what a let-down, I was super unhappy and dissappointed, because I was given something, then it was taken away from me prematurely. I'm not upset by the mechanics behind it, I understand that they give you extra time so you don't waste it, and there can only be so much extra points they can give you so the game doesn't become too unbalanced.

SE, please make these things clear on what they do, maybe in the discription you list what it does more speciffically so we don't get dissapointed and feel like you are taking things away from us, I feel like this ties in with the surplus system, it felt like we were being penilized for playing too much or doing too good (in this case I was getting too much sp so they dropped the crafters grace, thats what it felt like)

We need more things like bonuses for doing good, not taking things away from us. It is all about HOW you present something, if you made the timer 1 hour, and someone hadn't gotten their max sp gain from the scroll by the time the timer had run out then grant them a bonus time, or remove the timer completely and just go by sp gain, perhaps if they do really good at managing their time and sp/gains grant them a bonus

We need more bonus and less taking away