Crafting is dead

[Giantbane]

one other thing we need is more information on materias , some of these crafted gears are not as good as ilvl 180 ones without proper melds , take main tools for example with 5 IV materia melded on them , they either miss 3 craftsmanship or 4 CP just to be at same lvl of ilvl 180! same goes for all the chest pieces (10%-29% success chance on overmelding IV? no thanks)
so far had no luck with transmuting materias to higher grade spending so many materia in bonfire!

I'm surprised more people don't complain about melding/over melding with its awesome RNG.

[Lyrinn]

I'm surprised more people don't complain about melding/over melding with its awesome RNG.

Can't complain about melding when there's nothing to meld and no grade V materia to meld with.

[Jade-Nephrite]

I have 16 2* HQs made so far and I still have my tokens from this week's reset. HQing these crafts is laughably easy. Stop talking about them as if they're something special and the "old guard" just can't adapt. System is garbage, end of story.

I was trying to think of what would make a lv 60*** craft difficult and the only concept I think of is raising the Progress / Quality bars. The Master II books were tough because those trade-ins needed a ridiculous amount of Quality, if they raised new recipes to 15K Quality that would be pretty rough.

[Sibyll]

Wall of text

So you have no rebuttal for any of the comments I made about the specialist skills or new class skills relying too much on RNG to be worth using?

Saying you can do 2* crafting without relying on cross class skills is like saying you can do Tank swap mechanics without cross classing provoke. I'll repeat what I said before: Skills like Comfort Zone are too good not to cross class.

Can't complain about melding when there's nothing to meld and no grade V materia to meld with.

Just because there is nothing to meld at the moment doesn't exclude the materia system from being garbage. I'm not a huge fan of binary success/fail RNG design, especially when it's used to gate crafters from doing recipes.

[Lyrinn]

I was trying to think of what would make a lv 60*** craft difficult and the only concept I think of is raising the Progress / Quality bars. The Master II books were tough because those trade-ins needed a ridiculous amount of Quality, if they raised new recipes to 15K Quality that would be pretty rough.

The raiding equivalent of what you're suggesting is just raising the health of the boss, making it hit harder, and having harder DPS checks. That doesn't make a fight truly difficult, it just turns it into a number game. Doing mechanics while meeting all those checks is what makes a fight truly difficult.

Several months ago, someone suggested breaking "Good" down into multiple different types, like a Good condition for progress, quality, or CP (similar to how you randomly get -### GP pops on legendary nodes). Even something like that would make crafting more sophisticated, as you would constantly have to adapt your rotation. We need more unique skills to diversify rotations. Even now, everything is still built around the basic of idea of spam HT/ToT, restore durability, press BB. Having the option to use PT instead of ToT is a step in the right direction but still allows for little deviation from the gold standard. Whistle was a nice idea on paper but the implementation is poor. Just give us more options that allow us to come up with creative combinations and then the progress/quality bars can be raised high.

Edit: Personally, I think Inner Quiet/BB needs to be nerfed/reworked, because it's the #1 reason SE doesn't want to give us a ton of CP to play with and it's what stifles every other potential rotation out there, like the Rumination one.

[Jade-Nephrite]

Some Great ideas!

Edit: Personally, I think Inner Quiet/BB needs to be nerfed/reworked, because it's the #1 reason SE doesn't want to give us a ton of CP to play with and it's what stifles every other potential rotation out there, like the Rumination one.

I was thinking the same thing, Byregot's Blessing is just too powerful. I used Rumination for quite awhile because originally I had bad math on the Byregots, I actually leave that blog post of mine up there to remind me to re-test everything lol I also thought Tricks of the Trade was garbage haha

I really like that "good" condition breakdown suggestion that would work really well and give some variety to our rotations.

[seorin]

I was trying to think of what would make a lv 60*** craft difficult and the only concept I think of is raising the Progress / Quality bars. The Master II books were tough because those trade-ins needed a ridiculous amount of Quality, if they raised new recipes to 15K Quality that would be pretty rough.

I'd like to see them move away from the trap of just constantly trying to raise difficulty because it alienates new players while adding very little. I'm surprised they didn't utilize their workshop mechanic from the ixal dailies to diversify crafts. I'd be interested in seeing 3* recipes with the same or even lower difficulty, but each recipe requires a different workshop that applies its own restrictions. It's a lot more interesting than RNG "difficulty".

[LineageRazor]

So you have no rebuttal for any of the comments I made about the specialist skills or new class skills relying too much on RNG to be worth using?

For Brow vs Blessing, if your success depends on landing Blessing on a Good/Excellent, then the only relevant difference is going to be in the potency. At 11 stacks, there's a difference of 60 potency, amped up to 90 potency with a Good proc. Even after the Good, that's less than the difference of a single Hasty or Basic Touch. As for accuracy, I never discounted that a casual might go for Steady Hand II, but if that's just not casual enough, 90% success with Steady Hand is an acceptable risk, in most cases.

For Whistle and it's associated abilities - I just don't know - but I'm not convinced that others know, either. There are so many wierd ways that things intertwine with WWYW, abilities that can only be used at certain stack sizes and whatnot. They are expensive, yes, but I feel like folks have given up on experimenting with them too soon, and for the simple reason that they don't HAVE to use them, so why bother experimenting?

What I do know is that SE must have had some reason for introducing them. For whatever reasons, THEY thought that the abilities would be relevant, and since we don't, either SE is high out of their mind, or they understand something about them that we haven't figured out yet. They doubtless had their own crafters playtesting them before release, perhaps with coaching from the devs to tell them how best to use them, and those crafters gave the thumbs-up. If it is a correct assumption that the specialist abilities were added to cater to casuals, then those playtesters tested the new abilities WITHOUT cross-class abilities and found the outcome to be favorable.

[Sibyll]

Edit: Personally, I think Inner Quiet/BB needs to be nerfed/reworked, because it's the #1 reason SE doesn't want to give us a ton of CP to play with and it's what stifles every other potential rotation out there, like the Rumination one.

Many of the skills in general need to get reworked in a fashion that isn't just a bandaid fix. All their "fixes" have just been FotM skill rotations for each recipe tier. In 1*/2* recipes no one ever used PbP/RS for progress, it was all about Ingenuity+CSII. Then the progress bars got bigger with 3*/4* and the meta shifted to PbP/RS with a CSII finisher. Now HW is out and Flawless Synth is getting used only because of Maker's Mark as an initial progress builder. Or there are also the Name/Brand steps which give the otherwise useless Brand skills a niche to fill. I feel like Mastercraft II books were also designed to give Reclaim/Rumination a time to shine.

But these are all just temporary fixes. None of these has ever addressed the problem with their design. If brand skills aren't being used then maybe... make more recipes that have Aspect: Element conditions? As someone already pointed out, I'm surprised they didn't go the Ixali route. I had to adjust my rotation more for the beast dailies than I ever did between recipe patches. At most the patches required baiting a condition proc on the BB, and I'd say the standard was you'd have to add another Progress step at the beginning.

They've spent all this time building a great infrastructure for the crafting system yet the the only recipe characteristics we ever see are: Requires Craftsmanship: X, Requires Control: X, Not HQable, and Quick Synthesis Not Available.

Also, was Precise Touch even necessary? Couldn't they have just as easily made a Trait that gave you two IQ stacks for using Basic Touch? Maybe Excellents would proc three IQ on a Standard Touch. Sometimes I forget that Standard and Advanced Touch are on my bar for how rare the circumstances are that you'd use them over another skill.

[Hanmerreborn]

For Brow vs Blessing, if your success depends on landing Blessing on a Good/Excellent, then the only relevant difference is going to be in the potency. At 11 stacks, there's a difference of 60 potency, amped up to 90 potency with a Good proc. Even after the Good, that's less than the difference of a single Hasty or Basic Touch. As for accuracy, I never discounted that a casual might go for Steady Hand II, but if that's just not casual enough, 90% success with Steady Hand is an acceptable risk, in most cases.

For Whistle and it's associated abilities - I just don't know - but I'm not convinced that others know, either. There are so many wierd ways that things intertwine with WWYW, abilities that can only be used at certain stack sizes and whatnot. They are expensive, yes, but I feel like folks have given up on experimenting with them too soon, and for the simple reason that they don't HAVE to use them, so why bother experimenting?

What I do know is that SE must have had some reason for introducing them. For whatever reasons, THEY thought that the abilities would be relevant, and since we don't, either SE is high out of their mind, or they understand something about them that we haven't figured out yet. They doubtless had their own crafters playtesting them before release, perhaps with coaching from the devs to tell them how best to use them, and those crafters gave the thumbs-up. If it is a correct assumption that the specialist abilities were added to cater to casuals, then those playtesters tested the new abilities WITHOUT cross-class abilities and found the outcome to be favorable.

I only have weaver at 60, so can only rely on the specialist skills. My 2nd highest craft is 42 (armorer).

My cross class skills are ToT, HT, Waste Not, Rumination (for massive failing luck to attempt to eek out maybe one or two more attempts), manipulation, and rapid synth

310 base CP. 641/608 craft/control.

The specialization/Whistle system has some glaring issues, but you can still manage to make stuff.

Disclaimer: I don't intend to even remotely sound like the guys that figure out how to macro craft and can crunch the numbers and figure out optimal rotations.

What I find if I want to hit high-100% HQ I need the following to happen.

Not too little luck, but not too MUCH luck either. Getting near back to back good procs repeatedly is actually as if not more detrimental than getting none at all. If I'm having no luck, I want the no luck to happen at a multiple of 3 whistles.

You want to hit a multiple of 3 JUST before going into <insert preferred touch> train and have no (or an excellent instead) procs through the entirety of it.

Pros of Whistle:
-Multiple of 3 increases are pretty nice. It allows for rapid progress gains to cut down on the number of CS2 or allows you to rely less on RNG for rapid synth. Or it makes HT a bit better for pumping up control rather than just a way to get your IQ stacks up

-Relatively cheap durability increase (wheel). It still requires you to have dropped the CP for Whistle in the first place, but if you don't have all the cross skills this is a required CP dump anyways

-Miracle is decent half-progress and finisher and works somewhat as a way to fish for trained hand procs

-Speaking of trained hand, depending on what you are trying to make it's either fantastic or useless. If 150% progress puts you over the top, it's pointless, but if you can get lucky and get a good proc with trained hand up, you can get a huge boost to both for a fairly minimal CP cost.

Cons:
-Other than super rare cases (start of a buff period, namely), satisfaction is only useful as an icon that glows to tell you when your getting your bonus stacks.

-Notice how many times I mentioned luck? It requires too damn much of that. And luck at lucky times at that.

-WHISTLE CAN FAIL