Crafting is dead

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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".