Please save Crafting. Remove weekly limit on Red Scrips.

[lordoftheapes79]

Except secondary stats this time around are weighted much much less this time around compared to the primary stats.

But there will always be people that want the crafting shortcut into raids and I180 melded is going to be the fastest way in there. It's still going to take time to get Alex normal drops and the I180 melded is easier to get than farming enough law/centurio to get upgraded gear.

[DarthBuzzer]

But there will always be people that want the crafting shortcut into raids and I180 melded is going to be the fastest way in there. It's still going to take time to get Alex normal drops and the I180 melded is easier to get than farming enough law/centurio to get upgraded gear.

i180 Melded gear is slower and harder to get than upgraded gear. For a max melded piece you're looking at atleast 80 million.

[JayCommon]

snip

Regardless of the ease of obtaining, crafted battle accessories are just flat out better than any Alex NM drops. At least for tanks, but I would argue they are better for everyone if used properly. I have the crafted i150 accessories on my DRK and they are only tri-melded with materia 4's.

I have 850 STR and 815 VIT. My MT DPS is normally around 600-650 and I have 15.8k HP in battle (party buff, no food). It's literally the best of both worlds. For tanks, there is no comparison. "Do I have 870 VIT with 700 STR, 870 STR with 700 VIT, or 810+ in both?"

The answer there should be obvious. The bolts from Alex NM I've had to get have just went to DPS classes because i190 accessories from Alex NM do not match the overall value my i150 melded crafted tank accessories bring. The only downfall (and it's very minor) is that I have lower Parry rating than I maybe should have as a DRK. I have Slaying accs with Vitality melded in so I get accuracy/crit/det/skill speed bonuses, no parry. My parry is only at 450. What I've noticed though, is it doesn't really matter. If Parry (obtained from secondary stats) increased the % of damage reduced by Parrying something then this might be noteworthy.

Honestly, if you have the gil for it, crafted accessories are just plain better all around for everyone. For everyone else, the only reason you would get them is to pad your HP pool at the cost of maybe 10-15 points of main stats across all the accs. Or even for DPS/heal just swapping out one single accessory for crafted for the extra 400-500 HP you can get could be the difference between progressive savage damage wiping you and staying alive. And the main stat values attached to accessories scale at a much lower value than left side pieces. A i20 level jump is usually only 3 points of main stat increase on an accessory (as opposed to what we see on weapons, where there is a +8 or+9 main stat jump from i180 to i190 weapon). Helping your healers out by losing 3-6 points of main stat to get a potential +30/60 in Vitality? It definitely has value, and always will.

Also it should be noted (and this isn't in response to your quote, but to another comment I saw): For some people, blowing 80 million gil on penta-melded accessories is nothing. For some people, making that back would only take a week. The WAR in my raid group started HW with 40mil. He spent it all except for about 4mil getting all his crafters to 60 and buying stacks of cheap materia. After he got all his crafters to 60, he made 50 million in 3 days.

My melded accessories were a gift to me even though I have plenty of gil to pay for them. I paid for my own melds.

tl;dr: Crafted accessories for battle classes will always have a market. It isn't a shortcut, for almost every single Job it is either better/comparable to gear higher ilvl than it, and for some Jobs it is downright better. As for how this all pertains to the OP? I haven't messed too much with endgame crafting. I'm also at work right now so I don't know if last night's patch introduced new crafted gear or not (if there are patch notes, my work blocks the lodestone so I still wouldn't know ). Were i170 battle crafted accessories added as recipes that you need the Scrip mats for? If they were I can almost guarantee their value to the raid community would have played a large part in the decision to gate these types of materials. Yoshi has acknowledged many times that he underestimated the potential strength of crafted accessories and they played a large part in SCoB/FCoB being cleared so quickly after release.