Most of the time I'm fine with the way crafting works but then again there are times I find myself almost falling asleep.

Glancing at some threads a few days ago I like the idea of those who wished crafting commands to be based around the actionbar used for combat.

First of all the current menu driven method is slow and dull. Very much like synergy in FFXI. Not only that but I've been victim to accidently clicking the wrong command due to the random auto-scrolling it does. Also the command menu is too small for using a mouse.

What I'd like to see is (as suggested by others elsewhere) to use the actionbar to set and use crafting commands so they are far easier to access. Timers can be given to each action. Short recasts for the basic actions like standard, bold, rapid. And longer recasts for the more advanced ones making their use more strategic than random.

The battle UI's "stamina" bar could be a "control" bar. Like the stamina bar, the control bar will constantly refill. Each action will drain so much of the control bar. The lower it gets the less stable the crafting process becomes. Leading to stability problems. Basically this will allow a player to make the process go really fast at the expense of higher chance of failure. This also eliminates the need for "wait" as all you need to do is wait for the control bar to fill up to a decent level for stability of the next action to be good.

As with the synergy furnaces in FFXI: there will be a health bar, displaying the durability of the current synth. And another showing the progress. The longer the control bar is drained by so much will cause the durability bar to decrease faster. When too many actions are made whilst the synth is in unstable state will cause stuff like the elemental instabilities, sparks and mini explosions.

Which brings us to synergy from FFXI again. Due to the size of the furnaces the overload and explosion animations were good sizes making it look much more dangerous and somewhat exciting. The small animations when crafting FFXIV are timid and I don't really care if something bad happens visually.

Synergy had the control side wrong with its slow, tedious menu driven system but at least had decent visuals.

Crafting in FFXIV suffers in both areas making it slow and dull.