...and speculate
There are soooo many hidden things in the crafting system (wich honestly I hope they get rid of >.> or at least make them clear) let's talk about them.
Moon Phases
At first I was told New Moon is the best for HQ items and the worst for skill up, then someone told me New Moon is good to HQ finished items and Full Moon for parts (wich I think is true, I made a lot of hq lumbers during full moon, much more then in any other moon phase).
Now there's this rumor that every class and every type of item has its own moon phase...
Position
Again, there are a lot of rumors about this topic: every class has its own position, every material has its own position, every crystal has its own position, to synth easily you have to be in that position, to synth hq in the opposite...
It is a fact that sometimes when grinding the same synth it happens be extremely easy and other times at the same rank it's a total failure, so I think that the position theory may have something to do with that... but how the hell is it working? I tried different position, right now I'm facing south-east for every craft and I can see a little improvement in hq rate.
Tools
Ok, this may sound an easy topic, we all know that for parts we've got HY with main hand and HQ with off hand.
But at rank 50 our best tool is the off hand (the saw gets a bit more craftmanship and control, but no way it is comparable to the gap of magic craftmanship) but I've never used the off hand to synth finished items because I thought I wouldn't get hq.
Then I saw a guy at the carpenter's guild synthing 6 Champion's lance in a raw, 5 of them +1, using the off hand.
I asked one of the best Carpenters in my server what he was thinking about that and he said he himself always used main hand for finished items too, but he admitted that this was something new to him.
So I wanted to try out the off hand on finished items now that I was sure it wasn't affecting the hq rate... like hell it isn't! I synthed 5 Oak Composite Bow and 2 Champion's Lance, all with HQ materials, all of them were smoth syntesis, with lots of quality and lots of touch ups and all of them went out nq; I had materials for another Oak Bow and I tried it again with the saw... horrible synthesis, I got 2 elements unstable, a decent amount o quality but only 2 or 3 touch ups... and it was +1 °-°
Now, I know the hq rate is horribly random, but can this really be a coincidence? o.O the guy I saw synthing with off hand was using a Steel Claw Hammer +2 while I'm using a NQ one, could it be that the quality of the tool is affecting the HQ rate too? (quality, not stats, coz a steel claw hammer nq is already better then a iron chocobotail saw nq)