The Direction Of Crafting

[Lavinia]

1st of all am not here to say bring back all the glory of crafting and make crafting OP and all which even if I would love to see it happen, I also have come to understand Yoshi-P stance about it.

They even said so before about how OP melded gear can be even when its lower I level than the raid rewards, which is true and also untrue (you would need to spent stupid amount of money on the melds, so not many people could actually do it)

But lets accept it, people craft because they like to craft, and they are taking that away from us.

Then, (oh god i will hate myself for this) why not do it the WoW way (he already copied a lot of stuff from WoW anyway) and make crafters able to alterate/enhance gear from raids add materia slots, add a crafting component to add stats, there are so many things that could make crafting part of end-game raiding that doesn't need to be crafting whole new gear, and break the balance of the game like they fear.

But the lack of use for crafters in this patch beside making BIS gear for crafting the best crafting gear, is deplorable, Only interaction crafters have with raid groups are the alchemist and the culinarians and nothing else. Yoshi-P said so before that he doesn't want to put much attention on crafting and yes that is ok, but then don't add systems that break the people that want to craft and let them stranded in nowhere, let us participate, i even gave up on crafting on this patch cause the lack of incentive and I really like to craft.

Ps. Am not gonna go in the whole red scrips things since there are lots of treads about it already

[maelor]

Agreed 100%! There are posts all over the place about this problem. Hopefully they see how upset about the current situation most players are and make some changes.

[Kenji1134]

I mentioned this idea in another thread, but it may be worth bringing up here as well.

Allow crafters to make special materia which can be attached to any gear without slots. Dungeon drops, raid drops, tokens, anything without slots.
Put the recipes into their own section, and have each crafter make this special materia for lets say 2 weapons and 1 armor type... Basically distribute the item-specific recipes evenly across all crafters in a logical way.
Additionally each crafter will have the ability to make the materia for EVERY stat, preventing absolute market domination by whichever crafter gets Det or Crit, and all materia use the same ingredients, again to make it as fair as possible... Also for the love of god dont make the materials retardedly rare... who am I kidding though? =/

Now the fun part. Make 2 versions of each recipe:
One version produces a tradeable materia which has a 75% chance to attach to the item.
The 2nd version produces an UNTRADEABLE personal materia, which has a 100% chance.

This gives people an incentive to level their crafting classes, but does not outright force them to do so. If the mats are not ridiculously hard to come by, and each materia costs maybe 50k in mats with a 75% chance to succeed, then people will not feel "forced" to make the personal versions.

As for the crafting end of things, lets say the recipes are all 1 star difficulty with a reduced (75%) max quality, but have a requirement that you must hit 100% quality for it to be useful. We cant exactly make this a cakewalk.
And for the materials themselves, why not use something like the Unaspected Crystals? Just add a new hidden item on ALL lvl 60 nodes, with a 50% appearance rate called Materia Remnant or Aetherial Remnant.
Make it a lvl 60 item so it is obtainable with reasonable lvl 60 gear, and have the recipes use some... 20-30 per attempt.

Yes, 20-30 lvl 60 50% hidden gathers per attempt on a 1 star item that requires 100% (slightly reduced) quality. This is supposed to take some effort, but be entirely un-gated and fit within a reasonable timeframe.

[Shadygrove]

When I saw this thread title I was SO reminded of the crafting compass bit in XI.

http://ffxi.lokyst.net/timer/crafttimer.html

[Dererk]

It won't happen the stuff your suggesting would become mandatory for every progression raid group which is not what Yoshi wants.

Unless it can be raised by a small amount and no more than 2 matirea slots it won't happen.

[Shadowsun]

It won't happen the stuff your suggesting would become mandatory for every progression raid group which is not what Yoshi wants.

I love this game but the direction Yoshi is taking is just disappointing.
"Theme Park MMO" is a horrible concept and this is his entire concept.

Crafting is its own thing, its own section of the theme park and he doesn't want it to touch end-game PVE which is a terrible decision.
Things are going in a way where there's just no point in gearing up if its just to make better gear the next patch - whats the point in spending time and effort on gathers and crafts if its just for your own gather and craft gear?

It needs to evolve. Too many things in this game are so basic even MMOs older than WoW did it better.

[Sibyll]

It won't happen the stuff your suggesting would become mandatory for every progression raid group which is not what Yoshi wants.

Unless it can be raised by a small amount and no more than 2 matirea slots it won't happen.

Yea because Food and Potions are definitely not mandatory for every progression raid group... excellent logic.

I don't really think lack of making endgame gear is the problem. Rather, it's the massive amount of time and effort involved to earn a pitiful non-reward. They could give us more valuable items to make or they could stop pushing crafting into this ridiculously hardcore direction. Either one would work.

Part of why this tier of crafting is so awful is the massive grind combined with the lack of desirable recipes. All the DoH gear that you care about (glamours) can be obtained without being a 2* crafter and the i160 chest pieces for DoW/DoM are the main piece people would go for which makes the i180 gear pointless.

As the OP suggests, WoW kept crafters in business by having consumables each of them crafted for upgrading gear. It's a way of making every crafter relevant for the duration of the patch because people are always upgrading pieces.

[seorin]

As the OP suggests, WoW kept crafters in business by having consumables each of them crafted for upgrading gear. It's a way of making every crafter relevant for the duration of the patch because people are always upgrading pieces.

On the one hand, I agree. On the other, that alone wouldn't be enough. Anything locked behind the current grind would be extremely expensive, and there just aren't enough people who can and will spend that kind of gil. Looking at the statistics from their live stream, less than 10% of players have even hit 60. The number of those with millions of gil to spend is a fraction of a fraction, and those willing to part with some of that gil are fewer still. Even if we made BiS gear, we'd still be fighting for scraps. That can't change until they severely cut down the time investment to something more sane to the average player.

[Sibyll]

snip

If they want to put a grind in front of end game crafting then they can't make our only contribution be catch up gear, or progression gear that's only relevant during the first few weeks. This gear is far too expensive to make even after the grind is surpassed to even be considered a "catch-up" piece.

However, if we were making some type of consumable upgrade that you apply to a piece of gear then that would be relevant at all phases of the patch and will always be necessary. It would work similarly to how a glamour prism works in that you'd need to reapply the buff every time you got a new piece of gear or if you wanted to change stats.

I'd understand the logic of hiding a consumable like this behind 2 adamantite ingots (or equivalent) because they'd always be useful and they'd make people think very hard about the piece of gear you'd want to use it on. Hell, the pointless dissolvents could be used to make each equivalent stat buff.

[Alahra]

Hell, the pointless dissolvents could be used to make each equivalent stat buff.

That's honestly what the tooltip suggests they do, too. It would be a decent niche for ALC at this point since they've killed the stat potion market (and plain not introduced new Potions and Ethers).