The Direction Of Crafting

[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).

[Sibyll]

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).

That's what I hoped. What we got was Grade 1 Terminus Putty of Strength, Grade 1 Termins Putty of Dex etc.

[Alahra]

That's what I hoped. What we got was Grade 1 Terminus Putty of Strength, Grade 1 Termins Putty of Dex etc.

Yep. They sell fairly often on my server but at relatively poor margins. I doubt there will be a stable market for the Grade 2 Dissolvents until they either buff the item level of the 2-star gear or severely nerf the materials requirements.

[seorin]

I don't think it's either/or - we need both better recipes and lower costs before crafting will approach anything remotely as fun and useful as it was in 2.0. Even if we could craft BiS gear, you will never be able to sell enough gear at a high enough profit to offset all the time and gil spent gearing up and melding materia. They definitely need to add new stuff or improve the existing recipes, but it will barely do any good if the time and material costs stay the same.

[Sibyll]

The part that's a joke is they say its intended to be "catch up" gear, but the time/gil cost to make these items is far beyond anything you'd expect an individual that is just returning to the game to have on them.

The other problem is that tome gear requires such a low time investment to equip yourself that it begs the question why you would even choose this alternative in the first place.

The sad irony is that SE has stated they don't want BiS crafting because it would encourage RMT, but the only people I can feasibly see having the resources to gear themselves in i180 crafted gear in less them than they'd spend farming tomes would be gil buyers.

[Alahra]

The part that's a joke is they say its intended to be "catch up" gear, but the time/gil cost to make these items is far beyond anything you'd expect an individual that is just returning to the game to have on them.

I still don't understand why they couldn't have done two things:

1) make 2-star gear i170 and relatively as easy to produce as i70 gear was at ARR's launch, providing an alternative to tome gearing (melded i170 gear would be about on par with i180 gear, too, providing an avenue for people that dislike Hunts) and;
2) introduce i190 gear in 3.1 to coincide with the release of the new 24-man, with a grind not unlike the grind to produce i90/i110 gear in 2.2/2.4. Pentamelded i190 gear would be about on par with the (presumably) i200 gear, and the 24-man patches have always been catch up patches anyway, so if it's easier to gear than it's no big deal. They had already begun to do precisely this with weapons and accessories, so they could have moved *all* of the gear to the second patch and stopped it from having too much impact on progression, which is supposedly what they wanted.

Structured like this, they would have kept pentamelded gear from greatly impacting the Savage world firsts, but provided crafters with something relevant to craft, and the gear wouldn't have been so impactful that it would require a grind so ridiculous as the one we have now.

I just can't wrap my head around why they did things the way they did.

[Sibyll]

The only problem with that is i70 crafted gear and i70 tome gear both required Philosopher Tomes to acquire. The cost of the i180 gear would be less of a problem if you could just get the mats with Law tomes, and frankly the gear is so irrelevant making it easier to acquire would just make them more feasible as glamour pieces than as actual side progression.

Problem is that previously, with melding, you could argue that an HQ i110 piece is at least a good alternative to an i120 tome piece that had less than desirable stats and would allow you to free up tomes/twines for other slots. Given that tier V materia isn't widely available, I hesitate to say that HQ i180 gear is even on par with the Alex i190 gear.

Who were the target customers for this gear?