Quote Originally Posted by RiceisNice View Post
Pick your choice of farming/buying 100 chimera manes, 50 crawler cocoons, 80 deepeye tears, 40 bear fats, 20 fleece, or gathering 90 morels and 45 emerald beans.

Or in the case of birch rods, 60 raw star sapphires, 30 rues, 30 salivas, 50 aurum regis sand and 30 arch skins. I mean at this point, if you're buying materials off the market board you're factoring in the player market now, which is varied server by server.

Time:Cost:Efficency. My current starred turn in is a pair of LTW maiming pants. That each requires 2 ampi leather, 2 chimera felts, 1 crawler silk and 2 dissolvents. I'd need 10 of these crafts to cap my scrips. Like I mentioned above, that's 100 chimera manes, 60 ampit skins, 80 deepeye tears and 40 bear fats, that's a lot of time spent just gathering the raw materials, especially with the horrendous drop rate (or retainers, but I digress because we're still going through the process of obtaining said items). You also can't quick syn most level 60 crafts reliably unless you've fully decked out all your crafters (meaning HQ'd main and offhands) because you can still fail quick synthesis.

I mean on my end, I already have 17 felts in my retainer anyway so it's not that big of a deal. But what if I didn't and it's mostly a spur of the moment thing? Unless I were to buy the felts myself, it'd take an hour of straight up farming (or 10 retainer ventures, but that has to be done ahead of time) and maybe get enough manes to make my 20 felts. Now I have to do the same for ampi skins and deepeye tear. And at least on famfrit, these are not dirt cheap, It'd cost me 500k alone to get 100 felts, versus 475k in morels (and everything else for morel salad is dirt cheap). But when you're factoring service prices, it does not make for a good, objective argument because it's varied from server to server. And lastly, buying on the market is not self-sufficient; the definition of that is you're obtaining the raw materials yourself to make it from the ground up.

The game is balancing the red scrip rewards between the amount of raw materials needed for each craft. Beforehand, those pants I just mentioned (or the birch rod) would have given only 116-23 scrips compared to 10 from morel. Would you argue that then, it'd be a fair distribution of red scrips, or is culinary still too far behind?
I had all of my crafters to 60 at least 2 weeks before red scrips was even in the game (thank you GC-turn-ins!) in full HQ i150 gear, so yea I'm able to 100% quick synth anything that's currently quick synth'able.
On the point of being self-sufficient, I had a small storage of mats, and only one battle retainer at 60 when red scrips hit. This meant that I actually had to dip into my gil bank to do the first week; every subsequent week has cost me nothing gil-wise, because I'm spending ventures for those materials or farming them up on my own if my stores hadn't quite replenished from the previous week of farming red scrips.
After that first week I started stockpiling chimera manes, amphiptere skins, and etcetera, quick-synthing them into the respective crafting materials when the raw materials had reached about a stack. (I suggest other people do this too. why bother trying to gather materials all on one day for a craft that could be useless tomorrow? it's much better to keep a decently sized inventory that you can pull from as needed instead of rushing to farm items before the timer is up)
That being said, the cost of the materials for CUL still put it AHEAD of other classes