Specialist Recipees: Why do the developers keep listening to bad requests?

[Mindylou]

Why can't they just make it worth doing?

they could, add perks
(but they wont as fun is the "f__" word lol

[Nalien]

I like the idea of specialist recipes, but on one condition;

The specialist recipes are solely for equipment/consumables.

That I'm fine with. If, however, they add material recipes to specialists only, that's when I start getting annoyed. By all means, I don't mind only being able to make the best Weaver stuff, but if I can't make the best Weaver stuff, because its dependent on a specialist recipe from Alchemist, and I didn't specialize in Alchemist? That's just annoying. Specialist recipes should be, well, special, not crap like Terminus Putty. Depends how far they go with it, actually, I could tolerate a bit, but if I end up needing specialist recipe items from 5 different crafts just to make one thing... Yeah...

The "but the armory system!" argument is actually fairly weak. The armory system isn't there so you can be the best at everything, it is there so you can change your mind and switch easily. In other MMOs, if you roled one class, then want to pick up another, you have to make an entirely new character. Here? You can level everything, but the progression system for Jobs (and now crafts) was always such that you could only excel at a handful. The armory system was always there just to make it easier to decide what you wanted to excel at; you can play everything on one character, you can try them all, then pick your favorite and focus on that, if you change you mind you can switch easily. For weak content, you can play them all, for serious content it was always a case of being locked to a few and I'm actually glad they're applying that to crafting now. I doubt I will be in a few months, when crafting is still fairly irrelevant, but having specialist recipes is a step in the right direction, whether they take the next step and give us something like Abjurations to make crafted gear relevant, is another matter.

I mean really... How did most of you progress with crafting in 2.0? Did you make everything yourself? Because I sure as hell did. You know where that's left me? Sitting on a Large and Medium plot of land, and still with more Gil than I'll ever know what to do with... I would much rather have a specialist system which "artificially" makes crafted gear rarer and gives me something to spend my damn Gil on; I'm a specialist in (lets say, because I'm not picking until I see the recipes now) Weaver, Leatherworker and Goldsmithing. I can only make those pieces of gear for myself (and they'd hopefully be more profitable to sell), I cannot make the specialist gear from Blacksmith or Armorer, if I want that gear I need to buy it from someone else. Finally I'll have a reason for all this bloody Gil...

I fully welcome not being able to make everything, since it means I'll have to buy some stuff and my Gil will finally have value again. Specialist recipes address one of the two major issues I have with crafting in this game. Now they just need to add an Abjuration system to the game (heck, they're already have, it's how we've upgraded Sol/Poe/Law/Eso gear for a while now...) to make crafted stuff relevant, without it being a requirement/buy in to raid tier gear. Actually having a reason to make Gil, because I can't do everything on one character, is a great addition to this game. Anyone who loathes it and wants to be an full omni-crafter, nothing is stopping you from continuing to have mules. That was the "solution" to desynthesis, it's the "solution" to this.

[Seramme]

No. Just no.

There is already very little worthwhile craftable items and they are slowly taking them away with each patch (no more top-tier adventuring jewelry? super-expensive much-weaker-than-before adventuring armor? said armor not even having unique appearance but having the EXACT SAME appearance as ilvl 150? NO new potions aside from stat potions? etc). And now they want to start gating the remaining few useful things behind the specialist system, too? Ugh.

Please first make crafting viable and in demand again. Only when it is already that, you can start thinking about adding specialist-only rare recipes. So far I hardly remember even a handful of cases when someone asked me to craft them any non-crafting item that would require a level 60 CRP, BSM, ARM, GSM, LTW or WVR to make.

Instead of forcing people to be specialist using "sticks" (outright blocking non-specialists from making the best - and lets be honest, these WILL be the best - recipes), how about adding "carrots" instead? Things such as:
- buffing the specialist skills to be less RNG-dependant
- new fun specialist skills, such as maybe having a chance of reducing material consumption on the current craft by 20% (example)?
- making specialist CULs and ALCs able to make more consumables per craft
- letting specialists be able to equip unique-looking armor pieces on their chosen crafting class that will differentiate them from non-specialists (said pieces should not have total higher stats but they CAN have one more guaranteed meld slot to make them easier to meld)
- ...and so on...

[RubyShoes]

We were steered into omnicrafting all game long and now and it was the casual friendly part of the game /highlight *game* not timesink.

Now you choose whether to spend hours chasing disappearing nodes leaving very little time to do anything else in game if you have a life or a job.

Gathering has become a time swallowing grind.

Crafting well... specialisations should be dumped imo along with scripts and favors rather than implemented all half baked.

[Spellbinder]

This will probably seem petty (and probably mentioned somewhere in this thread), but there's only one thing in particular that concerns me about specialist recipes: glamour gear and housing furniture.

I'm sure you've heard the story before, the lone crafter of a small free company, etc. etc. Crafting has been something I thoroughly enjoyed from the beginning. By no means am I a lalafell warbucks, hankering to make gobs of gil on the market, but I took satisfaction in knowing that if there was some piece of craftable gear my friends wanted for looks, or a piece of furniture we really wanted for the house, we could go and gather or take down primals to get the ingredients we needed and make what we wanted. It goes without saying putting such a limitation on what we can and can't craft would put a damper on that.

Personally, I see no problem with the specialists being required to reliably make high quality items (as that's what people aim for when crafting essentially anything not furniture), and resign myself to a life of normal quality items that won't sell. Even if it requires pentamelding all my gear to meet the requirements.

In short, do I think there should be specialist only recipes? No.
Do I think specialists should be the ones making high quality items, and thus, making more profits for their respective trades? Sure.

[Taekrys]

I fully agree with the OP and gladly join my voice to the many we should gather to make SE knows how deeply we are suffocated in this black abyss of sadness and timewaste that Crafting (and Gathering alongside with it) has become.

The only happy people I see about actual structure are Gatherer-gil-hoarders who use Red Scrip to steal ton of money from crafters.

I seriously would like to know from SE why they keep ignoring dozens of (from you all) well explained complaints while instead answering to the comparatively almost non-existent demands like the one OP pointed out.

For instance, they "fixed" today the Favor system keeping the final drop rate identical as it was before, while making the gathering easier.
Anyone who whished to begin crafting asked to INCREASE THE AMOUNT dropped, since that would mean making it more affordable and obtainable, while gatherers who wanted to keep doing easy money exploiting the high demand against low offer asked to make this faster but to keep the actual drop rate.

And whom did they listen? The latter.
I don't have any good explanation for this. Do you? Maybe gil-hoarder are more important than whoever wants to have fun crafting?

I will seriously stop crafting (and gathering) if they don't show us some light at the end of the tunnel in the early future and keep instead listening to wrong people.

[Joronas]

There is no "good outcome" from specialist recipes that improves the market system.

The realistic outcomes:
1) reduced competition on any one item because only a few people make it
2) all the real crafters wind up collaboratively price fixing

Or maybe you think crafting should feature a horde of people always taking the "best" specialization and dropping the price down to "unsustainable"? That's possible too.

There should be no way that someone who invested the time and effort to max everything is locked out of recipes (content!) (even on a rotating basis). If you want specialists to be worthwhile, then give them traits and abilities and such. Make THEM worthwhile, not make non-specialists worth less.

[RiceisNice]

...

Speak for yourself, and have you even gathered favors before the change? They're functionally the same now (I still average 3-4 items per favor), but only in a shorter amount of time. They're still locked behind weekly red scrips. The supply is kept the same, the demand is still the same.

The amount was fine, you'd get on average enough for two-to-two and a half turn ins from one favor. Then you'd need two separate favors to get a crafting item trade in. So you would have spent two gathering tokens to get enough trade ins in total for...two crafting tokens.

There is no "good outcome" from specialist recipes that improves the market system.

The realistic outcomes:
1) reduced competition on any one item because only a few people make it
2) all the real crafters wind up collaboratively price fixing

Or maybe you think crafting should feature a horde of people always taking the "best" specialization and dropping the price down to "unsustainable"? That's possible too.

There should be no way that someone who invested the time and effort to max everything is locked out of recipes (content!) (even on a rotating basis). If you want specialists to be worthwhile, then give them traits and abilities and such. Make THEM worthwhile, not make non-specialists worth less.

Their idea is probably that they want people looking for a specific crafter when they want or need something made, not a crafter. The crafting scene is so homogenized with how every progress, process, skill and steps are exactly the same and identical to each other. Doubly so when the gear is shared between them all (non-AF gear, and before 3.0, the artisan gear).

[Snugglebutt]

I like the idea of specialist recipes, but on one condition;

The specialist recipes are solely for equipment/consumables.

That I'm fine with. If, however, they add material recipes to specialists only, that's when I start getting annoyed.

I agree with a lot of what you said on the subject of specialization in your post especially in that the specialist recipes should not be for the most part materials/components. They should be things like equipment, consumables, housing items and vanity stuff. I for one look forward to specialist recipes provided they do it right.

[Joronas]

Their idea is probably that they want people looking for a specific crafter when they want or need something made, not a crafter. The crafting scene is so homogenized with how every progress, process, skill and steps are exactly the same and identical to each other. Doubly so when the gear is shared between them all (non-AF gear, and before 3.0, the artisan gear).

So, the solution is to cripple the people who actually crafted? Because blocking the people who invest time in crafting out of doing all the crafting ... is crippling them. It's terrible design. There are many other ways to make crafting classes distinct. People have suggested several. The only ones who complain are the ones who think that their 1 class should be more important then other's 8. I cannot accept that. Many others cannot accept that either. We've already been nerfed to oblivion with being locked out of the endgame gear; now we need to have another one?