Quote Originally Posted by Sibyll View Post
I've had 20% Materia melds fail 30+ times before a success (yes it's happened on more than one occasion). I've failed 5 Hasty Touches with Steady Hand II in a row. I've also pentamelded using 6 materia total and gone an entire synth without failing a single Hasty/Rapid Synth. Troll the forums and you will find plenty of threads of similar stories, so if you've never experienced shit like this then more power to you for having the easiest time in the world crafting in FFXIV. Your last statement is fine if all you are doing is mass producing Wootz Ingots, but with 2* crafting you are kind of SoL if you get stellar RNG on the Ingots and Lumber but fail half of your Hasty Touches on the 2* Off hand you are trying to craft. This is where it falls short of 4* crafting. Unless you are using HQ aethersands (pure RNG time sink), you need about 9-10 IQ stacks to get 90+% meaning in a rotation where you can make 11 touch attempts you have minimal room for error. Compare this to 4* where full HQ starting mats on a final product would mean 6-7 IQ stacks would yield a 100%, but the trade off was that the ingots/lumber needed to be HQ'd from 0 initial quality. Your reward for mass producing base materials was a greater margin for error in the final product.
Oh, by no means am I so blessed that I've never had my share of disasters. But the problem with "trolling the forums and finding plenty of threads" is that you are looking at a FAR from unbiased sampling. If a craft goes great, do you come to the forums and talk about it? Not usually, unless you beat some crazy odds or something. But when a craft goes disastrously wrong? THAT'S when players come here to rant. It's not limited to crafting, either; if you'd never played the game and only based your knowledge of it on the General Discussion forums, you'd be convinced that the playerbase is a cesspool of hatred and ignorance, when actually folks in-game are pretty darned civil.

As for those blisteringly painful 2* crafts where your Hasties are failing left and right - that's why they gave us Reclaim, so that even if the worst happens, you still have a shot (a very good shot, in fact!) at salvaging everything for another attempt. You basically need to fail two rolls of the dice one easy (reclaim), the other of variable difficulty but typically also easy if you know what you're doing (an unsalvageable amount of bad RNG during the craft) before you're totally screwed. When that happens, you throw up your hands, accept your loss, and take solace in the fact that it's a kind of loss that's going to be very, very rare.

If it's a kind of loss that's NOT very, very rare, if you are REGULARLY being forced to use Reclaim on high-priced synths of this kind, it's time to reexamine your methods, your gear, and whether you might need to use more HQ ingredients.