Please Implement Auto-Reclaim on Disconnect (90% success, 10% failure)

[LineageRazor]

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.

[RiceisNice]

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Having done some of the 2* crafts myself, even if you use all HQ ingredients on something like the body pieces or main/offhands, it's diluted by the things you can't HQ (the materia) I could get as close to 3k starting quaility (though 2k is more than enough), it doesn't change the fact that in order to get that 100% HQ rate, you'd need at least 10 stacks, out of the 13 or so HTs you can get in and in the end, you still rely on that 80% to succeed (or 90% even if you're doing the MaMa method, and I've had my fair share of having more than 4 flawless synthesis fail, which means I need to use an extra CSII to finish). No matter how you slice it, your chances of success hinges on your hasty touches working (or getting good conditions so you can get CP to use precise touch, to reduce the need for hasty touch). No amount of assessment improves the chance of success, it only minimizes the chance of losing your materials (knowing when to bail out and reclaim). Just because they have to frequently use reclaim does not nessescarly mean they are doing something wrong in their rotation; there's a cookie-cutter one that works quite well, but it still has its fair share of misses because it relies on 90% flawless synthesis and 80% hasty touches to work (and unfortunately, this is probably the safest option too)

No matter the method you try to apply, you always have a static portion (which may or may not have RNG attached to it), that is, how you finish the craft through CSII. The other half is increasing the quaility, and we're not just slamming our buttons on HT blindly, we're already taking every counter measure to giveit the best sucess rate, gaining CP where we can afford it (TotT when we can afford to lose a stack of SH) if it happens, and using precise touch in place of HT. But half of that isn't even making adjustments on the go; most 2* crafts incorporate waste not II and they all use 7 out of 8 attempts on it to make the full use of out of it, so you can't afford to use TotT on the good anyway..

In the raid example, the crits only occur on auto attacks, which is the least of your worries as far as outgoing damage is concerned. Comparing it to the success rate of hasty touch is a far shot because the two are not equally important in their respective areas.

In context of the topic, it'd be so much better to just allow you to resume the craft from where it left off upon logging in. Its utterly infuriating lose materials for a 2 star craft because of a random disconnect on SE's end, and this was before the favor change so it effectively took 90 minutes of gathering to make that item.

[MN_14]

But half of that isn't even making adjustments on the go; most 2* crafts incorporate waste not II and they all use 7 out of 8 attempts on it to make the full use of out of it, so you can't afford to use TotT on the good anyway..

It depends on how you've designed your crafting strategy. I use Waste Not II pretty often, but only when I feel it is the best option at the "critical point" in my synth. My crafting strategy is designed with maximum flexibility in mind, and I don't believe that my HQ yields would be anywhere near as high if I was stuck to a predetermined pathway.

[LineageRazor]

snip

If your rotation has an 80% chance of building up to a decent HQ level and you use Reclaim the rest of the time, I don't consider that to be using Reclaim "regularly". That's a good rotation. What I meant by "regularly" is a crafter who can barely manage 40% HQ, and so reclaims again and again until they manage a perfect storm of touches that manages to nudge them 70% or higher - THIS is when a player needs to reexamine themselves.

80% success rate, with a 90% shot to regain ingredients the other 20% of the time? You have nothing to complain about there, imo. There's still a chance for failure, true, but I still maintain that a system with a 100% chance of success is a pretty boring one, even if it results in the occasional disastrous loss. There's not a lot of thrill in victory if there's no consequences for defeat.

As for the crits only on auto-attacks thing, yeah, that was something I was unaware of, and which I find pretty stupid. I could see disabling crits on things like tank buster attacks, but it's dumb to take them from everything else, as well. And it makes Awareness even more worthless than I already thought it was.

[Katlyna]

80% success rate, with a 90% shot to regain ingredients the other 20% of the time? You have nothing to complain about there, imo. There's still a chance for failure, true, but I still maintain that a system with a 100% chance of success is a pretty boring one, even if it results in the occasional disastrous loss. There's not a lot of thrill in victory if there's no consequences for defeat.

I concur with your general comment there, noting that if you are a "smarter" crafter with more experience you should be able to achieve a higher success rate, which is currently true. I find it interesting this discussion has gone from a simple talk about what should happen on disconnection to NQ vs HQ rates and the use of reclaim period. Its made me lol

[RiceisNice]

It depends on how you've designed your crafting strategy. I use Waste Not II pretty often, but only when I feel it is the best option at the "critical point" in my synth. My crafting strategy is designed with maximum flexibility in mind, and I don't believe that my HQ yields would be anywhere near as high if I was stuck to a predetermined pathway.

The thing is, you'r more-or-less predetermined when using something like WNII. You want to use at least 7 out of the 8 hits, otherwise every step you aren't using it is wasted (thus most people have it pre-determined with 5 HT+SHII and 2 CSII to use up those 7 steps). And everything after that becomes a flowchart at that point; Good but no SH? TotT. TotT at least once before this point? Use Precise Touch. etc etc. There's far too few meaningful variables for "making smart decisions" to be the case imo.

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It's all confirmation bias and depending on the perspective you want to go for. Some people believe RNG has no place in crafting as long as you know how to access the situation and change your approach as such (which is the difference between succeeding the craft and minimizing the losses from a craft). Especially when you're handling high-profile crafts which well...previously required an average of 90 minutes just to gather for (and multiply that by how many of those mats you actually need, like 4 of them for a mainhand).


That being said though, along with confirmation bias, there is the off chance where you can get a whole string of failed touches touches throughout the craft, and the good conditions themselves are already incredibly scarce (where 5 out of 7 crafts I had no good conditions the entire time). 80% is still 80%, and you don't need a whole lot of that 20% for the craft to go south to a >90% HQ rate. I've personally had my own crafting spree where out of my 7 crafts, at least 3 of them had gone south because I either failed more than 3 hasty touches, 3 flawless synthesis, or both (which also has happened). And unlikely as it is, it's still pretty damn shitty because me as a crafter, the only way I can access that situation is "Hope I get an excellent and not mess up that/Hope I get goods when WNII isn't active" if we were talking about succeeding the craft....and that feels like more praying to RNG than working with what I get honestly.

Sure it "evens" out if you get a larger sample size, but unlike previously, you cant mass produce material items like this because of the red scrips (thus lowering your sample size to a very very small amount compared to say, wootz ingots or kirimu leather)

On a side note, awareness has too long of a cooldown to be usable for all tank busters. If we were to take the current tank busters (which hit for well around 25k unmitigated) and let those be critable, we're looking at 32k damage, you'd need over 50% mitigation (and they're multiplicative last I checked, stacking cool downs that is) to survive it, and that's barely by the hair of your chinny chin chin since most full-vit tanks currently are barely breaking 19k. Outside of tank busters, you have cleaves that hit for around 7-9k, but those are usually mixed in with raid wide AoE that also hit for around 9k to the entire party. The outgoing damage in a fight is a very delicate thing and you don't want there to be an instance where it becomes a instant loss-condition because something crit and the damage is more than you can heal without requiring cooldowns (nor is it something you can predict and you obviously can't be pre-emptive on every possible-crit instance), and said cooldowns are already needed for certain parts of the fight because the damage is excessive as it is when it comes to raid damage.


If they wanted awareness to play an active role in mitigating tank busters, then the tank busters themselves need to be a guaranteed crit and the numbers tuned appropriately. There's only a few applications with Awareness, only two instances I can name off the top of my head where you're dealing with close to 100% crit rate (electric node in T11 and Shiva /w Bow), and preventing crits from RI as a warrior.

[LineageRazor]

On a side note, awareness has too long of a cooldown to be usable for all tank busters. If we were to take the current tank busters (which hit for well around 25k unmitigated) and let those be critable, we're looking at 32k damage, you'd need over 50% mitigation (and they're multiplicative last I checked, stacking cool downs that is) to survive it, and that's barely by the hair of your chinny chin chin since most full-vit tanks currently are barely breaking 19k.

Well, yes, that's why I specifically said "I could see disabling crits on things like tank buster attacks". When an attack is specifically designed to almost-kill a tank on a non-crit, allowing crits there is just unfair. I still maintain, though, that crits should be allowed on cleaves, raid-wide attacks, and so on, with the caveat that such attacks have their normal damage lowered a bit so that the total average damage over time is maintained. It's okay to give your healers heart attacks from time to time due to unexpected crits, and it gives your DPS even more incentive to stay outside of telegraphs and cleaves!

[RiceisNice]

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Raid wide attacks would actually be lethal to non-tanks if they'd crit. And they're unavoidable no less. Telegraphed AoEs are already lethal as it is, getting hit by one is a garunteed death regardless of the circumstance.

If you try to balance it around that, it kinda makes for a boring aspect to healing (because at this point they can't really risk going into cleric stance), not to mention the two ends of it; If you get no crits, the outgoing damage is a joke. If it's going to crit repeatedly, it'd either be the same degree as it is now, or unmanageable because there's no diminishing returns to the crit itself.

This sort of thing makes for very little room to work with too. Taking gunnery pod for example, it's two instances of 4.5-5k damage, totalling around 10k. If we keep it the way it is and allow either one to crit, it's lethal to non-tanks (they both occur at the same time). If we wanted to keep the crit aspect, their overall damage would have to be lower, and the instance of non-crits would be lower than what we have now. There's no need to immediately top the dps right after gunnery pod, making this crit or not would have no influence on what the healers are doing and is just slapping on RNG for the sake of it. Same with other raid AoEs like sluce or cascade.

If there were to be any meaningful reason behind the change, the crit'd variation would have to do more than it currently is, how much stronger than it currently is is debatable; significantly more makes it lethal, lowering the base damage will make it less of a meaningful mechanic as far as healing checks is concerned and there's no balance or leeway for fight designs if you take this into consideration. Almost no MMO bosses use crits in their numbers for a reason, it's too much of a wild variable to account for when you're designing fight mechanics.

[Katlyna]

And everything after that becomes a flowchart at that point; Good but no SH? TotT. TotT at least once before this point? Use Precise Touch. etc etc. There's far too few meaningful variables for "making smart decisions" to be the case imo.

I concur you have a very good point here. That a group of smart people can basically chop up a craft at a given star/difficulty level figure out a few "best" options A), B), and C) and then as you said flowchart the exact optimal option when a given situation occurs.

Personally I think this problem stems from two issues:
A) Item progress must be completed at the end.
B) Byregot's is superior at the end and often grants ~20-40% of an items quality.

If these two limitations were changed/removed then things would change notable. For instance if you could complete 100% of your progress at any time and instead your synthesis ends when durability reaches 0 (or less) then progress could be done dynamically. Rather than trying to hit an exact mark you could try more dangerous options without concern of overshooting.

Similar to the progress problem. Having Byregot's complete half your quality is terrible. If combat relied on similar mechanics where DPS had to get X stacks and then assassinate bosses at 50% life... we would get some really bizarre binary strategies for DPS. Quality should be something you chip away at any way you can dynamically throughout the rotation. Small rotations should be useful but a single rotation should not span the entire synth. Specialist rotations hinted at the possibility of this type of synthing, but failed because Byregot's is simply superior.

Anyway if they were to combine both of these ideologies into the current system, we would suddenly end up with truly dynamic crafting since you don't have to hit an exact mark, rather you are rewarded for making smart dynamic choices to push progress and quality as quick and efficiently as you can given your current state.

[Sibyll]

And everything after that becomes a flowchart at that point; Good but no SH? TotT. TotT at least once before this point? Use Precise Touch. etc etc. There's far too few meaningful variables for "making smart decisions" to be the case imo.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said in your last few posts. It's what I was trying to get at, but couldn't be bothered to keep explaining it anymore to these two.

I think there are more interesting ways to design crafting than around slot machine success rates and big HP bars. Raiders would get pretty sick of every boss getting more HP and hitting harder with everything else remaining the same, so I don't really see why crafting should be any different.