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

[Katlyna]

This is the mentality behind using Reclaim. If you're a gambler at heart, you may prefer the 20% chance of HQ - but there's a reason why gamblers are usually not wealthy people.

That pretty much summarizes why I hate but will sometimes use reclaim. Functionally and statistically I fully understand why reclaim has use and I'll use reclaim when absolutely necessary. But I rarely gamble anything... I fight tooth and nail to not gamble haha ;-)

[Sibyll]

This is the mentality behind using Reclaim. If you're a gambler at heart, you may prefer the 20% chance of HQ - but there's a reason why gamblers are usually not wealthy people.

I don't really like gambling, so having the entire crafting system designed so heavily around it is beginning to get old. I wouldn't expect raid mechanics like this to fly, so I really don't see why crafting gets a pass. At the end of the day whether or not you fail or succeed to HQ a craft is in the hands of the game telling you so, and many times crafts are failed through no fault of the crafter. It's really lazy, and at the end of the day if this is what crafting is going to be like I just assume have WoW crafting. At least then I can make raid food/potions for my static in 5 mins rather than being forced to individually craft consumables that you can literally guzzle down by the dozens in a 3 hour session.

Crafting this tier actually feels like a huge step backward from 4*, both in terms of usefulness of recipes and in terms of pushing the RNG to the ingot/lumbers and allowing the final products to be safely HQ'd so long that a few of the 4* materials were HQ.

[LineageRazor]

It's really lazy, and at the end of the day if this is what crafting is going to be like I just assume have WoW crafting.

Admittedly, I don't have a lot of MMO experience outside of FFXIV. The only other MMO I've played is FFXI, and the crafting in that was PURE RNG, with very little a player could do to affect the odds. You clicked Synthesis, loaded the ingredients, and then hit the "OK" button. No matter how high your level, you had a chance to fail (something around 5%, I think), which could cause you to lose none, some, or all of your ingredients (chosen randomly). If you were above the level of the craft, you had a chance to HQ, with the best odds being if you were 51 levels above the craft, netting you roughly 50/50 odds of HQ. Of course, it's not possible to be 51 levels above the highest crafts, so you were stuck with the basic HQ chance, around 1%. You didn't see a lot of HQ endgame gear, and the pieces that folks managed to produce (purely by chance, no skill involved whatsoever) were some of the most expensive items in the game.

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.

What was WoW crafting like? Just drop in the ingredients, and out comes a finished product? No HQ chance or failure risk?

Edit: Also, you mentioned this would never fly in Raid mechanics... except that they DO. Critical hits. Unless there's some limitation on how critical hits work in raids that I'm unaware of, every hit has a chance to crit and do extra damage. A crit or two here and there isn't likely to cause problems - but what if every hit is a crit? Not likely, of course, but it could theoretically happen. Hasty Touch is much the same way; a couple of Hasty Failures and you'll still be fine, but if all or most of them fail, you're screwed. It's the same deal.

[MN_14]

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.

.....and you just gave away the secret to crafting successfully. Aside from planning out a rotation that gives you the best expected results, the better you are at manipulating the odds during a craft, the better your HQ yields will be. The key is to actively assess the situation on a constant basis and look for opportunities to improve your probabilities of success.

[Sibyll]

Compared against that, the crafting system in FFXIV is amazingly fun. You have real control over how things turn out. Admittedly, it's a system that favors mathematicians; leveraging probabilities to produce the best results over the long term is what crafting is all about. Some folks, though, just can't seem to wrap their head around the idea that just because a CAN go catastrophically wrong doesn't mean that it WILL. Murphy's Law is a big, fat lie. And, even if that odd failure crops up, you have plenty of successes to balance it out.

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.

What was WoW crafting like? Just drop in the ingredients, and out comes a finished product? No HQ chance or failure risk?

Yes, and to clarify this is mostly aimed at things like food/potions that you need lots of and need to be HQ. NQ Draconic potions are on par with HQ X-Potions (which come in stacks of 3). In WoW/Rift there is no HQing, so you can basically craft the food and potions for an entire raid with quick synth, something that would take hours of tedious crafting to do in FFXIV.

Making potions and food in a game shouldn't feel like a chore.

Edit: Also, you mentioned this would never fly in Raid mechanics... except that they DO. Critical hits. Unless there's some limitation on how critical hits work in raids that I'm unaware of, every hit has a chance to crit and do extra damage. A crit or two here and there isn't likely to cause problems - but what if every hit is a crit? Not likely, of course, but it could theoretically happen. Hasty Touch is much the same way; a couple of Hasty Failures and you'll still be fine, but if all or most of them fail, you're screwed. It's the same deal.

To my knowledge only auto attacks can crit. The difference is as a tank/healer I can look at why I died and think of things I could've done to prevent that: 1) healer could've kept me topped off, 2) I could put on more fending accessories, 3) I could time my CDs better during heavy AoE phases etc. When I fail a synthesis because I failed an 80% chance 5 times in a row what constructive thought process can the player go through? At best: 1) get more CP to get an extra touch attempts to "lessen" the effect of RNG, 2) Rethink your rotation. CP will only take you so far as it has a hard cap and unless a rotation exists that eliminates Hasty Touch completely this really isn't changing much.

One last thing, RNG isn't bad by itself. The Good/Excellent conditions I think are fine RNG because it's something the player actively reacts to and I'd love to see more crafting mechanics where "something" happens and I need to choose how best to react to it. Success Rates are lazy RNG design and it's the equivalent of trying to DPS in a raid where you don't meet the accuracy cap. If Craftsmanship/Control raised success rate for associated skills I might actually treat these as useful stats instead of accuracy caps to reach and forget about.

[MN_14]

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.

I feel that the odds are heavily balanced in your favor for level 60 1* and 2* crafts, even more so than the 3* and 4* crafts from before. Having enough CP is key, however.

So far, I've crafted around 50 2* materials starting from 1500-1900 quality. For the first 30 materials, my stats were around 721 craftsmanship, 695 control, and 440 CP (w/food). Out of the 30 materials here, I ended up with 2 NQs, with one of them being at 68% and the other at around 30% due to 5 misses during the synth.

My current stats (other than my upgraded weaver) are around 721 craftsmanship, 728 control w/food, and 455 CP w/food. I've gotten a 100% HQ yield during my most recent 20 (2* material) crafts and have noticed a sharp decline in the number of my crafts that turn out to be 80-90% due to changes I've made using the extra 15 CP. It is possible to get 5 misses like my 30% synth from before, but they're not very common. It's true that NQs are bound to happen, but your HQs should heavily outnumber them.

[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]

...

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.