Grade III Aetherial Wheels - Currently useless

[Bellandy]

Our airship recently started bringing back empty clusters so we decided to create the level 3 Aetherial Wheel stand. Much to our disappointment, we discovered that not only you need:

• To create the prototypes separately once (each prototype brings 3 buffs, need empty clusters, synthetic resins and so on)
• It takes 3 days to create one buff in the wheel (fair enough)
• But most importantly, you need to create the buff manually every single time!

In short, you go through all the trouble of building the stand, the wheel, waiting for it to be done, farm all those mats every 3 days:



Only to get a 5 minutes of extra food buff (for example) compared to the level II one? If you ask me, that's a lot of trouble for such a minor reward.

So I'm asking the FC crafters out there, am I missing something? Or is it a system that needs to be looked into by the dev team?

Thanks!

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Why do you need to build the stand each time? If its anything like the Grade II stuff, you build the stand once, and then attach the Grade II wheels (that you have to craft each time) to it.

Yes, you have to craft the Wheels each time, but why would you have to craft the Stand each time too?

[Eisengrim]

Why do you need to build the stand each time? If its anything like the Grade II stuff, you build the stand once, and then attach the Grade II wheels (that you have to craft each time) to it.

Yes, you have to craft the Wheels each time, but why would you have to craft the Stand each time too?

I think they're saying it's not worth it because of the difficulty of gathering the materials for the grade 3 wheels for a small increase in the buff. Not that they think the stand has to be crafted each time.

[Bellandy]

Sorry if I didn't express myself properly, yes I meant the wheels themselves, not the stand which (thankfully) you only need to produce once.

[Loony_BoB]

They're far from useless. They give better stuff. If you have a large FC, getting those mats is nothing. Hell, aside from the Deep _____ Clusters, I can farm the rest of the mats myself in little time.

I don't know about the food buff and all that, because I don't think the lower level buffs are worth it either, but our FC always has Heat of Battle II up and often other buffs such as gathering/crafting exp or spiritbonding speed, or even reduced rates. As the saying goes: Every little helps.

[Bellandy]

Hell, aside from the Deep _____ Clusters, I can farm the rest of the mats myself in little time.

My point exactly - for a single buff, you need 9 clusters which are heavily reliant on airship RNG. On my server, the deep colored clusters go on sale for something between 500k and 3mil per cluster - of course this is bound to change as more airships reach high ranks, but as of now paying 5 to 10 million for a single buff that will be active 24h and give such a small upgrade is simply not worth it.

On top of that, the wheel can produce only one rank 3 buff (despite having 3 "slots", but the other two are for lower level buffs which I'm pretty sure nobody cares about), which is 1/3rd of the total uptime. Again, not worth it. As a raiding FC we mostly use Meat and Mead + Back on Your Feet, and the latter doesn't even exist as a rank 3 buff :/

[Loony_BoB]

Yeah, but these buffs aren't supposed to be the "standard" buffs. They're bonus ones, special ones.

As for the prices... better to level up your own FC's airships and get them yourself. *nod*

At the moment we have clusters of all three coloured types but *still* can't get those pesky empty clusters to pop so we can actually use them. xD

[Shadowsun]

The minor bonus isnt worth the time and effort.

[Jeykama]

OP has a point though. As a small FC of 4-8 active members a week, the pita of sending out airships for those clusters faaaaaar outweighs the 5% benefit we'd get from putting a G3 over the convenience of a vendor-buyable G2 buff.
Not to mention there are 3 G3 buffs inexplicably missing (i.e. battle xp, newbie stats, and weakness duration)

I get that clusters are basically free from airship ventures, but we still get the aggravation of T3 materia "polluting" our 50+ hour venture returns, not to mention that you need 9...

[Veritas-Ancora]

They're useless, and I hope it gets adjusted. My Free Company is Rank #1 on Gilgamesh server. We have more activity, more crafters, gatherers, and players of all shapes and sizes rotated in and out in a pool of over 2,000 members who get kicked out in less than 30 days of inactivity.

The amount of work required for Grade III is a waste of resources for a very short-term benefit even for us -- we made one, we're not doing others. I can't possibly imagine how a small FC would want them, either.

My suggestion: go through all of the work once, get the item, have it unlocked so we spend a larger amount of FC points and never have to do it again.