Crafting a Dead Horse: Work vs. Reward Seriously Needs a Revamp

[CatfishCassie]

Square Enix needs to address a serious problem with the crafting system... that problem being that the only worthwhile things available to craft are glamour items and things for other crafters and gatherers. It seems incredibly obvious to me that no one has done an honest risk vs. reward (or, in this case, work vs. reward) analysis on the crafting system or they'd see how ludicrously unrewarding it currently is (and, in fact, has been since the game came out, though the disparity has been getting steadily worse).

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[CatfishCassie]

Doing the math, there are 13 slots of gear for each crafting profession and for each gathering profession except fisher (which has 12). That gives you 142 2-star items that you'll need to make to get the best crafting and gathering gear so you can reliably craft 2-star items. Going with crafted items, that's 5 red-scrip materials per item. Each set of five requires a red crafting token, which is 50 red scrips... you can get 9 of these per week. So 142/9 gives us about 16 weeks (4 months) of capping red scrips every week in order to fully outfit every crafter and gatherer in 2-star gear. To make the gear you also need to spend roughly 3 million gil on materia. This lets you get the level 60 no-star crafting and gathering gear up to the point that you're at the minimums for 2-star crafting and folklore/favor gathering. Some people may get lucky, but the 3 million figure I quoted is how much I just spent, and I already had quite a lot of materia saved up. (cont below)

[CatfishCassie]

So, once you've spent 3 million gil and 4 months of scrip farming, you'll finally have the requisite skills to easily HQ the 2-star DoW/DoM gear. This gets you access to ilvl 180 gear. Granted... ilvl 180 gear *is* better than the ilvl 170 gear you get with Law Tomestones or the ilvl 160 gear you get from dungeons... but it's also woefully inferior to the ilvl 200 gear you get from Esoterics or Alexander. Not only that, but it requires still more red scrips to make... you only get enough red scrips to make 3 items per week. So even if you were just doing this to craft stuff for yourself, it would still take you another month of grinding red scrips on top of the 4 months you've already spent working on your crafting gear!

(continued below due to ridiculous 1000 character limit)

[CatfishCassie]

The bottom line here is that crafters are also "warriors of light". No, a level 60 crafter isn't challenging the depths of Alexander... but they are spending the same or more time perfecting their craft. As such, if the Warriors of Light who are challenging the great primals are fighting the gods themselves, the crafters and gatherers who put in the same amount of time and effort (or more) should be capable of similarly impressive feats.

(continued below due to ridiculous 1000 character limit)

[CatfishCassie]

These are the changes that I would make to the crafting/gathering system to bring it in-line with the rest of the game:

1. Add a way to upgrade existing crafted items to ilvl 190-210 using Gordian Parts/Manifestos. This would increase the demand for crafted items since crafted items would be upgradeable all the way to the same level as raid gear, but without removing the need to run raids to obtain the items needed.

2. Remove or reduce red-scrip requirements for DoM/DoW gear. Our reward for grinding through the red scrip gear shouldn't be needing to grind more red scrips. Our reward should be making gear that people want.

3. Make the above changes the "standard template" for future crafting additions. This gives crafters the ability to make items that raiders will want. It also avoids devaluing the effort that raiders put into raiding, which is what letting crafters make raid-level tradeable gear would have done.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

You know you can just edit a post to get past the 1000 character limit right? :/

[CatfishCassie]

Nope, I didn't know that :\ That honestly just makes it even more ridiculous.

Anyway... I dunno how I feel about crafting at the moment. Part of me says that the amount of work that goes into it wouldn't be so bad if the reward was worth it. Another part of me says there isn't a reward that can be worth the amount of work people currently have to put into it. It's really hard to stay motivated to log on every day and keep my guild going when the game seems to actively discourage me from playing it.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

Honestly the only reason the people in my FC craft is that
1. It kills time
2. It makes money (usually).

They're not trying to be super hardcore and craft all the top 180 gear, mind you, but they do what they feel like doing.

I do agree that crafting could use some more benefits, but it's hard to balance it so that it's fair, especially with the presence of RMT.

[Alahra]

Anyway... I dunno how I feel about crafting at the moment.

Don't worry, you're not the only one. The whole DoH structure in HW is a mess. Just about every aspect of it has something that's not quite right about it. Recipes require far too many materials. Basic (indeed, leveling!) recipes are locked behind Master books. DoW/DoM gear is largely pointless (both at 60 and pre-cap, because of the availability of HQ gear from quests). The grind is incredibly gated, and making 2-star gear requires Red Scrips from *both* crafters and gatherers. DoW/M content now has almost no interaction with crafting at cap. Class quests have lackluster rewards. Specialization is essentially pointless. And on and on.

[Silverbane]

The main points of crafting right now, as far as my wife and I are concerned, is 1) prepare for whatever may come in 3.1 in November, and 2) make a modest amount of money selling food and potions. Regarding the second point, tho, most of our income seems to be coming from gathering these days.

Maybe preparing for an unknown future doesn't seem like a reward to some people. Opinions vary.

But it doesn't matter. For us, crafting, like solving a puzzle, is it's own reward. We high-five after successfully HQ'ing a two-star craft. (We craft 2-Star items sitting side-by-side, with one of us running the applicable crafter -- I do BSM CRP LTW ARM, she does the rest -- and the other one supervising. It helps prevent mistakes.)