The Path to 3-Star is ... paved with more 2-Star crafting

[FoxyAreku]

So the gearing progression from when you hit 60 fresh on your first specialist, assuming little to no Gil to spend on the MB, goes Blue Scrip Gear => 180 Red Scrip Gear => (over)Melded 170HQ 2* Craft Gear?

Wanna stop you there, blue scrip gear is bad for anything but glamour.

It's 150 gear>170 class specific gear OR 180 gear (your choice, latter takes more time)>getting 170 accessories and melding them>3 star crafter.

Feels kind of contrived and backwards, especially when 170HQ are specialist-only recipes.

Also this is wrong. I made all my 170 accessories and my weaver offhand in 3.1 and my carpenter isn't a specialist (AND it has poor gear that barely meets minimum).

[SnugglesD]

So the gearing progression from when you hit 60 fresh on your first specialist, assuming little to no Gil to spend on the MB, goes Blue Scrip Gear => 180 Red Scrip Gear => (over)Melded 170HQ 2* Craft Gear?

Feels kind of contrived and backwards, especially when 170HQ are specialist-only recipes, and so force people to pick specific classes to be specialist to make the gear for the others (LTW, WVR, and GSM seem to have a pretty unfair advantage in this arena, since unless I'm mistaken, they make most of the Specialist gear). Only way to make this progression make sense would be to swap iLevels of Red Scrip gear, forbid overmelding of 170HQ gear, or make it so each class could craft their own 2* specialist gear.

Specialist requirements were removed with 3.2.

And the gear progression goes 150HQ->150HQ melded->170HQ.
Red scrip gear is a waste of time and isn't needed. You get 32 t4 materia for class quests and t3 are fairly cheap.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

2 star crafting gear was never specialist-only. The initial only specialist-only recipes prior to the patch were some furnishing stuff, and the i210 relic bits.

[OoglieBooglie]

The skypirate stuff was specialist only until 3.2, but not any crafting gear.

[Caitlinzulu]

Specialist requirements were removed with 3.2.

The specialist requirements for relic and anything else before patch 3.2 where removed.
Patch 3.2 added a whole new array of specialist only recipies in the mastercraft IV books though, mainly all the ilvl 220 eikon gear, and the relica allagan/high allagan items which are crazy hard to craft stats wise.