Finally got all my Crafting Classes to 60. Now about the gear...

[LystAP]

Ah, I see. I have my Gathering all to 60 but I don't do Favors or know where to go to look for them which explains why it's so pricey, but still that's a LOT of gil! Not a lot of players or crafters are willing to shelf that much.

This reinforces that Crafters got gimped big time in HW when it came out. However I don't know where to go to buy the Red Scrips gear which is odd as I thought they were be with the Scrip Exchangers, but I'll look a little harder. Probably in Idyllshire somewhere and I missed it.

Favors are an incredibly time-consuming process, the Red Scrips gear is located in Idyllshire (5.7, 7.1). The favor items utilized to make most 170 gear, requires not only favor items from Gathering Red Scrips, but also uses up Crafting Red Scrip tokens, of which need to be turned in with BOTH Botanist and Miner favor items. As a consequence, you need both Botanist and Miner at 60, alongside sacrificing your limited Red Scrip tokens to just obtain the material, of which could be wasted if you NQ it.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I keep looking at crafting as something I should consider getting back into, then I run the math and see that each item requires multiple millions of gil of materials (primarily the favor materials)

Although there are people who are willing and wealthy enough to shell out the Gil for the materials off of the board, most of the people making these things are doing the Favors themselves.

A typical leg piece takes 4 refined materials, several other easy-to-obtain materials, some Fieldcraft Demimateria III's, and some Seaborne Aethersands. The cost to buy those off of the board will likely exceed 2 million Gil, most of which is the cost of the Favor Materials or the actual refinement items (such as Purified Coke, the items that you trade the favor materials for), with the next most pricey item being the Seaborne Aethersand, at roughly 100k to 200k each.

MUCH lower Gil outlay to gather the stuff yourself. Of course, that requires spending extra time.

[VirusChris]

Favors are an incredibly time-consuming process, the Red Scrips gear is located in Idyllshire (5.7, 7.1). The favor items utilized to make most 170 gear, requires not only favor items from Gathering Red Scrips, but also uses up Crafting Red Scrip tokens, of which need to be turned in with BOTH Botanist and Miner favor items. As a consequence, you need both Botanist and Miner at 60, alongside sacrificing your limited Red Scrip tokens to just obtain the material, of which could be wasted if you NQ it.

Wow.. that's garbage.

Well I'm going to get the second to best crafting gear than just to hold me over and make it easy to craft most of the recipes. Honestly this is horrible.

For those who has played other MMOs with Crafting in it, which do you think is the best Crafting system?

[Roth_Trailfinder]

This system certainly beats the crafting system in Everquest. All you did in that game was insert the stuff for one recipe into the appropriate container and hit "Combine". No crafting minigame or anything at all - just a comparison of the recipe's difficulty level vs your own skill level to determine whether or not you succeed in crafting, and then if your skill is lower than the recipe's "trivial level" (basically, it's skill difficulty level) a second check to see if you gained a skill point.

[panderin]

Favors are an incredibly time-consuming process, the Red Scrips gear is located in Idyllshire (5.7, 7.1). The favor items utilized to make most 170 gear, requires not only favor items from Gathering Red Scrips, but also uses up Crafting Red Scrip tokens, of which need to be turned in with BOTH Botanist and Miner favor items. As a consequence, you need both Botanist and Miner at 60, alongside sacrificing your limited Red Scrip tokens to just obtain the material, of which could be wasted if you NQ it.

It takes less than an hour to farm all the favor stuff you need. I farmed it when it was far more time consuming and since the nerf it is ridiculously easy. But I have miner and bot at 60. To me waiting 3 weeks for one script piece was unacceptable so that is the route I went.

[LineageRazor]

For those who has played other MMOs with Crafting in it, which do you think is the best Crafting system?

Only other MMO I've played is FFXI, and the crafting system here is much better. In FFXI, you had no control over a synth once you started. Just put in the ingredients, hit synth, and pray. Chance of HQ depended on how high your crafting level was above the level the item you're crafting, and could be at maximum 50%. Most recipes worth crafting, of course, were very high level recipes, and your chance of HQ was much lower as a result; mostly 1% chance. Additionally, no matter the recipe, no matter how skilled you were, there was always a chance the synth would fail; I believe that this chance was somewhere around 5%. On a fail, you might get lucky and not lose any ingredients, but more likely you would lose some, or even all of the ingredients used.

Leveling up in that game was a pain, too. Completing a sufficiently high-level synth had a CHANCE of awarding you skillups, usually at a rate of 0.1 (so ten of these would get you one level). At lower levels these skillups rolled in pretty frequently, but after level 50, these skillups slowed to a crawl; generally around one in four synths would provide a 0.1 skillup. The max level was 110, and once you got past level 100 or so the cost of the ingredients used in recipes became prohibitive. So, you'd need to make dozens and dozens of high level items that would sell slowly or not at all, while fighting other crafters for the limited quantities of rare ingredients available.

I much prefer the crafting system in FFXIV. It's more enjoyable to craft, and the process of leveling up isn't nearly as gated. It IS, however still gated, as you can see in this very thread. You either need a lot of gil, or a lot of time and patience to get the gear you'll need to craft high level items. While the Favor system is relatively new, and definitely the worst gate, it's not the first time such a gate was implemented, either. ARR crafting endgame involved a lot of Ehcatl Sealants, which could only be obtained by grinding through the Ixali Beast Tribe quests or buying them from the Auction House at a premium. Upgrading your crafting tool and obtaining recipe books required a large number of Fieldcraft Demimateria III, which required high level desynthesis skill or (again) gil to obtain.

I don't mean to scare you off by any of this; just be aware of what you're getting into. Just as with combat classes, crafting has an endgame, and that endgame will test your patience and skill as a crafter. And, just as with combat classes, that endgame is optional; it's entirely possible to enjoy crafting without diving into the deep end of the pool, just as many players enjoy the game without raiding. One advantage that the crafting endgame has over the raiding endgame, though, is that you have less reliance on other players. The only person who can hold you back from success is yourself!

[Cleanse]

Since you can gather and if you can meet the min for 2 star crafting (using Rath's rotation/cp requirement), strap up and take a day to farm some favors and slowly build your own gear. It's much more satisfying having your name on all your gear.

[NorthernLadMSP]

I'd like some advice. I have recently hit 60 on everything except Armorer. I also recently finished Botanist to 60 (had Miner 60 for quite a while).

All of my crafting gear is the i150 HQ, and my accessories are the HQ Hallowed/Dragon Fang with the exception of the HQ Griffin Leather belt. I'm almost done melding my pieces and I also have 4 of the HQ crafted i170 off hands (BSM, WVR, LTW and GSM). Last week I purchased the red scrip i180 WVR main hand.

I'm unsure if I should keep getting main hands (which take three weeks each) for all jobs, or just my favorite 2-3 and then start working on the crafted i170 by using favor items. The other concern I have is if I should keep gearing my Botanist or use those gathering scrips for Favors. Currently, the only high level pieces my BTN has are the Fieldkeep i180 main hand and the i180 pants.

To give a general idea of my stats, for example, my BSM is currently at (without food):

745 Craft
725 Control
398 CP

My LTW (specialist) and GSM (specialist) would be:

765 Craft
745 Control
398 CP

and my WVR (specialist) would be higher due to the i180 main hand. So, my WVR stats would be:

805 Craft
770 Control
398 CP

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Try to get your Specialists geared up. I170 or i180. Until 3.3 hits though, I am not sure that getting the non-specialists to 850/820 is worthwhile. The reason being that we expect the 850/820 level to be approximately the level required to craft the 3.3 crafting/gathering gear. It would be far better to produce the stuff of that which you can, buying the rest from the board, and using the generic 3.3 set for all your crafters.

You may instead choose to continue to collect the Red Tokens, but simply not spending them until 3.3 hits, so you see what you need. I'm taking this route, but to be fair, I've already gotten my three specialists to the 850/820 (without food) level.

[MeridaQ]

Something to keep in mind for all new crafters 3.3 will have new crafter gear so maybe preparing for that or making friends with crafters to help you out. The new set is supposed to be a higher ilvl and possibly not job specific.