Has crafting been fixed? (Back from a break)

[Katlyna]

1. Can I enjoy difficult crafts more frequently now, being able to craft many a day?
Yes they fixed the ingredient numbers for red scripts. They are STILL a huge amount of work and investment. And there will be more script updates in 3.3 (but we're not sure what exactly)

2. How useful is crafting right now? Is the iLevel gap still huge?
The iLevel gap is no longer huge, crafed gear matches the best non lore/savage drops. Hense crafted armor/accessories are very useful at gearing up to start savage Midas raiding content. This meant during the initial patch drop the armor/accessories were in EXTREMELY high demand. SE appears to want to stay with this model where the optimal savage gearing preparation process includes a mix of crafted gear and and weekly token gear.

3. Is there more reliance on specializations?
Specializations now lock the current relevant crafting content. Then each patch SE will take all of those recipes and unlock them for everyone, but in return lock all the new recipies to specializations. This makes specializations critical to current crafting work and a must have.

4. Will it take me several years to gear up as before?
Because the material gains from the red script system were increased by a factor of three the time has changed from several months to several weeks. With this said there are some gearing "hacks" using weird materia melds, high Crafting/control food, etc to reach the three star requirements without having all perfect shiny blue BIS crafting gear.

5. What do we have in store for 3.3? Anything to look forward to?Guesses?
3.3 will be bringing new crafting and gathering armor which is shared. We don't know if accessories are coming or not. The new crafting/gathering armor is probably oriented toward being "catchup" to try and even the playing field, so I'm not anticipating the stats to be much better (if at all) than the current blue BIS crafting gear. We do know some kind of good is going to require the script system again, but I'm not sure what. We'll also get some new glamours