The Joy of Crafting

[Misteyes]

And you never mentioned what gear you are using.

Initial risk can start out a lot higher than normal. Sucks to have those synths but you'll get used to it - Not like the materials are expensive anyway.

It doesn't matter what gear I'm using (my gear is crap, but I guess it's "good enough" because I still succeed about 7/8 of the time). I used the same gear between the two events. I (arguably) played worse the second time but got better results for it. That's where the problem is. The difference between dramatic success and crushing failure was purely randomness. If my gear wasn't good enough to complete the synthesis, it shouldn't have succeeded the second time either.

That never happens in combat. If a monster is high enough level that a fight with it will end in crushing failure no matter how hard I try, it's going to kill me 100% of the time. If a monster is low enough level that I can kill it, then any deaths to it are by my own mistakes. And any monster that I can kill just by spamming one button has no chance of killing me if I bother to play.

That is what I want to see in Synthesis - a game where failures are caused by mistakes, and success is caused by good play. Not a game where good play increases chance of success a bit, but you can just spam enter and succeed half the time anyway.

The current minigame is entirely to simple to support that. If I hand my character over to my little brother (who's never played the game) for combat, I'm going to come back dead party no matter how much instructions I give him. If I hand my character over to my little brother for Synthesis and took half a minute to explain orb colors, Wait, Standard Synthesis, Preserve, and Instability... he'd probably do almost as well as I do, because the game simply isn't complex enough to take more explanation.

Yes, gear matters, and has plenty of subtleties to it, but "wearing the right gear" isn't gameplay. Acquiring it might be, but you don't re-acquire your gear for every synthesis.