The Joy of Crafting

[UnsayMoon]

White = High Success/Normal Chance of Perfect Synth if Successful

Red = Medium-Low(one word not a range) Success/Moderate Chance of Perfect Synth if Successful

Yellow = Very Low Success/High Chance of Perfect Synth if Successful

Slow Flicker = Random Chance of White/Red/Yellow leaning toward White

Fast Flicker = Random Chance of White/Red/Yellow leaning toward Yellow

Sparking = High Risk of Destabilization

Fixing Destabilization is quite literally pure luck. A Player of remote skill can mitigate deterioration by swapping between Wait, Skills and Standard synth.

Preventing Destabilization is based on Elemental Alignment

Control effects Success rates

Craftsmanship effect progress on physical based items

Mag Craftsmanship effects progress on magic based items

All Moon and Compass theories are as yet unproven and have little evidence.

This can be said about everything you typed. None of this has been documented by SE. It's all player speculation and I would bet that everyone has counter examples for each. I think that players are generally perturbed by the fact that SE never clarifies anything. They'd rather that the player piss through all their resources attempting to decipher SE secret formulas only to discover randomness.

[MANTASTIC]

This can be said about everything you typed. None of this has been documented by SE. It's all player speculation and I would bet that everyone has counter examples for each. I think that players are generally perturbed by the fact that SE never clarifies anything. They'd rather that the player piss through all their resources attempting to decipher SE secret formulas only to discover randomness.

Q. I haven't been having much success crafting items. What am I doing wrong?
A. The colored, glowing graphics provides players with a large hint toward a successful synthesis. When the glow is white, the synthesis is at its most stable, and the chances of success are high. When the glow takes on a color, however, the chances of success are low. Players seeking simple completion of their synthesis rather than high-quality results should attempt to use the Wait command when the indicator is colored to restore the stability of the synthesis before finishing it.

Q. Is there a trick to synthesizing high-quality items?
A. Though synthesis actions carried out while the colored circle graphic is red suffer a reduced rate of success, they often serve to increase the quality of the synthesis. In addition, the successful execution of consecutive actions also serves to increase quality. Ultimately, the higher the quality of the synthesis process, the more likely it is to yield a high-quality result.

source

And that's about as much information as SE has provided on the mechanics of crafting as far as I know. Not to argue that crafting is fine(far from it, see my other posts), but not all the "player beliefs" surrounding the current trainwreck that is crafting are unfounded.

[tymora]

...And you tell me luck is a small factor?

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.

[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.

[tymora]

That never happens in combat.

Maybe you can think of synths as equi-level "Imps" with their random one-shot kills? They can misfire it, they can miss it or you can interrupt it but it hits like a truck when it does...

Would combat be fun if every monster does the same thing every fight? (Well I suppose most mobs actually do until they improve the AI)
E.g 1st attack swing, 2nd attack kick, 3rd attack tail...repeat until dead.

While the variation of initial risk may be too dramatic, I don't think it should be done away completely with because 100% predictability is boring. If they scale the variation according to level difference, it should be good enough.

[tymora]

Craftsmanship also affects quality gained.

[Okiura]

Wait a sec, I thought I remember someone telling me (from highest chance of success to lowest chance of success) that it was White --> Multicolored --> Yellow --> Red - this is not the case? Where does multi/rainbow colored fit in this order?

Fast/Slow Flicker in the information.
This can be hard to tell what speed it's actually pulsing (flickering), it's normalay a good idea not to use an action while in either pulsing state while learning, but rather use "wait" untill you have a solid colour. Failing an action while in the pulsing state has a higher chance of destablizing the elements then the other states other then sparking (overload).

[tymora]

No one even knows what gold, red, or flashing orbs mean.

They already did. Can't remember if it was one of the interviews or "Ask the devs" though.

[MANTASTIC]

They already did. Can't remember if it was one of the interviews or "Ask the devs" though.

I think I remember that, but the answers were vague at best.

"Flashing orb is the least stable," etc.

[Madruk]

Get hand of the gods, problem solved. You'll hardly fail a synth.

In before but that's so much WORK.

P.S. HQ crafting is worthless for now, don't bother with it.