A few questions about Crafting and Retainers

[Samwytch]

Hi all, I just had a few questions about crafting, and the market ward, etc. I've played FFXI for like 10+ years, but that was sort of easy mode ^^; You look at what you have, you look at the auction house history price, and you put it in the AH, go to your mog house later, and voila, but it just seems so much more restricted here!

I've dabbled in a bit of everything, 11 Botanist, 10 Carpenter, 10 Miner, 10 Fisher, 10 Leathercrafter, 10 Blacksmith, and a few others, so I've learned the basics, like the crafting mini-game and such. Anyway; here are my questions:

1) The Orb color. From what I hear it works like this: White 75% Success Rate, Yellow 50%, Red 25%, and flashing different colors is random between the three, is this right?

2) About Recipes, for whatever reason, I only have the class who's recipes I had levelled last in my Awarded Recipes, I can't see any of my Blacksmith's or anything. I mean it's fine because I could just wiki them, but it should show every recipe I've gotten from levequests and such, no? Not just my Leathercrafting ones?

3) I'm finding it really hard to price things, as I farm all ore, wood, shards, everything for myself, I cant really judge fairly what I should sell things for. I just made a few Maple Fishing Rod's and a few Bronze Hatchets, and priced them at 10,000 per. When I went to the Search counter, I saw everything from 10k~50k, so it seems people are just putting whatever they want, there is no solid number?

4) I had read in another post somewhere in these forums that Ul'Dah Marketward is -the- place to sell things? Should I place all my retainers in their respected wards there and not in the other towns? I thought I was being smart selling fishing gear in Limsa where the guild was, but perhaps not ^^;

5) Using 'Touch Up'? I don't really see what it's doing, it lowers my durability and makes the synthesis unstable after 3-4 uses of it, but nothing good ever comes of it, should I be doing something different?

Sorry it's such a massive wall of text, but I havent had any help, and mostly everyone on Fabul keeps to themselves lol ^^;

[Estellios]

I have my AA in Craftology.

1) From Highest to lowest success rate, it goes White > Yellow > Red > Flashing. However the lower the success rate is, the greater the payoff if you do succeed. You will make more progress, get more quality, and lose less durability. It's recommended to only synth on White or Yellow if you're working on a recipe for XP grinding since those tend to be higher level than you.

2) The Awarded Recipes tab is not very useful as it is in-game currently. It might be a while off until the game is moved to the new servers, but at that point they're planning to implement a fully-featured recipe book. Until then I have been using Mooglebox.com for recipes.

3) Most people selling low-level items for that much are trying to take advantage of the recipe revamps and the fact that players playing since launch tend to have a lot of money to spend. I doubt they ever actually sell. If you are selling something, you can price it how you want. I tend to start at a base price of Level x 1000 gil. If the materials were easy/free to get I lower the price a little bit after that, and vice versa if they were tough to get. You might want to look around at the adventurer's guilds, any shops related to that class, and the class guild shops to see if they sell the item you're making. You will want to sell items for less than the NPCs.

4) Yes, currently you will want to sell things in the Ul'dah markets because it's where most of the population hangs out.

5) Touch Up gives you a "reroll" at the end of a synth to try and make the gear +1, +2, or +3. If you get your quality high enough, you might get lucky Touching Up a few times and raise the item to a +1. REALLY high quality might net you a +2 or +3. As you touch up it will start to cost more and more durability, especially when you start seeing sparks, so it's generally a good time to just give up on it.

[tymora]

1) No one actually knows the exact % of success on the orb colors. The number also varies with recipe level as well as your craftmanship values.

[REDace0]

5) Another tip for Touch Up, when it is not sparking, I don't recall seeing it consume more than 10 durability. After it starts sparking, I haven't seen it use more than 25. I don't have enough experience with it sparking really badly to know how much durability a Touch Up there could consume.

EDIT: Apparently there are exceptions, see Vydarr's post below.

[Samwytch]

Okay, thank you guys, really informative. Two more questions crossed my mind about leves:

1) When do they reset? and is there a limit on how many I can store up? Sometimes I'll have 4 after waiting 2-3h, but sometimes I'll log on and have 15+ leves.

2) I have yet to be in an actual party, and I hear that the entire party can do the same levequest as the leader? How do party members do this? and does it use up a Leve allowance for them to do it?

[VydarrTyr]

1) When do they reset? and is there a limit on how many I can store up? Sometimes I'll have 4 after waiting 2-3h, but sometimes I'll log on and have 15+ leves.

You get 4 leves every 12 hours, real world time. If you want to know when you'll get more leves, type /clock into your chat bar. It will let you know when the leves will reset (and also when you'll get more anima, when the next behest starts, and what time it is in the real world).

You can store up to 99 leve allowances.

2) I have yet to be in an actual party, and I hear that the entire party can do the same levequest as the leader? How do party members do this? and does it use up a Leve allowance for them to do it?

If you're in a party with someone else who starts a leve, you'll automatically be on the same leve as your party member. If you join the party in the middle of a leve, you have to open the aetheryte in your Main Menu, and then you'll be given the option to join the leve of your party leader.

Performing a party member's leve doesn't use up any of your leve allowances. However, you get less of an XP bonus and less of a gil reward at the end of the leve. But the advantage to performing leves in a party is that you can turn up the number of stars you're running the leve on, and complete it faster, which means you'll get a better XP bonus at the end.

[VydarrTyr]

5) Another tip for Touch Up, when it is not sparking, I don't recall seeing it consume more than 10 durability. After it starts sparking, I haven't seen it use more than 25. I don't have enough experience with it sparking really badly to know how much durability a Touch Up there could consume.

Just wanted to mention that -- although I would have sworn that what Robert said was correct (he's always correct) -- I just tried two touch ups, neither was sparking, and the first one consumed 11 durability, and the 2nd one consumed 14 durability. And then my object blew up.

I am the worst crafter in the world.

[REDace0]

Just wanted to mention that -- although I would have sworn that what Robert said was correct (he's always correct) -- I just tried two touch ups, neither was sparking, and the first one consumed 11 durability, and the 2nd one consumed 14 durability. And then my object blew up.

I am the worst crafter in the world.

Yikes! Guess I'll have to stick with never touching up with durability below 15, 25 if sparking.