New-ish crafter pushing before Stormblood

[Scorp6]

Hey all. Just wanted to drop in and say I started playing again and have been pushing my crafts pretty hard. At the moment I'm 51 CRP, 50 WVR (just spent a night unlocking moogle dailies, 42 CUL, 36 ALC (This is my next 50, I have the items to do leaves to 40), and the rest are level 30. It's very fun to be leveling crafting again and it's nice because I'm actually making the level turn in items but still leveling crazy fast. Any tips that may help me along?

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Hey all. Just wanted to drop in and say I started playing again and have been pushing my crafts pretty hard. At the moment I'm 51 CRP, 50 WVR (just spent a night unlocking moogle dailies, 42 CUL, 36 ALC (This is my next 50, I have the items to do leaves to 40), and the rest are level 30. It's very fun to be leveling crafting again and it's nice because I'm actually making the level turn in items but still leveling crazy fast. Any tips that may help me along?

Popping Company-Issued Engineering Manuals, Provision Missions at GC, Moogle Beast Quest, Ixali Beast Quest and even handing in collectables can all help you level even faster.

And try your best to hand in HQ items for leves. This really helps to get more EXP out of each leves.

[Silverbane]

You'll want to make blue-scrip collectable turn-ins for Rowena as soon as you can, for both the XP and the blue script. You use the blue scrip to pick up the advanced L60 recipes.

Also, use the "Timers" sub-menu in the Duty Menu. Using it, you can check your GC turn ins, and what's collectable at Rowena's, as well as how long you have before the options change.

[Frizze]

Unless this has changed since i finished leveling my crafters, rowenas people dont give you blue scrips until you get to the level 56 recipes. Yes you will probly want those recipe books, but they can wait a little(alternatively, if youve got a good squadron you might be able to start getting some scrips now from the right chemistries and pick up the books as you can afford them).

So my advice for your specific situation would be this.
1) Take advantage of all the bonus exp that you can. Get your FC to turn on the crafting bonus, use engineering manuals, use cheap crafting food for the extra 3%(the gold saucer sells stone soup for 18 gil - no the 15ish cp it gives you wont make much of a difference, but 30 mins of bonus exp for 1/5 of what it costs to teleport from one end of a zone to another is still worth something), log out in designated sanctuaries for the rested exp. Do it all.
2) Do your GC turn ins every day that you can, HQ them as often as you can - especially when theyre the starred extra special items(because doubling something that was already doubled...).
3) Use your allotted three daily moogle quests to keep pushing CRP, WVR, and eventually the rest toward 60. This is still the goal, so dont stop working on it just because theres other catching up to do.
4) Use your remaining beast tribe quest allotments with the Ixali to continue leveling the crafting classes lower then 50. With 9 allowances you should be getting something in the neighborhood of a level a day to boost those lower ones.
5) Try to keep up with your class quests when you can. The rewards might not be all that amazing, but almost all the crafting questlines are well done. Plus, exp is exp.
6) And finally, use your leves for a little boost here and there. This is actually one of the 3 best uses for your leve allowance stack currently in the game, so dont be afraid to take advantage. Just dont go broke doing it.
7) But most importantly, take a break if you need to. Theres no point in powering your way to the top if its going to burn you out so much that you never even want to make a sandwich again.

Best of luck!

[Scorp6]

Thank you for all the info! Sounds like I'm doing almost everything right. I do make sure I have a manual and food on and the FC crafting buff with rested xp. I havent done the ixali much because I'm usually gathering mats to make enough HQ leve turn ins for 5 levels at a time. I can HQ the stuff about 80-90% of the time so it's nice to be doing the crafting and power leveling instead of have someone give me the turn ins. With all the xp buffs I'm getting like 413% extra XP when crafting if I get 100% quality. I am still doing the moogle quests daily though.

I have had a lot of help from FC with mats and my first level 50 gear set. It was a pretty good feeling seeing the WVR level 50 class quest and saying, "oh wow, that stuff is better than my crafting gear. I'll make an extra set for myself, thank you very much!"

Thanks for the advice all. And caimie, I've been reading your guides again (because I recently resubscribed) to re learn the art of crafting.

[HaelseMikiro]

Definitely worth emphasizing what everyone else said about the Ixalis. The quest supplies all the crafting materials you need for them (might need a level 5 gatherer to pick up some quest items) the exp is good and scales with level until 50, and at higher ranks they give you tokens that you can use to trade for any DoH/DoL materia grades 1-4. And later down on the road you might be thankful that you can actually buy oak/walnut/yew lumber from them in bulk instead of gatherin/crafting it yourself

[Scorp6]

Definitely worth emphasizing what everyone else said about the Ixalis. The quest supplies all the crafting materials you need for them (might need a level 5 gatherer to pick up some quest items) the exp is good and scales with level until 50, and at higher ranks they give you tokens that you can use to trade for any DoH/DoL materia grades 1-4. And later down on the road you might be thankful that you can actually buy oak/walnut/yew lumber from them in bulk instead of gatherin/crafting it yourself

I did a lot of their quests and didn't know about the fact you could buy oak walnut and yew lumber from them! Thanks!

[Gemina]

You'll want to get CUL to at least 37 for steady hand II. I also highly recommend getting ALC to 50 for comfort zone. Both of these will ease the pain of HQ synthesis all the way to 50 and beyond. I recommend leveling your gatherers as well to facilitate acquisition of mats.

When I leveled to 50, I did it in increments of 5 levels for each class. I would pop my engineering manuals, turn on the FC bonus, and eat appropriate food for an additional exp boost on top of boost to stats and crafted everything in the logs. This can be tedious and time consuming, especially if doing all 8 crafters, but you find that when done, you won't have to use many leves to finish off the 5 level tier. HQ everything, and put everything on the MB that you will not be personally using yourself. The main thing you take with you from this method, is tons of crafting experience, and by that I mean developing your own rotations and freehand crafting experience. A great benefit of learning how to craft this way is being able to HQ synth using NQ mats. This saves a TON of time, grants the highest amount of exp per synth, and generates the highest profit if crafting to make gil.

Keep your gear up to date. HQ gear offers a pretty significant increase to stats in comparison to NQ so I would highly consider using HQ to make life easier. Melding is also an option, but is more important later on when max stats are needed to craft star items.

Another tip that is time consuming at first but pays off in the long run are ranking up all your beast tribes. Not just Ixal and Moogle. Especially if you don't have your gatherers leveled. The higher the rank, the more mats you can buy from their vendors, and these mats are VERY common, and consumed in great numbers.

You seem to be well on your way. Keep up the hard work, and never shy away from trying something new if a current method isn't working out. Happy crafting!

[Scorp6]

Thanks a lot! Currently CUL is 42, I pushed that hard for SH II. Also just got ALC to 50 last night. Excited for comfort zone! I now have CRP, WVR, ALC at 50 or higher. I think I'm going to go for innovation next and level GSM to 50.

Again, thanks for the tips!

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Thanks a lot! Currently CUL is 42, I pushed that hard for SH II. Also just got ALC to 50 last night. Excited for comfort zone! I now have CRP, WVR, ALC at 50 or higher. I think I'm going to go for innovation next and level GSM to 50.

Again, thanks for the tips!

Yep, Innovation and Ingen2 are you next targets. They are both extremely important lvl 50 cross class skills. Innovation gives 1.5x base control for 3 steps. Ingen2 lowers recipe level for you. It helps only slightly with boosting quality. But most of the time, it's major function is helping with progress, especially if you find yourself lacking a tad bit of progress to complete a certain item, which could save you 10 durab for quality. Notice that if the recipe level is already much lower than your class's level (like 6 levels below) or if the recipe is wayyy higher than your class's level, then the impact of Ingen2 diminishes.