Redo the Crafting system.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Some people prefer the "place items into box and press combine" method. I prefer FF14's crafting, as it is more complex than that and a lot more, in my opinion, fun. Those who are not interested in the crafting minigame could very well find the older, probably-predating-Everquest style of crafting preferable.

[ChloeGrace]

I like the depth of the crafting system. Specialization skills were a total failure, though. Here's hoping 4.0 re-works that area.
The only downside that I can think of is needing to be omni in order to craft anything worthwhile at cap. But then, people who craft seriously have no problem leveling up all 8.

[javid]

Some people prefer the "place items into box and press combine" method. I prefer FF14's crafting, as it is more complex than that and a lot more, in my opinion, fun. Those who are not interested in the crafting minigame could very well find the older, probably-predating-Everquest style of crafting preferable.

yea most crafters here prefer the hands on system- mini game offered here in FFXIV. While others just want to gather the mats, enter them in a box and pray. NOthing WRONG with either; and actually this game offers both (in most cases).

[Caimie_Tsukino]

The only downside that I can think of is needing to be omni in order to craft anything worthwhile at cap. But then, people who craft seriously have no problem leveling up all 8.

Think about it this way, the only downside you mentioned is actually a good side of it too! To be frank, you DO NOT need all those lvl 50 cross class skills to complete your level 50 class quests, right? So it's like an adventure to slowly push everything to 50, collecting all those lvl 50 cross class skills to make yourself more powerful. And then at the end, you take on the star recipes with all these super strengths you collected, and feel extremely accomplished when you succeed. Isn't this just great as a minigame?

[TarynH]

They're poking fun at the OP's statement of XIV's crafting being worse than XI's, since they described crafting in XI.

This. FFXI's system had no ingenuity behind it whatsoever. It was literally putting stuff in a personal mail/trade box, and hitting "OK" to craft. Then you'd sit and wait for the synthesis to either break, finish normally, or high quality the item. They didn't even have a recipe list in-game, unless you talked to an npc. (Maybe they added a personal list since I quit?) But there were websites devoted to having lists of FFXI crafting recipes. It was like "quick synthesis" only one synth at a time, and you had to put the ingredients in every single time.

[Dzian]

Think about it this way, the only downside you mentioned is actually a good side of it too! To be frank, you DO NOT need all those lvl 50 cross class skills to complete your level 50 class quests, right? So it's like an adventure to slowly push everything to 50, collecting all those lvl 50 cross class skills to make yourself more powerful. And then at the end, you take on the star recipes with all these super strengths you collected, and feel extremely accomplished when you succeed. Isn't this just great as a minigame?

It is actually a downside. Way back in beta yoshi had said you wouldn't need all 8 to make things and stay competitive in the market. Yet if love to see a 60 weaver hq itonworks with no cross class skills at all

[Silverbane]

Way back in beta yoshi had said you wouldn't need all 8 to make things and stay competitive in the market. Yet if love to see a 60 weaver hq itonworks with no cross class skills at all

"Not need all 8" isn't the same as "not need any other."

I cross-class skills from GSM (54), ALC (50), LTR (50), CRP (50), ARM (50), WVR (50) and CUL (37).
With those cross-craft skills, I can craft anything I want, even 4*, with relative ease and Rath's Rotation.
That's only seven classes, and one only to 37.

[magnanimousCynic]

snip

But it still shows the issue that if you want to do end-game crafting you need a majority of crafting classes at 50 or higher. If you want to make end-game CUL food then guess what; you DO need all 8 classes at 50 or higher!


I doubt that DoH/DoL will get something like Cross-Role, due to all Crafters using near-identical toolkits unlike DoW/DoM, but something HAS to be done. One example being WVR's 50 skill, Careful Synthesis II, increasing progress by 120% for 0 CP. CS2 is so powerful it replaces Basic Synthesis for nearly all situations.


On the opposite spectrum of powerful skills, all crafters have the skill Observation which does... literally nothing, moving the craft forward one step for 14 CP. The only reason this skill has a CP cost is to prevent the players from having infinite CP by maintaining CZ and fishing for procs for TotT. I'm sure people wouldn't mind this skill being replaced by something more useful or outright removed.


One last example, sticking out like a sore thumb, is the Specialist System. Originally planned as an alternative to leveling all crafters for Cross-Class, the skills were considered so reliant on RNG the system basically ended up becoming a stat-stick and temporary specialist-lock for new recipes. Specialism could've had potential, but the RNG required for a good pay-off was simply too high, along with Specialist skills increasing the time a craft took.

Crafting may not need a massive overhaul, but there are definitely issues that should be looked at.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

It is actually a downside. Way back in beta yoshi had said you wouldn't need all 8 to make things and stay competitive in the market. Yet if love to see a 60 weaver hq itonworks with no cross class skills at all

2 things:
(1) "stay competitive in the market" has nothing to do with the fun I was mentioning. You don't need to stay competitive in market to enjoy the cute little adventure minigame
(2) You don't need to make 4 star ironworks to "stay competitive in the market". Heck, I earned my few millions lately selling Ramuh weapons and Hive weapons. In fact, Ironworks do not always make you the best gil. There was a time when Ironworks market was saturated, and many other items were much better in earning gil... assuming earning gil is what you defined as "competitive".

Anyway, sure, you can call "leveling all 8 classes" a downside, because it is time-consuming and effort-consuming. But I wasn't trying to argue with that. I was just offering a different perspective to see the good side of things too

[MN_14]

But it still shows the issue that if you want to do end-game crafting you need a majority of crafting classes at 50 or higher.

The most important classes would be CRP, ARM, ALC, and GSM. LTW and WVR aren’t essential and really ALC is only essential if you’re crafting the latest crafts (final products) from all NQ or have too few CP melds. For a cross class approach, HW has cut down the required leveled classes to as few as 3.

The specialist skills are interesting but they’re underpowered at 60 (totally overpowered when crafting lower level crafts such as 50-54 though) and you’ll still want several level 15 cross class skills plus SH2. Crafts have been balanced so that you can indeed craft using a single class at 50+ but it’s considerably harder and more expensive. 4* crafts can be crafted fairly reliably if you start with 4000 quality (with my limited experience anyways; I’m sure there are better approaches than the one that I’ve tried). Increase the power of Byregot’s miracle to match blessing and it’s far more viable.

The problem right now is that it takes me three delineations per 4* synth and you have to HQ a ton of intermediate mats to get that starting 4000 quality for a relatively safe synth. So I consider the heavy use of delineations to be the main factor that kills the system.

Once geared with ironworks, all previous tiers are trivialized. 1* and 2* can be done single class from all NQ (with level 15 cross class, SH2) without needing a delineation. 3* can also be done from all NQ but I ended up using 2-3 delineations/synth.

If they take care of the delineation issue and increase the power of some abilities, they would have a workable system.