Observe now 7 CP??!!

[_Kakera_]

If I had the choice in generating endless CP over the next 200 turns and take forever to produce one HQ item, or finish the craft earlier by having a better management of my starting CP than taking the easy way out, I'd probably do the latter anyway.

[Lebenoshl]

Yeah this needs to be emergency nerfed.

Assuming a 12.5% Tirck of the Trade Chance (as Quality Assurance increase the Chance of material condition being good)
And assuming Initial Perperations Does nothing


A rotation loses about 16 CP, but allows you to slip in 3 Hasty Touches without any durability loss.

And since Initial Preparation Should reduce the CP cost of some of the skills, its likely to be CP positive, even if the Trick of the Trade Chance is less than 12.5%

[StouterTaru]

Yeah this needs to be emergency nerfed.

Your plan reminds me of a Martingale system.

To paraphrase the wiki page, It is only with unbounded CP, steps, and time that it could be argued that the martingale becomes a winning strategy.

[Danieros]

I think it's meant to push specialists and the new combo skills. Maybe specialists can do some extremely long crafts with this, but in HW it didn't feel like you needed specialist skills to be able to HQ even the hardest recipes.

[magnanimousCynic]

near-Infinite CP may sound nice but I'd rather not spend over a minute doing nothing but spamming Observe while praying to RNG just to squeeze a few CP out.

[Myon88]

Given that a single observe is still a net gain of CP when used inside CZ (two observes break even), it seems like it could be handy in situations where you have an awkward number of CZ steps left, and need to stall for time before proceeding to the next phase.

The most common scenario would be ending a MaMa phase with, say, 2 CZ steps left. If it was just 1, you would just stall with Inner Quiet and then reapply CZ cleanly before doing SH2 or WN2 or whatever else you plan to do in the next phase. If you were at 2 CZ steps it could be awkward as you'd have to choose between having the next CZ cast eat into a step of another valuable buff, or delay it to the next clean break in the rotation which could be quite far down the line (and potentially cost you a CZ use entirely over the course of the craft). Perhaps now you'll be able to utilize observe as an extra stall utility to smooth out weird CZ transitions like this.

[magnanimousCynic]

snip

While your scenario does make Observe have a good use, it's likely that Maker's Mark rotations will unfortunately be dead for 4.0 recipes and beyond. Due to the large amount of Progress needed, using MaMa instead of Muscle Memory makes crafting items take much longer than it should.

They could've avoided this issue by adding a Flawless Synthesis II that basically acts as 5 stacks at once with lower %chance, but unfortunately SE didn't give MaMa a higher level alternative.

If you want to make a 1-star 70 durability item, you would have 32 stacks of Maker's Mark! You'd need at least 3 macros JUST for Maker's Mark, and this is only 1-star! I think Muscle Memory will be the new 1st step for starred recipes unless Initial Preparations' reduced CP consumption is OP along with the Specialist actions.

EDIT #1: Just to add something unrelated; the Lakshmi Miniature is a 1-star level 70 GSM furnishing that requires 5668 Progress. If you wanted to use MaMa for that you'd have 57 stacks of Flawless Synthesis awaiting you. Of course you wouldn't use MaMa for furnitures but the scenario just felt funny enough to share.

[Myon88]

I agree that MaMa will definitely get more and more untenable as recipe difficulty increases, I just used it as an example since 3.x is still fresh in people's heads. But at the end of the day though, it's really comfort zone that's responsible for these 'off-by-one' issues. MaMa aside, you might have CZ at 7-8 steps left at the same time as your rotation enters a SH + 5 actions phase, which will put you in a similar dilemma at the transition point after that, and so on, I think it's just a nice QoL buff in general that gives us more room to fix desyncs between CZ steps and convenient pauses in rotations.

[Lebenoshl]

Okay. I can confirm that Observe does allow for infinite steps. However the CP / Durability regain is very very very very slow.

It's like 50+ steps to get Free 0 CP 0 Durability 3 Hasty Touches (with no SHII). Probably 300+ steps to get to a full quality bar with 0 CP / 0 Durability loss (I got bored before finishing). I'm not desperate enough to do that.