Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
At the moment, crafting in general has become significantly easier. Almost all the new craft abilities border or surpass OP status. Unless the new crafted recipes have insane requirements, it seems crafting as a whole will be much easier in Stormblood.
2* crafts should probably give us an idea on the SB direction for crafting. In general, they've been trying to make things simpler and easier for quite some time.

HW added the following to close the IQ gap between crafters (like how changes have been made to battle to close the DPS gap):

1. They added precise touch, allowing anyone to build 11 stacks of IQ with relative ease

2. They increased base CP allowing for much more powerful static rotations, eliminating the requirement for free hand work. In ARR, you either crafted free hand for the harder items or used a heavy reclaim based macro method.

3. For end game crafts, they reduced the good proc rate, making everything more predictable. This combined with the higher base CP and maker's mark (for a ton of bait steps) reduced the variability in available CP for use per synth.

Now the SB changes:

1. A major quality penalty was added if you're below the recipe level, but ingenuity 2 will negate it and give you a huge quality boost. Quality requirements were also lowered for each item.

Basically, in HW, the IQ gap was closed but there was still an overall quality gap because different approaches to IQ stack building resulted in differing amounts of quality built up. If you spent all your CP on PT and BT swaps, you typically ended up with less quality than if you moderated your PT use and used CP for additional durability restores as well.

The change to the penalty means that quality is now much more weighted toward your Byregot's finisher. This closes the quality gap because there aren't as many benefits to pushing additional touches on top of your IQ stacks. The best approach for now is to get as high of an IQ stack as quickly as possible (or rng free if possible) and then top your synth off with a byregot's finisher buffed with ingenuity 2 and innovation. Fail to use ingenuity 2 and you'll be hard pressed to even break 30%.

2. New overpowered skills were added. We'll see if there are downsides to using them when higher tier crafts release.