Quote Originally Posted by Nezerius View Post
Except it is a mistake. You can't really compare ARR 4-star recipes at lvl 50 post-HW release with HW 4-star recipes post-SB launch.

HW didn't add this penalty to quality gain when a recipe is above a character's level, meaning a lvl 50 was still able to craft a lvl 50 4-star recipe at the difficulty it was before HW.
Sure, just leveling a craft by 1 level to remove this penalty, but that doesn't leave the fact that this change made these recipes harder than intended.
I'm not sure whether it's really a mistake or if they just didn't care that the balance was changed a bit. SB so far doesn't seem to have any semblance of balance. I'd say master crafts at 60 are both simplified and harder depending on how you look at it. What we do know is that the difficulty is harder than level 63 at level 60 because quality requirements are not adjusted to be consistent.

I'd say it's harder to craft from 0-100% now because in HW, your only real shot at a fairly consistent 100% was by pushing more touches just like in ARR, which meant completely optimizing your use of CP. A mere 11 or 12 touches was insufficient. Spending an extra 32 CP would result in you being forced to use fewer touches.

However, for a rotation which used fewer touches in the first place, using ingenuity 2 now seems to give you higher quality than before the penalty (the scaling is different than before; ingenuity 2 increases quality significantly even at level not just if you're under level. by my calculations, gs, inn, ingen2, byregots should have given 7600 quality in HW but now gives 8200+ at level 60). So the result is that it's harder to craft from 0-100% most likely but much easier to get a consistent 85-95% using a really simple rotation.

This is a form of watering down because as I said, SB reduced the quality requirements...