Quote Originally Posted by Maeka View Post

UPDATE: Got a couple ideas from that guide, but they mention having far higher CP than I do... though I did manage to HQ that bow and can HQ Lv50 stuff comfortably, and Lv51 stuff sometimes if I have HQ materials. Still seems far harder than it should be, though. Needing food, lots of melds, and junk like that just to do stuff like the basic crafting quests...
How are you crafting? You shouldn't be needing to meld unless you have too little CP. If you can get around 380-390 CP with food, you'll be fine.

The basic idea is that you want to complete your progress with as few steps as possible while not overspending on CP. Quickly, filling up the progress bar until only one final CS2 is required is an effective strategy.

Then the rest of the remaining durability is used to build IQ stacks up to a maximum of 11 before you finish by using great strides and byregots blessing to fill the quality bar to as high as possible. Use tricks of the trade when good procs show up and use excess CP for durability restores and/or precise touch. If your level is below the recipe level, you'll want to use ingenuity 1 or 2 prior to byregots.

Unless you're way over-leveled and over-geared, you should also be using rng based, but CP free skills like hasty touch and rapid synthesis as your main skills for quality and progress.