[question] First time DoH looking for advice

[SirBrighton]

Well, personally, I didn't find Waste Not II to be that useful until late-game Heavensward (level 60 end game). WN II is not very flexible to be used together with Tricks of the Trade. You can only afford to spend 1 step during WN II on a non-durab consuming action, which in most cases, we need it for a single Steady Hand II. Thus, you cannot take any Tricks on the remaining 7 steps of WN II, or it'll equal to losing 10 durab for nothing. This inflexibility is biggest weakness of WN II. I only found WN II to be great for macros, since you are not going too be taking any Tricks anyway in macros. Of course, one argument is that any "Good" conditions during WN II can still be utilized by Precise Touch. But this is assuming you have plenty of CP to spare. Anyway, my point is, even without WN II, it is still OK to just use Master's Mend, Waste Not, or other durab-recovery/conserving actions. After all, when semoac reaches level 65, WN II will be replaced by Manipulation II anyway. I'd rather recommend semoac to level BSM to 50 for Ingen2 or ARM to 50 for Piece by Piece due them being useful even at level 70 (especially piece by piece... currently, pretty much ALL Stormblood 2 star rotations require this skill... There's no specialist skills or new Stormblood skills that can replace it.).

Waste Not II isn't flexible with Tricks of the Trade because it's not meant to be used during Waste Not II. Tricks of the Trade isn't something you should be using at every opportunity, just the ones that aren't detrimental.

Waste Not II is very useful in specific scenarios. It's not as useful in the low levels because of its high CP cost, but it becomes much more useful in the higher levels when you can equip better accessories to have 360+ CP.
Example: Say you're level 60, crafting something that takes 3 Careful Synthesis IIs to complete and you use Steady Hand II and Basic Touch to gain guaranteed stacks of Inner Quiet.
You could get 8 stacks of Inner Quiet using Waste Not II for 352 CP in the same number of steps it would take you to get 7 Stacks of Inner Quiet using Master's Mend for 346 CP.
In this case you'd be getting 1 more stack of Inner Quiet for just 6 more CP. That 1 extra stack of Inner Quiet could be the difference between 88% HQ and 100% HQ (depending on luck), and that will help a lot when making leve turnins.