How Do You Feel About Specialists?

[Kaurhz]

I like the idea of what specialists, give, I just think it can be so much more. The abilities are good, some of them could do with a slight buff for monocrafters. Although I know the 'meta' has never really supported this idea. For starters, I have mentioned before, but Initial Prep should, in reason be a stacking buff, and it should have abilities added to what it grants. An Ingenuity equivalent I would be in favour for, for example. With it giving a chance of reducing CP, I do think that it should still be a thing, however, the amount of stacks of Initial Prep you currently have should determine the likelihood, or how much CP is reduced on a given action. Of course not something completely overpowered. But I would like this buff to give the vast majority, if not nearly the entirety of the 'crafting community' to use specialist actions, especially over Maker's Mark.

A little bit of salt, I'm sorry, but I really do think that Manipulation II and Prudent Touch shouldn't exist, or at the very least be a specialist only action and have CP cost increased drastically, considering what it gives. Yes I made that comment - Crafting should have RNG element to it, especially to craft HQ, otherwise the idea of an item being HQ is meaningless and everything by default should be HQ, or have the stats of a HQ piece. Starred pieces should be of the 'difficulty' of reinforced spruce plywood to HQ.

I know this last suggestion has some significant logistic problems likely to solve, but being a specialist, rather than granting the ability to just craft a given item entirely, should allow for a second bar allowing for the possibility of a third materia slot opening as a guaranteed slot. Perhaps granted by something equivalent to a delineation which requires yellow scrips to get, and has some form of cap on it. This has been suggested elsewhere I do believe, or something similar to it, albeit with much less a cap on it.

[-BlueGreen-]

Crafting should have RNG element to it, especially to craft HQ, otherwise the idea of an item being HQ is meaningless and everything by default should be HQ, or have the stats of a HQ piece.

Sadly that's already the case. HQ isn't that 'special' currently. It's basically on par with dungeon/trial/raid/tome gear of the same ilvl. NQ is below that to the point where only retainers are likely to really benefit from it, and only because for some reason DoW/DoM retainers (unlike DoL) use ilvl instead of primary stat to determine what they can/can't do. If HQ were as hard as you're suggesting to get, that'd put it in a position to not be worth it compared to alternatives in most cases. It'd only survive if NQ was what HQ is right now and HQ was an actual bonus at the same ilvl as anything else. Of course, the problem with that is that then everyone would only want the HQ crafted gear and there'd be a riot about 'requiring' crafting gear because it's BiS or that sort of thing that has caused problems before (it's why a tanks can't cram 5 strength materia into accessories anymore).

So respectfully, I must disagree. With the way the crafting skills are balanced, you're given options, some of which involve RNG currently:
1. You can craft slow and steady, using a lot of steps to up your success rate (even more if you don't use a macro). This can essentially wipe out the impact of RNG on a craft, but it comes at the cost of being difficult on someone (in terms of time/energy) wanting to mass produce items (presumably to sell on the MB). This approach is more for people looking to keep costs minimal and probably for personal crafts.
2. You can macro a craft. Many macros have a few weak spots that a particular 80% or two chance failing at the wrong times can prevent HQ or similarly, having a very poorly timed poor condition can do the same. RNG is present, but often acceptable for mass production.
3. You can use an RNG-heavy setup to reduce the number of steps to produce more items in a shorter time. Useful if the NQ product has some value (food and potions can often be this way)
4. You can become a specialist to basically do #2 and #3 with higher success rates to the point where #1 might even be a waste of time for a specialist.

Basically, #1 comes down to a basic skill check (like a DPS check... do you know your rotation?) while #2 and #3 are more of a higher risk, higher reward sort of thing with RNG.

[Alisi]

Crafting should have RNG element to it, especially to craft HQ, otherwise the idea of an item being HQ is meaningless and everything by default should be HQ, or have the stats of a HQ piece.

No. No no no. No NO NO! Forgive her, Father. She knows not what she's talking about. Please stop this insanity. We've had insanely hard crafting and gathering processes, shrouded behind gates and all that BS. Did you craft HQ gear in HW? Not the easy Ironworks shit, but the actual class pieces? Did you do the favor farming? Did you use a weeks worth of red scrips to get all the material, then spend 5 or 10 hours gathering all that, and another hour or two making all HQ stuff to make that one HQ piece a week that you could make? Did you get it up to 99% HQ chance and get a NQ? I have. Please don't advocate going back to that system. It wasn't fun. There wasn't any real joy getting an HQ item -- it was just relief in knowing you didn't waste a full weeks worth of work on something that became an NQ. Why do you think Ironworks was SO easy to craft and they took out favor farming entirely by the end? It sucked.

Getting an HQ item shouldn't be RNG based. You can have the best crafter in the game gather everything and spend all his knowledge to get HQ stuffs, doing everything right, and end up with all NQ items while joe shmoe can just walk up with a 1% chance and craft a full HQ set. That's how RNG works. It's not fun or fair. If you want a game that relies on RNG, go play WoW. Go ask any WoW player how much fun their RNG system is. They based almost everything around RNG in the current expac. Their legendaries are RNG drops. It's not based on skill. It's based on luck and it freakin' sucks. Getting an HQ item should be based on ability. I actually like the new 2 star recipes. Yes, the FS are hellishly long, but it forces you to actually craft it. You can't just macro your way. You could, but you're depending more on RNG and less on skill. I think that's the right approach and balance. You want something easy? Then you risk a NQ. You want an HQ for certain? You actually have to craft yourself.

[Kaurhz]

Snip.

On the note regarding Heavensward class items I wouldn't class those difficult, but more so just outright obnoxious. Yeah I've experienced the favour farming at a glimpse. It was fairly grim and yeah I would support that having RNG on top of a favour-based system would be hell on earth. The favour based system on top of something entirely RNG is nothing short of hell. I think that would be mutually agreed by anyone except people that love grinding. The possibility of getting maximum quality should be a possibility, and in fact, favourable in terms of probability. But, it shouldn't be guaranteed.

My primary point being is that there's very very little satisfaction out of making anything currently in the game. I've actually read the extracted piece and found it came off a bit harsh, but then again I'm not in support of crafting something that has 100% success rate for quality, particularly when the materials, for the most part aren't exactly difficult to get. Manipulation II, and Prudent Touch are far far too CP efficient for their own good. Least of all Manipulation II should cost more CP, same with Prudent (Or, Prudent shouldn't be a guaranteed hit). Or, Inner Quiet should extend to around 14-15 stacks. But again, logistic issues. At this point Hasty Touch isn't even viable.

EDIT: Referencing Reinforced Spruce Plywood probably wasn't the best example to give for the point I was trying to make.

I would argue however, that the new gear can in fact be macro'd to guarantee a fixed quality rating, much like you would with a manual craft. Macroing Maker's Mark certainly isn't feasible on time, but is however doable. IP is also comfortably doable. You need only separate Byregot's Blessing into a separate macro. These crafts shouldn't be doable with a macro, at all.

[MN_14]

There’s nothing really wrong with RNG based crafting. I went through all of the HW 2* crafted pieces and the difficulty of the crafts themselves was not high, although they were a bit harder than the 3* and 4* recipes that came after.

At min requirements and low cp, you could simply start with ~1100 quality and then HQ 95%+ of the materials easily. Final products weren’t an issue of course since you could use a few HQ mats for added insurance. I didn’t NQ any of my gear/tool pieces and HQed literally 96% of my materials from my first 50 synths. Once I upgraded to 471 CP, I could comfortably craft them from all NQ.

I’m going to be honest here. It seems to me that most of the complaints about RNG in crafting stem from technique issues more than anything. In HW, you couldn’t use a mere 11 HT static rotation and not expect RNG to mess you up a third of the time. 11 touches simply wasn’t enough to reliably build 11 stacks of IQ (and land a one or two more touches on top of that). Even worse is that your synth was highly susceptible to poor RNG because those 2 or 3 early misses could kill your craft right out of the gate. Such a rotation was definitely not reliable enough for final gear pieces/weapons starting from all NQ mats and that would have been a technique issue, not a RNG issue.

I found that to craft endgame recipes effectively in HW, I had to use a variable number of touches with 85% or more of my synths using 14 touches. If I’d managed to build up IQ stacks and quality quickly enough, I’d intentionally shorten my synth by using CP for RNG free abilities instead of durability restores as I’d have locked in that 100% via a RNG free finish. I also strategically timed my use of precise touch as I obviously could not expect the procs to always magically pop up at the ideal time. So that was a judgement call that I had to make. This made crafting anything from all NQ a total breeze.

A decent middle ground, imo, is to include a batch of crafts that are at the difficulty of the SB 2* i320 DOH/DOL pieces at minimum craftmanship/control requirements and from all NQ. If you understand the finer crafting mechanics, you’d be able to easily hit 90-100% for the vast majority of your synths. These crafts aren’t even terribly sensitive to misses so RNG can’t be blamed. If you fail to understand how to craft properly however, you’d get <20%.

For the current i320s, if you over-gear or start with a bunch of HQ mats, you’re more or less getting your HQs easily by skipping mechanics. The experience is completely different.

[Alisi]

My primary point being is that there's very very little satisfaction out of making anything currently in the game. I've actually read the extracted piece and found it came off a bit harsh, but then again I'm not in support of crafting something that has 100% success rate for quality, particularly when the materials, for the most part aren't exactly difficult to get. Manipulation II, and Prudent Touch are far far too CP efficient for their own good. Least of all Manipulation II should cost more CP, same with Prudent (Or, Prudent shouldn't be a guaranteed hit). Or, Inner Quiet should extend to around 14-15 stacks. But again, logistic issues. At this point Hasty Touch isn't even viable.

The way the quality step works is to get it to 11 IQ stacks asap and keep going. The best way of doing this is capitalizing on goods and excellents. You get both of these frequently. Once you get to a certain level, HT and HT2 are actually viable. I personally use Prudent touch for the first 5 quality steps (minus any goods or excellents) and after that, things are much freer. The rotations on these recipes aren't cut in stone. For example: if RNG is terrible and you can't recover most of your CP doing the progress phase, you can use Man 2 at the start with Prudents for the first half and use HT or HT2 during the second half. You get normal amount of goods or excellents? You can start with full dura, one step from completion, and use Prudents for most of the quality phase. You get a ton of goods/excellents? You can start with all your CP and several stacks of IQ and shorten the load. They're flexible, if you're actually doing them by hand.

I would argue however, that the new gear can in fact be macro'd to guarantee a fixed quality rating, much like you would with a manual craft. Macroing Maker's Mark certainly isn't feasible on time, but is however doable. IP is also comfortably doable. You need only separate Byregot's Blessing into a separate macro. These crafts shouldn't be doable with a macro, at all.

They are doable but they aren't 100%, and that's the point. You risk RNG if you want to be lazy. You either do it by hand and basically guarantee 100% HQ plus a much shorter time in crafting or you risk a NQ and take twice the time with macros. These rely on a system that can't be macro'ed (the proper use of goods and excellents.) I think this is basically the only way you can make something unmacroable. Allowing us to build stacks about 11 or making it easier to build stacks would only serve to make macroing much more easier. Either they make gathering for materials so long and so hard and so expensive that you don't want to risk using a macro (as well as making the NQ utterly useless -- back in HW endgame crafting in the beginning, you actually would gamble on losing all your material via reclaim because NQ was utterly useless) or they use a function that is completely out of your control (ie, the RNG nature of status.)

[whyarenamesalltaken]

specialist actions are confusing, unpredictable (which is just the thing we need when the materials are soooooo expensive for whatever you might want to use them for), and plainly useless considering you can craft HQ top-level items without it. So why bother learning a way to craft items that only can be used in certain classes, instead of a way that can be used for every class and be better at that one?

creating items only specialist by design is just such a lazy way to force people to engage with your poorly designed, failed mechanics. Please get your shit together SE.

The only thing I've ever benefitted from being a specialist is the crystal, for its stats.

[magnanimousCynic]

At least the Souls are vastly easier to obtain now, with two NPCs to do Custom Deliveries with. >.>

[RojGardoth]

As far as I'm concerned nothing is really locked. Because there are ways to make this production work and it's really not all that hard. I've already made all my own new DoL and DoH gear, and all tools except WVR and FSH. I was originally GSM, WVR, and LTW spec but switched GSM to ALC to make fibers and snakefish oil. Many yellow scrips later I made the WVR and LTW gear. Then switched LTW to BSM for all those tools. Then BSM to ARM for the ALC and CUL tools. And ARM back to GSM so I can make WVR tool and be almost back to where I started, spec-wise. But I think I'll keep ALC spec for a bit to sell some Alchemic and Oil if I'm not totally burnt out by then. And at some point switch to CRP for FSH tool then back to LTW (maybe). And I never had to switch my WVR spec. So I'm basically done 3 weeks later and the recipes that all this trouble is for AREN'T. EVEN. OUT. YET. and who knows how much time to spare. So, see?!? There is plenty of time to do this folks! Beside, SE knows it can work this way so doubtful they are changing it.... xD

As far as specialist actions, tho...no thanks

[Zfz]

I feel that specialists have made crafting more of a pain than anything.

Specialists were designed so people no longer feel the need to level every craft.

But the actions themselves are too RNG based, making them inferior to cross-class actions, which again encourage people to level every craft. When faced with the choice of whether to level every craft, the determining question has become "do I want to settle for more unwieldy actions or invest in the time to level everything?"

I have heard the argument that people who put in the effort to level everything should be rewarded, and they are rewarded so with better actions.

But that claim itself shows how the design has violated its goal in the first place. The goal was never to reward leveling every craft! The goal was to make sure people don't feel the need to do so, and rewarding doing so creates the feeling that one needs to do so.

My opinion on specialists:

• There should be no locked recipes. The goal was to let people feel comfortable having only a few crafts they're interested in. Nothing in the original goal of the specialist system was about exclusivity.
• Specialist actions should be equivalent to cross-class actions. The reward for leveling every craft is that you can craft everything.

As it stands, the specialist system feels like a good start that went sour because some bright mind thought it'd be a good idea to "build on it", "make it more elaborate", "make it more exciting"; and in doing so, completely lost track of the original purpose of the system, going off on a wild tangent and creating a monster that no longer has anything to do with the original goal.