No Offhand / Right Side

[Elamys]

Its because SE is trying to figure out how to deal with the crafting problem. The percentage of people doing current crafting recipes is tiny. Especially on NA servers. So they are being very conservative about gear replacements while they assess how best to adjust recipes and design to make things more accessible/fun.

I don't know how much more "accessible" they can make crafting. The experience gain has been buffed numerous times, with old gear being made easier to obtain, while current endgame recipes can be macro'd at a 100% zero RNG completion once you meet the stats required. You don't even need to level multiple classes anymore unless you want to be self-sufficient because of the new "class neutral" versions of some of the more powerful crafting abilities, while specialist abilities like Specialty: Reflect are incredibly strong. Short of something ridiculous like making overmelds have a much higher chance of attaching or making most of the materials buyable from vendors, I think we may just have to admit at this point that the culture on NA servers doesn't enjoy crafting (to my understanding, crafting is much more popular in JP servers).

Someone with a decent amount of leves stocked up and some gil can just buy a levekit and level to max that way then just copy someone's macro. They may not be the most efficient crafters in the world since they won't have an understanding of anything but it gets the job done, and even that is too much for people, apparently.

[Zojha]

I don't know how much more "accessible" they can make crafting.

Depends on how crazy you wanna get.

If you don't want to change anything about the system as such, one REALLY helpful thing would be to show recipes that contain other crafted items in a tree diagram where hovering over the items gives you their name and a brief list of locations where you can get that item (Like, "Synthesized by Weaver" or "Tomestone Exchange, Mor Dhona" or "Wild Hog, South Shroud").

Right now, that process is pretty cumbersome, as you rely on google for it and if you don't make a list for it by hand, you might forget the name of an item and need to tab back in, then back out. Putting all of that info in one place and ingame would help a lot already.

If you wanna get a bit more crazy, but not change the system as such, leveling a DoH manually (i.e. not via levekits) currently requires you to either level further DoH and DoL in tandem, sacrifice your wallet to the MB, or rely on Ixal/Moogle dailies + custom deliveries to slowly grind up. The latter are all time gated, daily/weekly respectively. Having something that isn't time-gated but also doesn't require materials from elsewhere would also help. This is the way I personally level my crafters, as I can't be bothered with DoL.

In the enjoyability department, it would help a lot if the 8 crafters would not all play exactly identically. That makes leveling/using/playing multiple crafters extremely repetitive and it reduces the chances for people to like crafters, as they all share the same gameplay and if you don't like that gameplay, crafting as such goes out the window. With a higher diversity in gameplay, there's a higher chance at least one of the crafters will appeal. The fact that you mention just copying someone's macro to not even bother with playing the content themselves is kind of an alarming thing in its own right. It's like saying:"Well you can just bot.", if botting were allowed. Ouch. That's not a great sales pitch, to say the least.

And honestly, I could imagine a slew of other things they could do, all depending on how far you're willing to go.

[TaleraRistain]

Its because SE is trying to figure out how to deal with the crafting problem. The percentage of people doing current crafting recipes is tiny. Especially on NA servers. So they are being very conservative about gear replacements while they assess how best to adjust recipes and design to make things more accessible/fun.

I think part of the problem is they don't actually increase the difficulty or make it something engaging. They just keep driving up the stats required, putting it further and further in the reach of only those with large pocketbooks who can eat the expense of losing on overmelding over and over until they get it. Which they make worse by their intentional scarcity of the materia required.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I think part of the problem is they don't actually increase the difficulty or make it something engaging. They just keep driving up the stats required, putting it further and further in the reach of only those with large pocketbooks who can eat the expense of losing on overmelding over and over until they get it. Which they make worse by their intentional scarcity of the materia required.

Actually ... planning ahead comes into its own here. How much time has there been since the end of 4.0? It was not hard to level crafters to 70 in SB. And once that’s done (a likely scenario if someone is into crafting, an unlikely one if someone isn’t) the time spent since then could easily have been spent using Retainers to get materials to craft some refined material en masse. Why? Because Spiritbinding for your own materia IS a thing.

Currently, you can get T1-3 crafting/gathering materia in almost any quantity desired from the Ixali. T4 and 5 materia can be bought with Red Scrip. T6 only has one repeatable source : spiritbinding.

At a casual level, using retainers (or gathering your own materials) to SB one set of crafting gear a week would net you a significant chunk of T6 materia by now. I’m just as guilty as most of not doing this, but this sort of planning ahead is exactly the response called for by the “scarcity of the materia required” to overmeld.

[TaleraRistain]

T6 has WT and some random drops on cracked crystals in Canals as well. But compare this to combat materia. It's coming out of the walls. You do not have to spiritbond to get your combat materia. But tier after tier they continue this pattern of creating artificial scarcity with non-combat materia.

[Elamys]

T6 has WT and some random drops on cracked crystals in Canals as well. But compare this to combat materia. It's coming out of the walls. You do not have to spiritbond to get your combat materia. But tier after tier they continue this pattern of creating artificial scarcity with non-combat materia.

combat gear is replaced much more frequently and you will generally have multiple combat sets at max level as the majority of people play more than one job (particularly those who raid). they also have a much wider array of stats to pick from, so while you get a lot of combat materia, how much of it is actually the materia you want? Crafting gear is very easy to obtain. Melding up is, essentially, crafting's gearing process.

[TaleraRistain]

I would just like to see more from them with crafting than driving required stats higher and higher. EQII had a great system while you crafted where you had to react to events that were happening. It's like the difference between playing a dps role or playing a healer role. A dps has a very set rotation with little room for adjustment. A healer role reacts to what is going on in the fight. Right now our crafting rotations resemble a static dps role more than a reactionary healer role. They were kind of nudging at this idea with specialist skills, but they made things way too RNG based. These constant stat pushes rather than trying to make crafting engaging just make what we enjoy feel like an afterthought to the development team.

[Faeon]

I would just like to see more from them with crafting than driving required stats higher and higher. EQII had a great system while you crafted where you had to react to events that were happening. It's like the difference between playing a dps role or playing a healer role. A dps has a very set rotation with little room for adjustment. A healer role reacts to what is going on in the fight. Right now our crafting rotations resemble a static dps role more than a reactionary healer role. They were kind of nudging at this idea with specialist skills, but they made things way too RNG based. These constant stat pushes rather than trying to make crafting engaging just make what we enjoy feel like an afterthought to the development team.

Well engaging is not enough,when the primary goal of crafting is just to make GIL, crafted battle gear only good for the first couple of weeks. Since there is no real incentive outside of make Gil however large or small.I personally think crafting is fine as it is. If you want something more engaging and challenging you need to give it a course, not just make it this and that to stop it being boring etc.