Quote Originally Posted by Vidu View Post
When the patch dropped all I had to do was grabbing the new mastercrafterbooks because I had half a year already to level and gear my crafters. We had about 2 or 3 months to get the ala mhigan gear and melds ready. Its nothing new and nothing that caught anyone by surprise.
Exactly this.

I don't raid anymore, and didn't ever want to lead a static in this game (spent 18 months creating and running an endgame LS in XI - that's more than enough for a lifetime), but if I did I wouldn't accept most of these excuses and just find a replacement. You have six or so months between release dates for Savage raids. If you can't put any sort of effort into acquiring money, materia and/or materials for 5+ months then I would be absolutely justified in doubting whether you'd actually put in your fair share of effort when it came time for progression. And now I've become a semi-elitist jerk that advocates for putting in work but still thinks the NM raid's loot system is 1) pretty bad and 2) rewards subpar gear so Q) isn't worth touching. Go figure!

And again if you're not doing Savage content, the i350/NM raid stuff doesn't really have any value besides glamour anyway.


Specifically with regards to gathering, since that's my role within a static/partnership context:
- HW Folklore books were awful to obtain. SB Folklore books are a joke. Unlike the crafter side, they just add the new items into the already existing books so you buy them once and don't worry about it again until next expansion.
- The most recent Folklore nodes (Nightsteel Ore, etc) don't require you to meld your Ala Mhigan gear with GP or Gathering, just Perception. 700 GP for Sharp Vision II/Field Mastery II + King's Yield II/Blessed Harvest II + Unearth/Leaf Turn = braindead success. You could maybe even just use the augmented Yellow Scrip stuff, I'm not sure; I grabbed the main hand tool and didn't really look at the rest.