[dev1237] Why take skill out of crafting?

[NoctisUmbra]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l=1#post544099

I'll just drop this here.

Hi, this is Director/Producer Yoshida here again.
Thanks for all the feedback regarding the HQ synthesis revamp! Allow me to provide some more info on the topic (although this might repeat a bit from the recent Topics post…)

The Concept
To put it simply, the main idea behind the revamp is that if Quality exceeds 1,000 when completing synthesis, you’re guaranteed to create an HQ item.

Basically, you can gather HQ materials to raise the Quality to 500 (out of 1000) before starting your synth and this can be seen as the need for crafters needing to get good materials together. In the past, I did talk about crafters being guaranteed an HQ item with all HQ mats. However, after further internal discussion we wanted to leave some room for the crafter's equipment and skill/luck as a deciding factor for the final item. Therefore, we decided to go with 500 instead of the 1000.

Item Quality & HQ Success Rate
Starting in patch 1.21, you’ll be able to visually reference the chances of getting a HQ item while you’re crafting. With the level of Quality increasing in stages from 500⇒800⇒1000, the rate that Quality increases during synthesis will not increase at the same rate through the entire synthesis. The adjustments will be made so that 500-800 Quality will have a major increase in the HQ rate, and 800-1000 will have a gradual increase for the HQ rate.

Therefore, if you collect HQ materials and go for quality of 500, and use abilities at the right time, you will get around 80% HQ success rate at worst, and if everything goes well it can increase up to 100%.

So basically, if you take time to prepare all of the materials ahead of time, and so long as you don’t relax while crafting, it means that you should get 80% - 100% on your first HQ craft and create an HQ item. (I am really sorry about this, but keep in mind that the numbers will be adjusted right up until the last minute…)

Touch Up
Even with an 80% chance of success you still might end up with NQ. Of course, even with a 95% chance of success, there will still be the unfortunate 5% that will get NQ. Even if you think “Oh no my item turned out to be NQ”, you can still try to turn it into HQ with the new adjustments to Touch Up.

Since the success rate can already become 80% or 95%, having the exact same rates again would mess up the balance of total HQ output. Therefore, we think that for this second chance the HQ success rate should be about half. For those that feel very strongly about this kind of thing and say “Darn, I don’t want a NQ item and if it isn’t HQ it’s just like losing the item”, we think it would be good to let these people have one more chance.
I would just like to say again, if you follow the typical flow for creating HQ items, I think you will be able to craft HQ items at a decent rate. So, you can think of the new Touch Up as a little “extra”.

Elemental Instability and Abilities
Elemental instability will be adjusted in accordance with the coming patch as we plan on lowering occurrences of elemental instability to make things less stressful. In patch 1.21, we won’t be making any major changes to the details of the abilities, but adjustments will be made to the proc rate of the abilities.

I look forward to hearing your feedback!