Returning Crafter

[Jedediah]

I am returning to the game from a long absence (ARR) and I am working my way through HW. I am learning all about master recipes, specialisation and scrips and wondered if any of this is still relevant in SB..?

I don't want to put a lot of effort into getting the lvl 60 gear (blue) if I should really be pushing through (via leves, etc) to lvl 70 and then working on the end game gear.

Knowing what you guys know now, what advice can you guys give me..?

[Frizze]

So... is that stuff still relevant? Yeah. We have 2 new master recipe books for SB(master 5 and 6), specialization still offers benefits that are relevant at 70(plus some new benefits too), and red and yellow scrips are still the primary crafting currency. Learning how all that works(along with custom deliveries and collectables in general) is something everyone has to do at some point. As for the level 60 gear, if its cheap go ahead and pick some up but we mostly recommend people push through to 61 and then upgrade to THAT set instead(its much cheaper to make then the ironworks and gives you stats roughly equal to the un-augmented scrip set). As for finishing off that level you have a few options. Doing provisioning missions for your grand company is the most efficient, collectables are an ok option, you can still get a little mileage from your beast tribes(moogle for now), and maybe some leves or general crafting. Best of luck!

[Kaurhz]

If you're at the point where you are at Level 60 crafting then I would double on the recommendation made above, but to expand a little:
- Buy the Level 60 HQ Chimerical Felt set, this leftside you should be able to get for approx 60k gil total. You can equally just keep your whatever gear, though it will probably require a i180 scrip tool on your weaver at least. This gear if you play carefully can technically last you until Level 63. Only if you're careful with your crafts. But play it safe if you aren't comfortable.
- Once you have some relatively stable gear, you can work on just simply burning through 60-61 by doing a combination of the Grand Company Turn ins, Custom Deliveries, and grinding Level 61 40 durability materials. Just pop a few Commercial Engineering Scrolls, and you will be 61 in no time. Few hours gathering, few hours manually synth'n items and you'll be there. I cannot stress enough that the larger problem with crafting ifor 51-60, and 61-70 is the levelling factor. You are essentially crafting recipe level 260 items with a crafter level of 150. Once you have gotten that level it's trivial!!

- Once you hit 61, you're best off crafting the gear, as opposed to buying it, simply because buying it for each given upgrade is annoying and expensive. It should be extremely easy to HQ once you get over the level gap and are crafting recipes equal to your 'crafter level'
- This set will last you until 63, at which point you will be able to do full upgrades across the board, and you'll have a nice set of really powerful gear which will carry you to 70 to make your 290 pieces.

Regarding the skills and specialists, all of them are significantly useful. This I cannot put enough emphasis on. Level 60 specialist skills trivialises gear progress by a drastic amount, and the Level 70 specialist skills are bog standard in specialist rotations and really CP efficient. Stormblood crafting is pretty different to how it was in Heavensward as generally, the skills at that point weren't really at a point they could be feasibly used so the only advantage was the stat boost and crafting specialist only recipes, but now they're pretty standard use. But now in Stormblood with the modifications, using the Level 60 skills are more feasible and can use them to skip a lot of gear progression at end game.

Also, you may or may not have done this, but catch up on ALL of your crafter quests, from Level 1 to 60, then do 60-70 quests when you hit 69. These quests give essential abilities and traits in the clipboard game (what crafting is now), and it's a significant amount of exp, as these quests are enough to carry you from 69 right to 70.

[Shadygrove]

Two words: Caimie's guide.

http://ffxivrealm.com/guides/ff14-ad...e-tsukino.194/

[Grimoire-M]

To be honest if you're a returning ARR crafter then spamming a single crafting class to 70 is the best thing you can do. Don't bother levelling the rest via leves/gc turn-ins until you have at least one at cap so you can use them to begin farming yellow and red scrip from the weeklies. You'll be fine with your level 50 gear for the moogle daily quests and the level 60 Stormblood vendor gear is fine for the Namazu quests. Leve/GC turn-ins and the HW quests still accept vendor/market board items while you have to craft the SB items manually (I do not recommend doing this until you hit 69-70 on your first class, but save the gear you get from those quests for levelling the rest a little faster). I never used the collectible turn-ins while levelling any of my crafters, but you may want to if you want to get more yellow scrip faster. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have your retainers gathering materials and the DoL classes levelled up tbh.

It doesn't really matter which class you level first either if you're willing to sink gil into it and/or specialize in that class to speed up the process. The only thing that might give you pause is the level 54 GSM skill Maker's Mark, which is the only useful cross-class skill from Heavensward, but I'd recommend levelling GSM to 70 first anyways given how cheap the vendor items for its leves are relative to other classes.