Crafting "Practice Dummies"

[MN_14]

To be clear, I’m not against the idea of creating efficient rotations when you have already mastered the system and the game allows you to gear for it. SB allows you to over-gear for even the latest crafts making everything very macro friendly from all NQ mats. Unfortunately, this also means that anyone can copy someone’s macro and craft as effectively.

I believe that there is an over-reliance on the web-based simulator as the be all and end all learning tool. It’s not a great tool if you have to craft under conditions where you really had to utilize procs for good results/freehand craft (unless you incorporate a million what if scenarios). Hence, that’s the reason why macros gave subpar results back in ARR (unless you consider reclaiming 1/3 of the time to be acceptable…). That said, a crafter’s striking dummy would be highly useful as a learning tool for freehand crafting and I’d vote for it.

In the case of the i320s as I mentioned previously, at the min requirements, no matter how much you tweak a rotation using the simulator, you’re not going to get the greatest results because you’re not incorporating all of the CP required to HQ it effectively (earned through procs, etc). Effective static rotations only became possible once you obtained the new gear. If a crafter relied on the simulator and the game forced you to craft the latest tiered crafts under similar conditions, a crafter who relied on simulators would never learn it correctly. ARR master 2 tokens and 4* was kind of like that to a certain extent.

SB is tuned toward mass market crafts. While I think there is a place for both mass market and high-end crafts (where you have to freehand them for high HQ rates), if the majority of players copy a macro, there probably won’t be high end crafts again other than ones that require rare drops (high end only due to scarcity).

In the end, I think it boils down to opinion too. I don’t find creating efficient rotations when way above the min requirements to be very satisfying. Yes, you could produce crafts a bit more efficiently than the next crafter’s rotation/macro, but the difference isn’t great. On my server right now, some crafts are being sold at a 30% profit only (based on raw mat prices) and supply still exceeds demand. If there were also crafts with similar difficulty to the i320 Doh/Dol gear on release and forced you to craft from all NQ and min requirements, I think you’ll find that you’ll quickly outproduce the player who hasn’t learned how to freehand them. It’s what happened back in ARR and even HW.

You also can’t treat anything under 100% as a failure. Especially, in ARR where it was impossible to guarantee an HQ, a solid crafting methodology works fine. Even with my i320 example, if it’s impossible to guarantee an HQ but you’re getting 100% sixty percent of the time, 90-95%, 35% of the time, and 5% eighty percent of the time, at the end of the day, it’s an overall 95% yield and you’ll on average only get 1 NQ per 19 HQs. It’s not going to make a dent especially as crafters (majority in ARR and HW from my experience although that could be server dependent), will either be producing very slowly or producing NQ after NQ.

What I find fun is a craft where it’s impossible to guarantee 100% and you have to constantly think. There also has to be logic and strategy behind your approach (it can’t be random or simply hammering out x number of touches). I was quite surprised that although the i320 2* crafter gear was easy even with all NQs and i290 gear, I found them more fun than anything in HW due to the vast pool of abilities at your disposal. I think interesting crafts can be created using the SB system, but we generally won’t see them.

[Liam_Harper]

What I find fun is a craft where it’s impossible to guarantee 100% and you have to constantly think. There also has to be logic and strategy behind your approach (it can’t be random or simply hammering out x number of touches). I was quite surprised that although the i320 2* crafter gear was easy even with all NQs and i290 gear, I found them more fun than anything in HW due to the vast pool of abilities at your disposal. I think interesting crafts can be created using the SB system, but we generally won’t see them.

I do agree, while I'm fine with some accessible crafts, I wouldn't mind a few crafts like this at all. Another thread brought up ideas like glowing glamour tools for crafters or other such vanity items and making things like these very difficult crafts that take everything you have and some good use of things like tricks on top, could give us something to actually challenge us, not to mention a nice way to display your craft mastery.

I found SB lacking in challenge once they back-tracked on the difficulty for 320 gear. In the same way an experienced raider enjoys things like Ultimate as a long-term goal, crafters could do with something to push us to our limits.

[Elamys]

To be honest, while I understand the overall mechanics of crafting, I have a very difficult time coming up with my own rotations. I have tried to every tier so far and it just leads to a lot of frustration. While I can usually adjust to situations mid-craft (I don't macro craft so occasionally I make mistakes in the button presses) and end up finishing the craft, trying to start from scratch is overwhelming. So I usually use someone else's rotation and make adjustments to it (moving touches around based on procs, etc). I don't think crafters who use other people's rotations are inferior or worse at crafting, and it's frustrating to see that sentiment repeated.

As crafting stands right now, it's very linear and simple. You fill up both bars and you either get an HQ or you don't. While there's potentially a huge amount of ways one could get to that point, how important really is it to have an original rotation that you came up with yourself? As someone who gathers their own materials and can make a large amount of gil on crafting items I don't even need to HQ, I don't have to worry about the costs of food or tea beyond anything but the time spent, so I'm not worried about coming up with a tealess rotation or a rotation that uses cheaper food. All I do in the game anymore is craft, gather, and decorate, so it's not like I was going to spend that time in game I was gathering doing something else.

I've seen recommendations for prestige kind of crafts like Liam mentioned above and I think they're a good idea for vanity. While I do wish Stormblood crafting was a little more difficult (I really enjoyed HW endgame crafting as it did challenge me to think more and craft more actively) I can see why they made it simpler. Even now a lot of people still don't want to craft even with zero RNG 100% rotations. It's also worth considering what kind of crafts end up being more difficult. It makes sense for an armor piece to be the one where you have to think and plan more, but having to fully focus when I'm mass producing a bunch of mid-level materials can easily become tiresome and boring. Right now though SE has made them both roughly the same difficulty in the amount of engagement required, which I'd like to see change.

Endgame crafting should inherently come with some manner of risk at some point in the process, which is why I'm not sure I agree with the implementation of practice dummy items. But it is true people use simulators to bypass this, which means the risk has to come just from the crafting process itself, and in HW that was mostly Hasty Touch RNG.