Crafting "Practice Dummies"

[PangTong]

Experimentation and "on the fly" adjustments aren't exactly economical when you're working with materials potentially worth hundreds of thousands. It's difficult to even work out how much progress/quality your actions are even going to give since it's affected not only by stats but by the level of the craft. Stuff like Ingenuity 2 certainly isn't going to tell you how much it's helping before you use it, and at that point you're committed to the craft, whether or not you've left yourself in a position where finishing it is even possible. Furthermore, most people aren't really going to consider a 60% chance of getting 100% HQ as acceptable, particularly since even 95% HQ in this game feels a lot closer to 50% than it does to 100. Even highly optimized rotations (or "methodologies") which end up with 0 durability and less than 5CP usually can't hit 100% HQ on max level crafts starting at 0 quality, without relying on procs and/or actions with sub-100% success rates. If what you're suggesting is that you can successfully craft anything in HQ from NQ materials as long as you're willing to do try multiple times until you get sufficiently lucky, well, DUH! You can obviously do that, but you'll be doing so at a massive loss if you're buying materials. The reason why people use sims and rotations is because reliability is extremely important in high level crafting, because if you don't value reliability you're going to end up wasting loads and loads of time.

[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.