Crafting "Practice Dummies"

[MN_14]

You shouldn’t need a sim for you to reliably design a viable approach, especially as SB has been designed to be more intuitive as you don’t need to consider statistics anymore when determining skill priority. With enough practice (on materials, etc), you’ll get to the point where you can get a very good idea of what you need to do just by looking at the required quality and progress requirements. Yes, even if the game had crafts that gave you progress/quality requirements from a more or less random pool, you should be able to ace them (designers should not include requirements that cannot be done with the min required stats). If you’re unable to effectively design on the fly, can you say you have truly mastered crafting?

Case in point: When the i320 crafter gear was first released (first time we saw 28.5k quality crafts and our stats were far worse than what we had for 3* and 4*!), a lot of players found them challenging to 100% using full HQ mats, never-mind starting with i290 gear and all NQ mats. If you understood the crafting process, all NQ runs should not have been difficult. You would already have known that your Byregot’s blessing finisher gave you 11k quality from previous 2* crafts and could easily determine what you needed to do to come up with the other 17.5k. The trick was simply to get your IQ stacks as high as possible before firing off a barrage of at least 9 ingenuity 2 buffed touches; around 25% of the time, you could manage 13 ingen 2 buffed touches. You also got enough CP for an average of 16 touches. You don’t need a simulator to figure that out.

I managed 86% on my first blind run and moved my results to 90-100% (100% around 60% of the time but I never did optimize it before upgrading) with some refinements. Imagine if the game forced you to craft from all NQ with stats capped at the i290 gear…..

The truth is that those crafts were very easy to HQ even at min requirements and all NQ mats if you had a solid grasp of crafting mechanics but very hard to HQ if you didn’t. They would have served as an excellent and fair skill check if the game forced you to craft under those conditions. But given the way the game is balanced (lots of HQ mats, major over-gearing), most players will never learn, which is a shame.

Back in ARR, sims were counterproductive to your learning as the idea was (and still is if you truly want to master crafting) to design a crafting methodology (on the fly prioritization, optimization, adjustments to changes in the situation etc). If the i320s were considered difficult at 0 starting quality and i290 gear, it’s no wonder crafters did poorly on ARR’s master 2 tokens. That’s what was satisfying about ARR crafting. The balance created divisions in player proficiency and you were rewarded with excellent results only if you took the time to truly master the system.

[Liam_Harper]

You shouldn’t need a sim for you to reliably design a viable approach, especially as SB has been designed to be more intuitive as you don’t need to consider statistics anymore when determining skill priority. With enough practice (on materials, etc), you’ll get to the point where you can get a very good idea of what you need to do just by looking at the required quality and progress requirements. Yes, even if the game had crafts that gave you progress/quality requirements from a more or less random pool, you should be able to ace them (designers should not include requirements that cannot be done with the min required stats). If you’re unable to effectively design on the fly, can you say you have truly mastered crafting?

Not sure what you mean by this.

I can design "viable" rotations on the fly just fine. I'm at the stage where I do all my gear crafting manual and just pull the rotation out of my head and 100% hq, I know exactly what Brygots will give me at 9, 10 and 11 stacks Inner Quiet on each craft, how much CP I need to leave for a finisher, whether Innovation is better than that good proc or not and so on. If I misclick something or forget a specialist stone I can improvise with high success rate. So I'm not sure where the idea that sims are counter-productive to learning comes from. All the information I've had available has improved my learning. It's like studying a subject with books and research compared to randomly poking at it until something makes sense.

SB crafting is fairly accessible, but it's certainly got complexity if you want to go beyond viable and create the most efficient, economical rotations possible. Almost every ability has a use somewhere in some endgame rotation. Sure you can 60% HQ a normal piece with Makers Mark and a bit of sense and the same old rotation, but if you want to figure out how to HQ a non-specialist piece 100% reliably without markers mark, with cheap food, with your own given stats, you need to research it. And the second is far more valuable to a serious crafter.

[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.