Allow easier ways to obtain shards/crystals please :D.

[RareItems]

Especially for Shards, it takes forever to gather them, they're too expensive in the MB (about 110gil a piece).

Any way we can have Battle Retainers have access to gathering these as well instead of just the botanist/miner retainers?

Maybe let us buy 1 shard/crystal for 1 red script crafting/gathering and 1 cluster for 1 yellow script crafting/gathering.

[Vahlnir]

But...they're not hard to farm. At all. They don't take very long to farm either.

[HyoMinPark]

You can grow shards with the seeds that are very easily gatherable. Even if you don’t have a house to access a garden, you can grow them in flower pots in an apartment. Get Grade 3 Shroud Soil, and it nets you 100 shards per seed. They take 24 hours to grow. Slower, but braindead to do and zero effort required short of gathering the seeds/soil and planting them. If you have alts with apartments, have them grow you some too and use a friend or an FC chest to transfer them to a main.

Crystals are easy to get through aetherial reduction; even after the nerf to it from HW to SB.

[Edax]

Not only can you mass produce shards with a garden, you can always just sell the surplus shards and use all that gil to buy crystals. You'll never really want for them if you dedicate yourself to it.

[JunseiKei]

Diadem: Matron was probably one of the absolute best ways to get shards. A clear got you 10 Steel Spoils, 1 spoil netting you 80 shards (800 shards for 30 minutes of work). There was a point in time where people were asking to be able to go into Diadem Matron solo for this reason. You can still get in with an airship and one other person since 8 people for Matron seems unlikely anymore.

[BillyKaplan]

I wouldn't mind seeing scrips exchanged for this, esp if you can get them for gatherer scrips (these are the classes that farm them, after all).
But as others said above, this really isn't that hard to do. I've been working on the crafting achievs and between the garden and my gatherer retainers I've managed to keep my head above water shards-wise.

[Mirch]

may i suggest mass producing em on houses, on your friend houses, on your guild house, and so on, you won't be in crisis of shards, unless you craft in mass on daily basis tons of recipes that require 4+ shards per element

[Lukha]

It seems to me that shards are pretty easy to stock up on at the moment, but I would like to see seeds for gardening crystals added into a game, maybe at half the yield or twice the grow-time as shards seeds? And hopefully with a cool, unique model for the fully grown plant?

Or what about a new trait for crystals like the one for that gives a small chance to increase the shard yield of a single strike by a random amount?

[Mirch]

It seems to me that shards are pretty easy to stock up on at the moment, but I would like to see seeds for gardening crystals added into a game, maybe at half the yield or twice the grow-time as shards seeds? And hopefully with a cool, unique model for the fully grown plant?

Or what about a new trait for crystals like the one for that gives a small chance to increase the shard yield of a single strike by a random amount?

i tihnk it faster to farm crystals by doing the conversion thingy, but i do agree i would like to see some crystal plants

so we can have crystals on our gardens like thos ein dzemael darkhold!

[Deceptus]

Honestly, IMHO, they should remove shards/crystal/clusters entirely. They don't serve much of a purpose and are just a relic from FFXI that needs to go away. Crafting recipe's are bloated enough as is.