Clusters, Crystals, and Shard conversions.

[YukiKoneko]

Hi Yukikoneko,

Thanks for your patience while we worked to get a response on this topic for you. We have discussed this with the Item Team and they let us know that currently there aren't plans to introduce more ways to break down crystals into shards (partly due to the fact that shards are so easy to obtain that they've become much cheaper as a result). Another reason being that new recipes utilize crystals instead of shards, so it's not as though their entire purpose is to be broken down into shards.

Thanks so much. Sorry I had to go to such great lengths to grab attention.

[Raldo]

The overall cost of converting crystals to shards via fish:

6 fish + 6 fire shards => 6 sea/river sand (figure ~15 seconds per synth?)
Change jobs (+30 seconds)
6 sea/river sand + 2 wind and lightning shards => 1 fine sand (~15 sec)
Change jobs again (+30 sec)
Finally, break 1 crystal into 16 shards (via dated recipe) (~15 sec)

Overall, you took ~3 minutes to produce 16 shards... no wait, subtract the shards you wasted in the process (10 shards overall). So in ~3 minutes, you've effectively crafted... 6 shards.

I'm not trying to mass produce them, but why should I have to buy shards from RMT? And more importantly, why haven't they revised the crystal -> shard recipe since it's been marked as dated since 1.19.

Yes, going the sand route is stupid. What I meant was the direct lightening > other shard/crystal synths. Yes, there's no cluster>crystal or crystal>shard conversions, but I think the direct fish>crystal stuff is sufficient.

[YukiKoneko]

Ah yes, though you gotta keep a healthy supply of lightning shards. Bayohne's correct in that shards are much easier to come by now. I still think they ought to convert the fish + 10 lightning shards -> 1 crystal recipes into higher shard output.

[Peptaru]

What Raldo said, there are fish/kelp that triple your shard investment without even HQ'ing.... It sucks to have lost cluster > crystal > shard, but the other recipes should be more than sufficient. I'm hoping that the clusters will be useful again someday though as they still drop. I still use plenty of crystals.

[Cthulhu]

I'm really hoping they do make a use for clusters again. That's what I did with all my guild marks.