This thread is confusing the hell of me, you're a fully leveled omnicrafter and gatherer. The hard part is behind you. I don't get why you waited until you got this far to complain about crafting being some kind of scam. I literally don't get what you're referring to exactly, but I'd assume you're not happy about having to buy master crafting books with scrips, and then also that you have to buy the mats to craft your gear or something? Or is it that the game doesn't tell you crafting rotations for HQing top tiered gear or something? Because the game does nudge you in the correct way all the way through but it doesn't hold your hand, especially not for something as competitive as crafting can be.

It's very common for invested crafters to spends severals tens of millions on new gear and melding each time they're released, and hundreds of millions on materials to craft and sell crafted goods that eventually will have you needing to store gil on retainers because you realize there's a gil cap and it's not very high by the time you've actually gotten to that point.

There's no scam here though. Crafters even make money each other, I buy tons of alchemics and food for example because I don't feel like crafting them when my time is better spent on something more lucrative for me. But everyone finds that one thing, or whatever it is, on their own. The game doesn't tell you what to make to become rich nor should it. The game also doesn't tell you the best order to use crafting skills to keep your costs down by hitting higher overall quality from your rotations which translates to needing fewer HQ mats. Some actually love that part of crafting, having to figure out the one puzzle you get every few patches that just becomes the same old sebutton sequence with near 0 vartiety. And once you've learned that you're set for months and months. The game shouldn't provide you with that sort of information if that's what you meant with not understanding specialist skills? Tool tips already take care of that. and really, it only takes like a few hours before someone posts new crafting rotations on crafter update patches, the crafting community is sort of its own community after all and they share rotations and crap.

Did I miss anything? Becuase I feel like you're just extremely bitter over something you really didn't enjoy doing anyway. Did you expect it to become fun after a certain point or something? Because it's the same shit you've been doing just to level everything up lol. And yeah, crafting is a constant gilsink, but if you're investing your gil into the right things (which are 100% your responsilibity to discover) then what you get out of it can easily be order of magnitude greater than what you put in. But it comes with some stuff that sucks too, like having to deal with keeping your wares priced to sell beause every crafter knows that the undercut game is a crafter's endgame lol. If you have two stocked retainer, thats not too bad, but if you have several more it can be the most dreading thing of your day but still a necessary evil to reap the rewards of being a crafter.

In closing, I find it hard to just dismiss your complaints with what seems like a very logical answer by just suggesting that if you don't like craft then don't craft. But you already did all of the crafting to get all of the skills you need at your disposal. If you didn't llike it or didn't see any signs of how it mich benefit you in the process of getting everything to 70, I think you qould have said "F this shit" a long time ago. So I guess I don't really know what elsee I could say lol. You can look at it like the WoW south park episode and ask what you're supposed to do now that you're an omnicrafter and we could just tell you "What do you mean? Now you can finally play" lol. I mean you're already there so unless you really have a vendetta or something with crafting and the game's economy, you might as well find out how it could benefit you now that you have it. Or just write it off as a huge waste of time, but I can't seem to think of a scenario of it taking someone that long to get to that conclusioon. Either way, happy trails whichever trails you decide to follow :3