Square Enix, please think about both Casual AND Hardcore crafters..

[CookiesNCreams]

I dont really follow patch update and stuff like this, but i see in my twitter that some people said crafting is no more. After looking more info i see this translation from a QnA/live letter session.



Although funny thing is you can apply this to DoW and DoM too.
Now, if only people read the tooltip probably this wont happen. I build my own macro if i mass craft something since im not 80 yet.




isnt this already a thing? with the poor/normal/good/excelent condition. manual will always optimal than macro
although im agree that once you got full rotation, HQ-ing is easy.

You can’t be serious. At the moment, macro or manual, it’s irrelevant. Both HQ just fine either way, there is no thinking, no skill, no nothing involved. Just brain dead button pressing.

[Tomoebi]

You can’t be serious. At the moment, macro or manual, it’s irrelevant. Both HQ just fine either way, there is no thinking, no skill, no nothing involved. Just brain dead button pressing.

thats what i said lol.

although im agree that once you got full rotation, HQ-ing is easy.

i wouldnt really called crafting a "skill" tho. you read tooltip, figure it out. you have your rotation memorized or stored in macro for 40/70/80 durability items, and you repeat it everytime. the only feedback/challenge you got from crafting is item condition (which relied on RNG), which is super easy to mitigate. and not to mention, macro sharing is a thing, so IMO crafting is already easy from the get-go.

[CookiesNCreams]

the only feedback/challenge you got from crafting is item condition (which relied on RNG), which is super easy to mitigate. and not to mention, macro sharing is a thing, so IMO crafting is already easy from the get-go.

You're right, that is exactly the state of crafting right now. But it wasn't always that way.

Back at Lv 60 the crafts using materials from gathering favors... sure, you could use the same macros all the time without thinking, if you didn't mind having a 10% or 20% chance that a 4 mil gil craft would turn NQ. It was a risk most people weren't willing to take, so many people asked experienced crafters to do the crafts for them. It actually meant something then to be an end game omnicrafter, it was something to aspire to. Was it difficult? Well, not in terms of skill it wasn't... if you followed all the steps correctly and crafted it manually with a decent understanding of crafting you had around 97-98% chance it would HQ, assuming you had good melds and took the time to HQ the crafted materials used for the craft. You could spend 10 minutes crafting just to make a single piece of class-specific crafting gear, using raw materials that took hours of gathering from actual gatherers (pretty sure bots did not gather favors items). To begin with, I did all steps of the process myself... a single piece of class specific gear took hours, and I believe it was effectively capped at about 3 pieces of gear per week if you used your own mats only since favors were capped weekly. It was comparable to the time needed to get end game raid gear... hours just for one piece of BiS gear for one job. The crafting was not gated behind anything though, anyone could have done it completely from scratch exactly like I did, but it was too overwhelming to most players. It was not difficult in the same way that raiding was, but it was difficult enough that not many crafters attempted end game crafts.

I don't know any way to think of crafting back then other than being difficult:

dif·fi·cult
/ˈdifəkəlt/
adjective
needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.

That is the definition of the word difficult. Crafting needed much effort to accomplish, therefore it was difficult. To argue otherwise is nonsense, that is the definition of the word. Did it take skill? No. Did it take understanding? Only if you wanted to improve your HQ chances. But it was difficult because of the large amount of time/effort needed.

But now? Buy a few NQ materials for like 20,000 gil on the market, click a one button macro you found online and bam, 100% guaranteed you get a piece of end game crafting gear that can be used by all crafting classes. A few minutes of effort right now get you what would have taken dozens of hours to get back then.