New crafting skills in ShB - Prep Touch & Delicate Syn are better than they seem!

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Hi all, I haven't seen any discussion threads here on the official forum yet regarding the following new skills, so I figured I'll create this new thread.

I was sure people on Reddit would have figured everything out about these skills already, so I briefly googled, and went to one Reddit thread there. The OP and a number of people who responded were pretty disappointed at the new skills, which I was very surprised, since the new skills are really amazing in my opinion. In fact, someone there obviously had the wrong impression that Prep Touch gives only 1 IQ stack, which was quickly corrected there. So I guess people just haven't really dug deep into the topic yet?

Hence, I would like to give my personal opinion here about the usefulness of these skills, and ask for your comments and advice.

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Preparatory Touch (36 CP) (PrpT) (lvl 71)
Increase quality at greater cost to durability.
Additional Effect: Increases Inner Quiet stack by one (up to 11)
Efficiency: 200%
Success Rate: 70%
Durability Cost: 20

Same as all the similar actions we have studied before, the “additional IQ stack” means it increases IQ stack by 2. However, the skill costs 20 durab and 36 CP. Thus, in the end, the effect of Prep Touch (PrpT) is identical to using 2x Basic Touch (18 CP, 100% efficiency, 70% success rate). So why introduce this skill into the game? Well, for 3 good reasons -- (1) Shorter macros: We have been suffering a lot regarding the need of using too many lines in our macros to HQ our items. PrpT effectively reduces the number of Basic Touches we use in a macro, allowing much shorter macros to be build (2) Better utilization of conditions: In manual crafting, it becomes a strong skill to use during an “Excellent” or “Good” condition. When using 2 consecutive Basic Touches, you can only catch the favorable condition once, since you can never have 2 “Goods” one after another (and after Excellent is always Poor). As illustrated below, you can see how a PrpT under Good is equal to having TWO Basic Touches under Good. In fact, if you land it on an Excellent, the 200% efficiency of PrpT will be quadrupled, resulting in 800% efficiency. (3) More steps of Steady Hand / Ingenuity left: As illustrated below, even though 1x PrpT is similar to 2x Basic Touches, it is still a single action… it only counts as one step. When under the effect of Steady Hand (I / II) or Ingenuity (I / II), it saves a lot of steps so you can use the remaining steps of the buff(s) for other actions or simply more touches.


Mini figure illustrating the advantage of a PrpT over 2x Basic Touches. Orange spaces indicate the steps which are covered by SH2. The string of 4x Basic Touches gave a total of 450% efficiency, whereas the two PrpT gave a total of 500%. The amount of CP spent, durab decrease and IQ stack accumulation are exactly the same between the two scenarios. But the one using PrpT gave more quality and leaves more steps of SH2 available after the touches.


Rapid Synthesis III (24 CP) (RS3) (lvl 72)
Increase progress at greater cost to durability.
Efficiency decreases significantly when durability is below 20.
Efficiency: 600%
Success Rate: 60%
Durability Cost: 20

This the strongest synthesis action to-date. Just like how one PrpT is similar to two Basic Touches, one Rapid Syn III (RS3) is similar to two Rapid Syn II (300% efficiency, 60% success rate), as it consumes 20 durab. And just like PrpT, it is a single action that counts as a one step. But the biggest difference here is the 60% success rate. Under Steady Hand II (SH2), it has only a 90% success rate, which means it sometimes fail. When it fails, you lose 20 durab and 24 CP for nothing. That is a big deal when we are crafting items of the highest difficulty. Thus, we should avoid using this skill when making really valuable items. To me, this skill has been wonderful for making NQ ingots and lumbers (40 durab items) when I was leveling my classes. When I was below level 80, quicksyn results in a huge loss of raw mats due to frequent failures. What I liked to do, was to just pop SH2, Manip2 and then RS3. If it fails, durab drops to 20, and then rises to 25. Then I can just follow up with another RS3. Even if it fails a second time, my durab will drop to 5, and then rises back to 10. I will then just use Master’s Mend (92 CP) and then try a third time on RS3. If I didn’t use Manip2, then durab will stay at 20 after a RS3 failure, then I don’t have the luxury to use it again right away, because if it fails the second time, durab will hit zero.


Delicate Synthesis (32 CP) (DS) (lvl 76)
Increase both progress and quality.
Efficiency: 100%
Success Rate: 100%

This is one of my new favorite skills! You’d think: “Hey, what it does is just a Basic Touch + a Basic Syn. Isn’t that rather expensive for 32 CP?” Hell no! Firstly, you’re massively saving durability and saving steps from buffs. Secondly, the beauty of this skill comes from its 100% success rate. This means this skill can function independent of SH2, and this is a big deal. Back in Stormblood, one of our common practices was to do the Ingen, SH2, Prudent Touch spam combo, and one of the most annoying thing is that the Ingen always falls off before SH2, so you may have one PrudT having no Ingen buff. Furthermore, it was also a common practice to activate Ingen (or Ingen2) near the end to buff the Byregot’s Blessing, and then leave behind a few more Ingen steps for progress. Now, both problems are resolved together. You can simple do an Ingen, Delicate Syn spam, and both touch and synthesis will be buffed by the Ingen, effectively saving you another Ingen.


Intensive Synthesis (12 CP) (IS) (lvl 78)
Increases progress.
Efficiency: 300%
Success Rate: 80%
Available only when material condition is Good or Excellent.

This is a condition-restricted skill. Thus, it is more likely to be used in manual crafting than macros. Its effect is exactly the same as RS2 (300% efficiency progress, 60% success rate) but with 20% more success rate. So it is 100% secure under SH or SH2. Inten Syn (IS) is basically a replacement for RS2 when a Good or Excellent procs. This skill can be quite useful when you’re massively making NQ ingots/lumbers with SH2 + RS2 spam… and when a Good procs, you just hit Intensive Syn instead of RS2. But apart from this, the condition-restriction really renders the skill relatively useless when planning a rotation. Most of the times, we won’t plan a rotation involving RS2 as that is unreliable, and we won’t plan a rotation with IS either as it is condition-dependent. In fact, when a Good or Excellent procs, it is more likely that you would want to use that favorable condition for quality instead of progress.


Reuse (60 CP) (lvl 74)
Grants Reusing. Chance to become available upon reaching maximum item quality.
Reusing Effect: A portion of ingredients used to synthesize the item are returned to your inventory when synthesis is complete

From what people say, the chance of it being active appears to be around 20-30%. This skill serves two major functions. (1) Saving mats while leveling: It encourages people to max out quality during crafting (especially when leveling), giving them a chance to recover some mats in the process. (2) Exploitation of the Reuse/Recycle combo to earn a fortunate: When paired with Recycle (90% chance of recovering all materials when synthesis is botched), one can somewhat exploit this skill to create many, many products with a single expensive mat (usually will return the most valuable mat if Reuse is activated). Basically, when one crafts a very expensive item, such as a Nidhogg weapon, one can push the quality to max to induce the activation of Reuse. If Reuse procs, then just complete the progress, gets a finished product, and let the most expensive mat (such as the Nidhogg’s Scale) return. If Reuse doesn’t proc when quality is maxed, then don’t continue progress. Activate Recycle, and pray that all materials will return when you botch it (10% chance of losing everything). Usually, everything will be returned, and now you can repeat the whole process again to try proc the Reuse until succeeded. Using this method, one can likely create many, many Nidhogg weapons with a single scale.


Trained Eye (250 CP) (lvl 80)
Increases quality by 50%.
Available only on the first step. Recipe level must be at least 10 levels below yours.

Trained Instinct (250 CP) (lvl 80)
Increases quality by between 30 to 100%.
Available only on the first step. Recipe level must be at least 10 levels below yours.

These are the only skills in ShB that I’m disappointed about. They’re really quite useless. If an item is like ~60 levels below yours, then you probably just need to hit “Advanced Touch” (AT), and be done with it. If an item is like ~20 levels below yours, then you can easily push quality with the common double strides combo of “GS, SH, Innov, AT, GS, AT” under IQ (which I have set up my buttons to quickly do it with one hand). If the item is like 11 levels below you, and you use “Trained Eye”, yes you immediately completely 50% quality. But you actually still have 50% to work on. “Trained Instinct” is even worse. Sure, it may one-shot the item at 100%, but you may very well end up with only 30%. We all hate RNG in this game. Yet you have burned like half your CP with either of these skills. Honestly, maybe these skills can save you a little bit of time, but it seems to me that you’re leaving yourself more vulnerable to mistakes as well. Unless you’re massively crafting like 100 items which are like level 69 recipes, it really doesn’t save you too much time comparing with performing 1 to 2 simple double strides combos, which would otherwise be much safer and reliable.


SUMMARY OF THE NEW CRAFTING APPROACH:

Here is my vision of what's coming. The "new trend of crafting" (at the most difficult level) would be to first quickly build up IQ stacks with either PrpT or Precise Touch. PrpT has the advantage that it is more reliable, predictable and plannable comparing to Patient Touch and Precise Touch, while very quickly build up a high IQ stack (much faster than using Prudent Touch even though PrudT is already very efficient with CP). This can be done while Manip2 is active, to let durab falls by 10 per step, which means a combo that looks like this:
(assuming durab is below max from Muscle Memory)
"Manip2, SH2, PrpT, PrpT, PrpT"

After IQ is like ~5 to 7, then spam DS under Ingen:
"Ingen, DS, DS, DS, DS, DS"

What's good about Delicate Syn spam is that it is still very good to be used AFTER IQ hits 11. So if we encounter a craft sooooo difficult that IQ11 Byregot is not enough, we can actually do another round of Ingen+DS spam to further push BOTH progress and quality at IQ11. And we can keep doing this until progress is just a tad bit before completion.

Finally, we finish off with a standard Byregot finisher, and complete with a single CS3 or Observe+FocSyn.

Of course, these are just some theory crafting discussions. At the end, if we have to fall back on Prudent spam, I won't complain about it! :P

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Predatory Touch, when not under buffs, is lackluster.

It is a 200% Quality gain, for 20 Durability, and adds 2 to IQ.

But what it does not do is add the gain from one point of IQ to the second half of the Quality gain, rendering the buffless Quality gain LESS than that of two Basic Touches.

As long as IQ is under the 3000 Control cap, increasing IQ increases the Quality per Touch. So, one BT will be X Quality, the next one will be 10ish percent greater. Real world example of what I mean :

2083 base Control, making Dwarven Mythril Nuggets :
IQ1 : BT adds 799 Quality.
IQ2 : BT adds 985 Quality. Total of 1784 Quality.
IQ3 : BT adds 1181 Quality. Total of 2965 Quality.
IQ4 : BT adds 1387 Quality. Total of 4352 Quality.

IQ1 : PrepT adds 1598 Quality.
IQ3 : PrepT adds 2362 Quality. Total of 3960 Quality.

Both of these ate 40 Durability. Both of them were entirely on Normal condition. It is a situational use move, not a regular use move. It should only be used when you have some kind of buff on - Ingenuity, a Good/Excellent condition, something along those lines. Its a Quality loss if used in place of two buffless, Normal condition Touches.

[Chiami]

Trained Eye (50% Quality increase at the push of a button for 25 CP) definitely is not an ability to get excited about like PrepT or DelSys, but I found it capable of shortening my macros for making some old glam items like weapons "of the Round" or the old primal weapons a little bit. So it has some niche uses for speeding up production of these older glammy things if you want to HQ them for Reuse procs, but that's about it I guess.

It seems to me the general theme of our new abilities is "make macros shorter / make better use of buffs", no matter if in endgame crafting or going back to older recipes as a level 80 crafter.

That, and... conditional / RNG based skills. Which make me wonder about the future, from Ishgard Reconstruction to the big changes for crafters and gatherers coming with 5.1, as we learned in the latest live letter... comeback of manual crafting ahead?

[XenabelleS]

TBH - the 20 durability cost renders Prep Touch rather scary when dealing with 40 durability crafts. You need to also use Manipulation II just to bring it back down to 10 and I think you can combo Waste Not II to reduce the dura cost to 5 which makes it much more feasible but that is VERY CP intensive. You'll need the lvl 71 accessories, melded with CP VIs and still eat food (can buy in the Chrystarium) in order to use it.

[CookiesNCreams]

Right, they are good...but over powered moves. They aren’t any different than prudent Touch in 4.0. It just makes crafting easier. The least they could do is make these abilities disabled during end game crafts.

But like I said, I will not stop bringing the topic up until it’s answered in a live letter.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Predatory Touch

Wording...

[Buuhuu]

Huhu,

I am completely agreeing with you. Those skills are very good. I am not that often reading about crafting on reddit or other sources. But if they really said that those skills are bad, they were really underestimating those.

So going trough the mentioned skills:

Preparatory Touch (36 CP) (PrpT) (lvl 71)
Delicate Synthesis (32 CP) (DS) (lvl 76)

Those are one of the best skills ever. Once I had them, I reduced all my macros to using this skills. A very good staple I've come up with is this:

/ac "Steady Hand II" <wait.2>
/ac "Waste Not" <wait.2>
/ac Ingenuity <wait.2>
/ac "Preparatory Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Preparatory Touch" <wait.3>
/ac "Preparatory Touch" <wait.3>

Since here I continued with two Careful Synthesis III or some observe touch or synth, but when I got Delicate, you can use those Ingenuity Buffs also for some Delicate Synthesis aswell, thats a huge boost with low amount of skills (and therefore macro lines!). And is not wasting buff stacks, neither do you need to buff Steady Hand again etc.
I consider Waste Not II almost a completely waste of CP, as in order to use the skills needing it, you have to have Steady Hand II up + Ingenuity for example. I often dont need to use those skills that often, so a normal Waste Not is completely fine for me.

Rapid Synthesis III (24 CP) (RS3) (lvl 72)
Another nice skill, as you have mentioned the quick synthesis has like a 20-40% fail rate sometimes more.
I don't use Manipulation though, I am using Waste Not again:

/ac "Steady Hand II" <wait.2>
/ac "Waste Not" <wait.2>
/ac "Rapid Synthesis III" <wait.3>

I put this macro next to my RS3, so I can use it when it fails. In almost all cases this is enough (after the 3rd fail you can decide if you want to roll a 4th time or use Masters Mend as you have mentioned)

I also used this once in a while:

/ac "Steady Hand II" <wait.2>
/ac "Waste Not" <wait.2>
/ac "Rapid Synthesis III" <wait.3>
/ac "Rapid Synthesis III" <wait.3>
/ac "Rapid Synthesis III" <wait.3>
/ac "Master's Mend"
/echo Finish / Try Again <se.2>

It will try to finish it 3 times in a row, if it fails even that, it will use Master's Mend and I can press the same button again^^ (laziness ftw!)

Intensive Synthesis (12 CP) (IS) (lvl 78)
Definetly nice, but as you said, not reliably usable in a rotation.


Reuse (60 CP) (lvl 74)
Nice incentive to HQ Glamour this time yeah. And very good indeed, now, if you want to come up with rotations the cherry would be to include this skill into the master recipe rotations.

Trained Eye (250 CP) (lvl 80)
Trained Instinct (250 CP) (lvl 80)
I thought the 100% would be nice, but its 100% chance is like... non existant. I can make 100% HQ of older items with the new skills in like 5-6 lines of macro and don't have to rely on RNG with that. Sounds nice on paper but is not that good. Even the 50% one, as you need to build up some quick IQ-Stacks anyways, with some PrpT thats so fast, and not that much longer than with the 50% skill.


Currently I use just non-specialist rotations for the current master recipes. I didn't started optimizing yet (I have already slightly better rotations, but I didn't replaced this old one, yet), but your conclusion (at least for my rotations for the current endgame stuff are pretty accurate xd)



edit: Well, I was trying just a bit and I think for real endgame crafts PrpT is just a little bit too costly to use it more than once or twice in a rotation.
I just prototyped some with prudent touch and it was way easier to manage the CP.
Something like that is far better:

[Nixxe]

I was really hoping that Trained Instinct's range was based on how trivial the craft would be for you, not RNG, but it's basically impossible to macro without just wasting it, so it's garbage. Even for a single craft, it's unreliable, so I may as well just hit a couple of touches rather than risk adding an extra step to the craft.

I'm not even sure what to do with Trained Eye. I guess it may save time for level 70 4 star crafts or something, but most of the ones that are still worth making have no HQ version anyway because they're housing items or other cosmetics.

[Shadygrove]

Trained Eye (250 CP) (lvl 80) & Trained Instinct (250 CP) (lvl 80)
Its just so easy to HQ stuff 10 or more levels below me without these.

[Liam_Harper]

SUMMARY OF THE NEW CRAFTING APPROACH:

Here is my vision of what's coming. The "new trend of crafting" (at the most difficult level) would be to first quickly build up IQ stacks with either PrpT or Precise Touch. PrpT has the advantage that it is more reliable, predictable and plannable comparing to Patient Touch and Precise Touch, while very quickly build up a high IQ stack (much faster than using Prudent Touch even though PrudT is already very efficient with CP). This can be done while Manip2 is active, to let durab falls by 10 per step, which means a combo that looks like this:
(assuming durab is below max from Muscle Memory)
"Manip2, SH2, PrpT, PrpT, PrpT"

After IQ is like ~5 to 7, then spam DS under Ingen:
"Ingen, DS, DS, DS, DS, DS"

What's good about Delicate Syn spam is that it is still very good to be used AFTER IQ hits 11. So if we encounter a craft sooooo difficult that IQ11 Byregot is not enough, we can actually do another round of Ingen+DS spam to further push BOTH progress and quality at IQ11. And we can keep doing this until progress is just a tad bit before completion.

Finally, we finish off with a standard Byregot finisher, and complete with a single CS3 or Observe+FocSyn.

Nice to see you posting discussions again

From what I've seen of rotations so far, including my own, it's been the other way around. It varies, but I tend to start with Ingen and 4-5 Delicate Synth, then move to Strides + Preparatory in the second half to set up the Brygots finisher. I feel Preparatory's strength is in how powerful it is with Strides. 200% is like a 5 stack Brygots and IQ tends to cap by 8 now. Strides + Prep at 7-8 can often put you in range of finishing with Brygots.

Ingenuity II is currently a dead skill and Innovation is far weaker which frees some CP and lets you do things like Steady II -> Ingen -> Strides -> Prep -> Strides -> Brygot -> Careful II.

I've found Prudent has uses and Focused Touch is quite useful.

As for our 70-80 toolkit I pretty much agree. Delicate and Prep Touch are very overpowered. Reuse is a goldmine and bonkers. Intensive and both 80 skills are virtually useless though Intensive has potential if Ishgard is as hard as they say.

While we're on the topic of discussion I'm curious if anyone can strengthen this one. It's a non spec vendor food Reuse that works off NQ mats + HQ Alkahast but just falls short on chest pieces. I have 100% Spec vendor food Reuse rotations too if anyone needs.