Quote Originally Posted by Solarra View Post
How do I feel about the changes? I agree something had to be done, levelling from 40-50 was an absolute slog and the complexity at endgame was daunting, leading a lot of people to rely on macros made by a few clever people who managed to work it out. However, I think it's too easy now.
It is slightly on the easy side, but then again, the entire game is meant to be casual and laid-back with the exception of Savage, Extreme, and Ultimate content. Can you really look at any MSQ duty and tell me that they are genuinely hard? Heck, the Lv80 end-of-MSQ Trial I got on my first try without looking any videos up.

The change to levelling-speed will be of huge benefit to raiders and people who simply wanted crafters so they could repair their gear (but surely there were better ways of addressing their needs?).
I don't think the changes will affect very rich crafters much, but I do think they'll be detrimental to people taking up crafting in the hope of making gil. With a huge pool of crafters at max level, easier crafting but very little to sell, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people getting to 80 and wondering why they bothered.
Well, see... if crafting remains hard, there's very little to sell because only a few are crafting.
If crafting is too easy, then everybody can DIY.

You're going to have very little to sell in either case, except for the endgame stuff which is meant to be hard (not sure how they're actually going to make it hard).

I've already seen people on the forums asking for macros for level 50 crafts and upwards, so I don't think the devs will achieve their aim of reducing dependence on them. A lot of people just want to take the easy path, and even with a simplified system, they're not going to start working things out for themselves if they can get someone else to do the work for them.
If the devs decide to replace skill with RNG at endgame, I'm not going to be very happy. I enjoyed the depth of crafting before 5.1; I don't want a system where you depend mainly on luck.

It's early days still and maybe crafting will get more interesting as the expansion progresses. I hope Ishgard will give us a challenge but it could be just more of the same. Right now crafting feels gutted.
The focus is more on future content I think, rather than current content.

I like the fact 1-80 crafting is easy, and that only Star recipes are hard. It's the way it should be. That way, everybody can enjoy crafting, but yet those who want to go the step further, can find challenge in the Endgame stuff. I don't know what they have planned for Ishgard, or future Star crafting, but hopefully they can find some way to appease the "hardcore" crafters without making normal crafting harder again.

I think crafting is really nice the way it is now, with the exception of endgame being a bit lacking in difficulty.

But you know what?

It was never hard to begin with. It was just a massive gilwall and timewall to build your stats up high enough so you could grab a macro and 100% HQ everything.