Request for better challenges and better rewards (Formal Letter/Megathread)

[Cleanse]

I totally agree with the need for greater challenges and love the idea of minions/mounts for crafters! However, since I don't use macros much of what you've suggested may be beyond my craft ability...I'd still give it a try regardless because of the pleasure of success. And you're spot on about use of HQ mats; I've been asked why bother making them since it doesn't seem to matter, plus as a DoL no one wants to buy them on the MB. I hope this changes in the future, and especially the shiny tools with sound effects!!!

You are more than capable of crafting high end items without a macro. A little research (such as reading through this forum) to get an initial understanding is all it should take.

[Sylvain]

So I started this on my phone but decided to hold and write it properly on my computer later on.

Tbf as long as it's only glam and can't be abused for gils making, I don't see why we couldn't have super hard recipies.
It would indeed be quite fun to be able to craft a laser saw that you can't buy.

Another way to add difficulty , (which wasn't in the megathread

Would be multistage timed craft.
For instance, to craft [the essence of darkness] a consummable with limitless charge that creates an aura of purple darkness around you for 5min . Untradable, unsellable.

To do that, you would need various regular mats , but most importantly

[Highly purified Dark eather sand]
[Distilled astral essence]
[Black quart cristal vial]

Each of those 3 special mats can only be made as collectible. They all require expensive and nodded mats.

Each of these mats can be crafted once a day. They are unique and they last 72h before turning back to a regular mat.
The regular mat can be recycled for some of the most expensive mats (for example if you failed the quality too much)
When crafting the [essence of darkness], the collectability of each 3 special mats is added as initial quality. Which means that the better you craft those 3, the higher you start.

So you would basically have 1 chance a day (for each mat) to craft it. Because they are unique, you can\\'t just spam the craft until you get it perfect. And even you try to do so, they only last 72h, so you just can't fish for good proc. You need to gather your mats, and do the best you can in the little time you have . And if your mats have a decent enough collectability. You go for the actual glam item.

Finally , the glam item is also a collectible , and like rowena house, have 3 rank. Let say the law collectability is 7000
Below 4500 The craft fail.
Between 4501 and 6500, you get the item but is has a drawback (less darkness, duration, bigger cd. Something)
6501 to 6999 : you get the item
7000 : you get the achievement [Alchemist of Darkness]

Some craft could require item from various job, but I'm not a big fan of expecting people to have all crafter job.
So these should be rare

As a side note, perhaps to mimic ''savage content'' , I've always thought it would be nice if some recipies would have special unique mechanic tied to them.
Basically , those new proc proposed in the big thread could fit very neatly in these.

Each craft could have a special unique proc. Either good or bad that we have to exploit of be careful. They could have weird status and effect forcing us to change how we handle the craft.

A few ideas (still remaining with my essence of darkness):

The highly purified dark eathersand has the particularity of requiring 100HQ mats but starting at 0quality.

Distilled astral essence cannot have it\\'s durability restored.

The black quartz Cristal vial has no good or excellent quality but only "bad" and ''terrible" (removing progressing)

Finally , the essence of darkness has the particularity of having the "darkness" quality. action requiring "good" or "excellent quality" can be used. Using an action there cost no CP and no durability but grants a buff "astral charge" which last 6 turns. If the charge reaches 3 stack. The craft fails. The proc raté is about 30% .






Other thing that could be done
A recipy can reach inner call stack:22
A recipy has a "perfect" quality granting 100% chance on everyskill
Some skills can't be used
Some have "sturdy" quality, costing not durability.
Some could be done under a certain amount of turn, or the opposite! Imagine a 100turn recipy !

This was a rather lengthy reply but it's something I've always wished crafting would have .

Just more intricate (glam only) recipies that are actually hard, require some serious work and that you can''t just cheese with gear. Some (if not most) have special unique attribute and effect making each craft a ''differente encounter''
I don\\'t like crafting for HQ and just being at the mercy and RNG for the HQ . Which is why I consider collectible more adequate.
While the time on crafting and duration may seem arsh, to le at least, they are akin to progressing savage content.

Day one you don\\'t know how the craft works. It has a weird new quality (so meca basically)
So you go farm your stuff, then attempt, and first time you don\\'t get a really good collectible on all 3 mats.
The second day you try again,and this time it went really well on 2 out of 3 because you knew how to deal with those weird proc. You could push for a third try the next day but you aren\\'t confident if you could do better. But this third mat could definitely be improved. So the next day you try on the last one and get the same result. Well this time you have a choice to make. You could bait for a fourth day without loosing the 2 mats you did on the second day.
But you also have never attempted the essence of darkness so perhaps a first round would t hurt.

I mean , add 1 craft like this to every crafter every patch and that would be some good stuff imo.

[KageTokage]

The progress/quality requirements on the expert recipes look to be about double that of standard 3* recipes.

The new conditions involved in making them are all strictly beneficial, too, but I'm kind of doubting that there's going to be much depth to it and we'll likely just default to using one of a few different skills for each condition (They offer 25%+ success rate, -50% durability usage, and -50% CP consumption respectively) based on how much durability/progress/quality is remaining.

Which basically confirms my suspicions that they'd be impossible to macro, but not actually that much more difficult otherwise.

[Hasrat]

Using the right skills at the right time is most of what crafting is. But yeah. The gameplay loop might've been made more interesting with more trade-off conditions. More progress, but less quality, etc. Depending on how difficult the crafts actually are, could lead to the gamble of holding off on, for example, progress, hoping for the condition to make it easy, risking a failed craft. Or make progress like usual, and take the quality hit if the condition comes up.

It's a good start, tho. I really like the idea of conditions being more than "bigger boost to quality." Hopefully it continues to improve. And hopefully these recipes provide some of what you're looking for.

[Nandrolone]

Honestly? These recipes don’t look as hardcore and difficult as I imagined, lol. Guess I’ll see when I play around with it in a few hours.

[Plastics]

The expert recipes may be fairly difficult to hit the max collectability on, though they missed the mark on rewards, and because you can do an easier craft to get points, the issue of people who want the top spot just spamming crafts (or botting) also exists.

It's mostly what I expected. I don't see a good reason to do them more than to try and hit the max collectability a couple of times and then you're done, because if it's heavily RNG based, grinding out leaderboard points is going to be all about 45k+ or whoever plays the most. I think these missed the mark.

[KageTokage]

The easier crafts give so little points that I don't think anyone who's making a serious effort to rank high will bother with them.

Expert crafts are unlikely to be off-limits for bots, unfortunately, and Diadem is liable to be swamped with them before the end of the week, too.

[Aurida]

grinding out leaderboard points is going to be all about 45k+ or whoever plays the most. I think these missed the mark.

Yeah that's pretty much about it. That and the materials are tradable, too? It wouldn't have been so bad if you, say, got 30 attempts at it in a ranking period and it took your top 20 to contribute to the score for the leaderboard, but since it's just a quantity thing after you can establish the base quality, it'll be infested with bots once they get them up and running. Maybe if the leaderboards operated on a tier system instead, but...

[Ryaz]

I see that SE still loves to have their percentages be completely wrong. +25% to actions? 85% hasty touch and 75% for the other two? Fail 75% of the time. Lol.

But I'll be skipping these for now. Unless you get extremely luck with a ton of pliant and good procs, plus no failures on centered procs, there's no way you'll even hit the minimum required. Looks like we're back to being 100% reliant on rng for us to craft the hard stuff again.

[tdb]

Honestly? These recipes don’t look as hardcore and difficult as I imagined, lol. Guess I’ll see when I play around with it in a few hours.

They seem plenty hard to me. I made three attempts at one and didn't even come close to getting enough collectability to return them, let alone reaching the max tier. I have somewhat conservative overmelds because I didn't want to spend hours farming scrips to buy VII and VIII materia, but I can trivially craft HQ three-star items starting from NQ materials. I'll just stick to farming scrips with the normal Lv80 items for now and consider attempting the expert ones again when the rewards are known.