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

[Caimie_Tsukino]

I think these Expert Recipes are pretty good. I'm quite happy with the difficulty that it's currently at. It's true that you do depend on the RNG-driven conditions to do them, but that's the primary idea of how a harder recipe should be.

Most of the times, we need Pliants which greatly saves our CP for durab restoration. But if it doesn't appear early, you can still work around it until it appear later -- you just need to know how to handle a late Pliant! The total number of steps are quite long, so it's only natural that you'll encounter a few Pliants eventually. In the case that you really just got 1 or 2, then maybe really bad luck, and the craft will fail. But otherwise, there's a lot of time/steps for buffering.

The same goes for the all-hated Hasty Touches. Unlike ARR, which 3 to 4 failed Hasty would screw you up completely, here we can fail a bunch of Hasty and it'll still be fine. So even though we always say "actions that do not succeed 100% is a bad idea", it still somewhat works out here since there's a lot of buffering for the failed touches.

[Nandrolone]

Honestly, this whole expert recipes backlash just proves how spoiled the community is when it comes to accessibility and simplification. Most of the players are so used to Yoshida just handing them things on a silver platter with no rng, no difficulty, no locking, etc.

Then, when he does it once...on content that is optional, no less....people just want to cry “HW is back! omg! End of the world!” If HW was back, things on the market would cost at least 1.2 million gil a piece. Don’t see that? Then I believe you are NOT in heavensward anymore. Come on, guys...let’s not take one step forward and two steps back.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

If there is an immediate problem here, it's the reward system. If one has to do these Expert Recipes to get a good rank, and if getting a good rank is required to actually get a reward (and we still don't know what will be given yet, do we?), then it's a really stressful thing to do while fighting the leaderboard. The idea is to be REWARD-driven, not STRESS-driven... Imagine how you feel when you suddenly get kicked below top 10 on the very last day!

I don't think rewarding the Top 10 or 20 is as important as the idea of rewarding whoever getting pass a certain score. I mean, it's OK to reward the Top 10 as well, such as given a title. But we do need a MUCH better reward for players who get pass certain scores with Expert Recipes! That will provide an attractive force for people to do these Expert Recipes.

[Jojoya]

If there is an immediate problem here, it's the reward system. If one has to do these Expert Recipes to get a good rank, and if getting a good rank is required to actually get a reward (and we still don't know what will be given yet, do we?), then it's a really stressful thing to do while fighting the leaderboard. The idea is to be REWARD-driven, not STRESS-driven... Imagine how you feel when you suddenly get kicked below top 10 on the very last day!

The achievements are the reward driven content. Leaderboards are always competitive and therefore a source of stress if you're not the type of person driven by competition (I know I'm not).

I'm not going to worry about my ranking this first time around. Let all the competitive people push to be in the top 12. I plan to enjoy the content for now and get my rewards in a later ranking period.

[Stabby-Chan]

Hello,

Grinding DOES NOT EQUAL better, thrilling, and challenging.
Remember when we had to level all 8 to cap then set cross-class skills so they all operated the same? ...just to grind out tools (not really skill) in ARR/HW?

Remember Maker's Mark and Flawless Synthesis? Remember those cute 64 stacks under 6377 difficulty for Stormblood 2 star craft/gatherer gear? That also was annihilated by macros later.

Remember when it was a thing to use Steady Hand II + Great Strides + Ingenuity II + Innovation + Byregot's Miracle + Great Strides + Byregot's Brow?
and back then brow had a 100% success rate under specialization?

Difficulty? Whats that!?
We had Steady Hand II and Reclaim back then, Stealing the Chance out of Chance Macros.

I used to do
Muscle Memory + Inner Quiet + Steady Hand II + Piece by Piece + Prudent Touch x 2 + Patient Touch x 2.

This had a 64% chance of working.
If it did, I was already over 50% in progress and at 11 IQ Stacks.
If it failed, I would just use Reclaim and Botch the craft to have a 90% chance of reclaiming materials.

So 1/10th chance to lose my materials on a 36% chance of failure....
where upon success I know I will go from 0 - 100% on light melds with food....
How do you think I went from nothing to fully pentemelded in a week after getting Goddess of the Hand in SB? Then I went to safer macros.....

Today, Chance Macros has a MUCH HIGHER chance of failure.

Reflect + Patient Touch x 2 has a 75% Chance of failure and no Reclaim to fall back on.

Expert-Recipes are more pliant-RNG dependent.

I wish there could be a Savage-Level version of crafting that gave us our own soulbound savage-iLvL gear once a week for crafters to show we really are a big deal, but that would take making Crafting more non-linear and making people actually THINK and not beat everything with macros.

[NanaWiloh]

Honestly, this whole expert recipes backlash just proves how spoiled the community is when it comes to accessibility and simplification. Most of the players are so used to Yoshida just handing them things on a silver platter with no rng, no difficulty, no locking, etc.

Then, when he does it once...on content that is optional, no less....people just want to cry “HW is back! omg! End of the world!” If HW was back, things on the market would cost at least 1.2 million gil a piece. Don’t see that? Then I believe you are NOT in heavensward anymore. Come on, guys...let’s not take one step forward and two steps back.

I am not doing the expert recipes but I did have fun watching the hardcore crafters on my crafting discord go nuts. Patch notes dropped and they started slamming the teamcraft sim despite it not being updated with the new procs. Didnt take long for some results to come back showing how far experts can be pushed without proc's. Best 2 hours I have spent in a discord just watching people slam away at something

[Fate_Testarossa]

Here's a very easy way to create a mount for every crafter:

Make a carriage as a base mount. Now attach different items to it depending on the crafter.

BSM? Attach some existing weapon sprites to the carriage/cart.
ARM? Attach some Armors/Armor parts to the carriage/cart.
And so on and so on. They could basically make one base model, and then just add already existing objects to it. That way they can basically create 8 mounts with little effort and I'm sure people would still be excited over it.

I'd really love to have a little Carriage for my BSM with some weapons attached to it.

[TrenDeca]

It’s sad to see such an amazing and well thought out thread be buried like this.

[HeulGDarian]

It’s sad to see such an amazing and well thought out thread be buried like this.

sorry sorry im late im late. What did i miss? The op message was awesome and im pretty sure i have to thank him for the expert rlts and all the crafter mounts , as well as the equivalent of crafter astrope in the form of pteranodon.
Did the forums went pepega again?

[Nixxe]

It’s sad to see such an amazing and well thought out thread be buried like this.

I'm not really sure what you expect. That's how forums work. No matter how popular a thread is, it eventually falls by the wayside.