Ishgard Restoration phase 3 feedback thread

[Kakure]

I would love to see the competition changed from a grindfest to something that more accurately reflects player understanding and ability, but the skill cap on expert crafts is just too low and the RNG too high to do that in the ways people are suggesting here.

If everyone had 50 attempts under the current expert crafting system, there would be a very narrow point spread at the top and the difference between the person with 37 max-quality crafts and the one with 39 would probably just be a function of luck. Increase the collectability cap to something like 10,500 and we would be forced to lean on Hasty Touch and Patient Touch to build stacks, introducing even more randomness into the rankings. Increase it to an unobtainably high number and the whole endeavor becomes 100% RNG.

There is a decided upper limit on what you can make without Good or Pliant procs. That might be a bit higher or lower depending on your approach and your particular melds and your tolerance for risk, but eventually you'll run into a wall where you simply cannot go any higher. Anything above that is only possible because of Pliant and Good conditions, and thus a reflection of your favor with the condition gods rather than your ability to squeeze blood from a stone. You need to be competent enough to use Tricks of the Trade and Manipulation in the right places, but that's not a super high bar. No one is ever going to look at a craft that hits 20,000 collectability and think "Wow, I wish I were good enough to do that!" They would rightly think "Wow, I wish I got that many Good procs in a single craft!"

There are a number of things SE could do to make expert crafting a bit less luck-based (tone down Pliant, lower the progress so players aren't forced to rely on Rapid Synthesis, etc.), but the only way to really make it a better reflection of player understanding and skill is to make expert crafting harder (as in more complicated, not just the same system we have now but with bigger numbers).

In my view, the way to do that is to make it less strictly reactive and more forward-looking. Crafting used to involve planning ahead, stacking nested buffs for optimal benefit. Now it mostly just involves reacting to conditions as they appear, which isn't all that hard. Ideally, it would involve both planning ahead AND reacting to what happens during the craft. I don't expect SE to bring back Steady Hand or Comfort Zone, but if they wanted to make crafting a bit more forward-looking again they could do some things like:

• Give players some control over conditions -- maybe a crafting equivalent to Impulsive Appraisal or a Careful Observation analogue that sets the condition to Normal and gives you whatever your old condition was on the next turn.
• Add more structured abilities, a la Whistle While You Work.
• Add more combo abilities. Some of the most interesting expert crafting decisions arise when you have something like Great Strides > Innovation > Preparatory Touch > Great Strides > Observe > [PLIANT].
• Make our buffs stack multiplicatively. Currently, all the %-based ability buffs stack additively so, for instance, Muscle Memory > Veneration > Groundwork x5 is exactly the same as Muscle Memory > Groundwork > Veneration> Groundwork x4. Players should be rewarded for understanding how abilities work and slotting them together optimally, not for understanding that it just doesn't matter.
• Make Waste Not less bad by letting us use Prudent Touch with it, at least for expert crafts where the inclusion of Sturdy (and odd durability levels) makes the WN/Prudent limitation seem a bit unnecessary. Even without the limitation, no one would use Waste Not before/apart from Manipulation anyway.
• Allow us to see the next condition in queue.

I'm not saying that reacting to conditions is bad and I understand that some RNG is necessary, but if you want crafting to better reflect player understanding and puzzle-solving skills, on any given step the answer to the question "What are you going to do the step after next?" probably shouldn't be "Who knows? It depends entirely on the next condition and the one after that."

[Kakure]

I also kind of wonder how prevalent hoarding/sandbagging really is. It seems to me that a lot of what people are talking about here is mostly just conjecture.

I personally added the vast majority of my points on the last three days, including ~600k points on the final day. I phoned it in for the first six days, then spent 8-10 hours a day crafting and turned in the bulk of what I made before bed, a couple hours after the daily cutoff (so most of what I crafted on day eight didn't appear until day nine and most of what I crafted on day nine didn't appear in my total until the final ranking). Sure, of course I realized that it benefited me to do that, but it was also just convenient for me. It was less a grand scheme to trick people for competitive advantage and more just... not wanting to pause in the middle of a productive crafting session to go play Kupo of Fortune fifty times.

It sucks to think that you have done enough to place and just miss out, and I have sympathy for anyone in that situation. But I am kind of curious why the assumption seems to be that someone who adds 100k or 200k or 300k points on the final day was saving up crafts for days and not just crafting at the end.

[DoH]

These are some really good points, Kakure. I think that a good crafter, across 100 crafts, would still do much better than a bad player even if RNG wasn't on their side; as I mentioned, you often don't know what is going to be played next in Triple Triad or Mahjong tournaments, but if you've played enough you will generally have a sense of what to do, even though there's a large amount of RNG involved.

Having said that, having an indication of what the Condition would be on the next turn would make it a lot more interesting. Either that, or having a fixed interval for the procs (e.g., it always goes 2 Normal procs, followed by 1 random beneficial proc, followed by the opposing detrimental proc (if they were to add detrimental procs)). Such changes would certainly make the competition (and thus expert crafts in general) a lot more fun and, more importantly, skill based.

I think the inability to use Prudent Touch during WN1/2 is probably a relic from before Expert Recipes when durability only went up or down in intervals of 5. Hopefully they'll realize that this restriction is no longer needed and fix it. It would also be nice if they would cause applying Manipulation when you still have at least one stack of Manipulation up to give you back 5 durability. It's always annoying that, if you refresh Manipulation when stacks are still up, it counts as a step but does not give you back 5 durability despite what the tooltip says.

[BluuMeowmeow]

As someone that wasn't worried about the title or achievement, but was grinding for scrips and to level DOH, I would have liked to have seen "overall" rankings.

I ranked #343 as WVR, with a fraction of my time spent during the restoration. I was expecting a series of "---" next to my jobs. Got me thinking... how would I have done in overall points?

[Morningstar1337]

I think detrimental conditions might be interesting, but I think having it affect something besides the effectiveness of a given skill would yield more interesting results, like a say is bad conditions use up more durability or CP (likewise, Good and Excellent would affect those aspects as well)

Like for example there would be 5 conditions:

• Excellent: multiplies quality by I think is 4? Removes CP costs on all actions, halves durability use, makes the next condition Poor, adds an extra IQ stack for Touch actions
• Good: Halves CP costs for action, multiplies quality gain by 2
• Normal: the baseline
• Bad: Doubles CP use on Touch and synthesis actions, halves quality gain.
• Poor: Quadruples CP use on Touch and Synthesis Actions, doubles Durability use, reduces quality gain to a quarter, removes 3 IQ stacksif a touch action is used

While it might make things more RNG heavy at current, combined with actions that manipulate conditions, it would allow more skill to be in play. Especially since Observe already exists to bypass negative procs.

[KageTokage]

I also kind of wonder how prevalent hoarding/sandbagging really is. It seems to me that a lot of what people are talking about here is mostly just conjecture.

I personally added the vast majority of my points on the last three days, including ~600k points on the final day. I phoned it in for the first six days, then spent 8-10 hours a day crafting and turned in the bulk of what I made before bed, a couple hours after the daily cutoff (so most of what I crafted on day eight didn't appear until day nine and most of what I crafted on day nine didn't appear in my total until the final ranking). Sure, of course I realized that it benefited me to do that, but it was also just convenient for me. It was less a grand scheme to trick people for competitive advantage and more just... not wanting to pause in the middle of a productive crafting session to go play Kupo of Fortune fifty times.

It sucks to think that you have done enough to place and just miss out, and I have sympathy for anyone in that situation. But I am kind of curious why the assumption seems to be that someone who adds 100k or 200k or 300k points on the final day was saving up crafts for days and not just crafting at the end.

I don't recall anyone thinking such meager point gains were unusual.

I'm thinking stuff along the lines of 600K+ or in the case of FSH one million+ personally.