The Exarchic crafts are significantly too hard.

[Arkevorkhat]

The minimum requirements to craft Exarchic gear are frankly too high. I have head-to-toe Aesthete gear, some of it melded, and I can't even attempt to craft any of the gear, nor any of the pre-crafts. I understand that Exarchic basically exists as a way for pentamelded crafters to try and make back the tens of millions of gil they burned to meld their gear, but it's frankly ridiculous that there should be crafts that are sequestered to the top 1% of crafters.

This is frankly just a transparent attempt to make the rich get richer in this game, to the detriment of those of us who don't enjoy putting on a movie and pressing a macro over and over.

[Greyhawk]

Don't forget your food buffs, then you might actually pull off a successful HQ craft. :P

[Bacent]

It's not really the 'top percentage of crafters'? If you got up to date with your crafts then it'd be leagues easier.

Also note you said 'some of it melded'. Melds add on a ton of stats, as well as food and medicine buffs (Hell there's even 10 more points you can get from FC buffs for craft/control).

But a lot of this seems to be some assumptions and anger for it not being easier.

[Wrestlefire769]

They're meant to be.

[LisSquid]

I was under the impression crafting was easier this expansion. Who knew?

Meld your gear and then overmeld it. Make sure your tools are HQ, too. You'll notice a night and day difference.

[Rufalus]

It's a lot easier to get materia than it used to be. Instead of reducing the need for melded gear, they just let you buy whatever materia you want using scrips and give you a large amount of scrips if you do weekly custom delivery. Also extracting materia from spiritbonded gear no longer destroys the gear in the process. So everyone who wants to craft master recipes should just put in the time to advanced meld their crafter set. Don't forget to consume food and tea/syrup for further stat boost.

[Kamatsu]

I can craft Exarch gear and have spent ZERO gil on materia. I can do so with a 80+% chance of HQ... yes it's not 100% guaranteed, but it's still better than none. Some of the base items needed I do need to get HQ mats to guarantee HQ craft's of them, else I can go with normal quality and run a 70-80+% chance of HQ'ing them. Again, having spent zero gil on materia for either my crafter's or gatherer's.

There's a reason why SE added in both a crafter and gatherer beast tribe to ShB which lets you buy VII & VIII materia. Do the beast tribes daily and you'll be able to buy materia every 3 days (for the VIII's) or daily (for the VII's). Also thanx to there being 2 good sources of yellow & white script's due to the 2 ShB custom deliveries... you can easily use both scripts to get a bunch of VII & VIII materia each week. In fact, due to how weasily it is to get yellow scripts via easily crafted/caught items... you can easily stock up on VII materia.

Am I fully pentamelded? Nope. I have VIII's in all base materia slots, and mostly VII's in at least the 1st advanced slots. All items have at least 2 extra materia... and I'm now saving up materia to go for the full pentameld. Yes it's going to take awhile to do so due to not spending gil, but it's 100% doable for EVERYONE and no need to be a gillionaire (which I'm not... I have like 2 million gil... I'd be considered broke by most ppl. lolz)

Also note - when doing the ShB Custom Delevieries... when they level up they give you free food. Keep the food, it's free food towards high-end crafting. You can also buy/make decent food fairly cheapily/easily as well for both crafting and gathering. It can help put you over the stat points needed... or help you reach the needed CP for HQ'ing gear, etc.

[Arkevorkhat]

I was under the impression crafting was easier this expansion. Who knew?

Meld your gear and then overmeld it. Make sure your tools are HQ, too. You'll notice a night and day difference.

So basically the answer to "I don't want to waste all of my gil overmelding gear that will be outmoded in 6 months" is "Meld your gear, waste your time and money like the rest of us did."

[Sirweed]

Don't play MMO then

[Arkevorkhat]

Adressing this in general, because there's a common theme between many of these replies:

I have full normal (non-advanced) melds on all of my aesthete gear, which is all HQ, including my tools, plus some overmelds.
Using High Quality Chili Crab, I can only meet the minimum requirements to attempt the crafts.
Having spent an hour in the shed on Teamcraft, I was only able to manage 14% HQ on precrafts, with HQ materials where they are available, on one of my specialist jobs.

If I want to have a statistically significant chance at receiving a high quality final craft, I need all of the materials that can be obtained as high quality, to be high quality.