SE: Please consider changing the crafting menu

[Iscah]

I was thinking this the other day when I was explaining to someone that crafting is now the same class you just have to level multiple times to unlock different recipes.

"Is now" the same class multiple times? Did they differ somehow in the past?

What bugs me is that every single item is the same. Whether it's a necklace or a shirt or an entire house it's the exact same "hit the glowing ball" with the same skills.

[Jojoya]

"Is now" the same class multiple times? Did they differ somehow in the past?

What bugs me is that every single item is the same. Whether it's a necklace or a shirt or an entire house it's the exact same "hit the glowing ball" with the same skills.

They did differ in the past. You'd have the basic synthesis and touch actions in common (with their class specific names) but then there would be unique actions. Things like Muscle Memory, Manipulation, Tricks of the Trade, Byregot's Blessing, Comfort Zone, Maker's Mark+Flawless Synthesis, Ingenuity, etc. belonged to separate classes. The only way to get access on other classes was to level up their assigned class and select them as one of the limited number of cross class skills you could have.

What happened? Serious crafters were leveling all classes regardless so they had all the cross-class skills and could grab the "must haves" from other classes. Rotations would get worked out that worked across all classes. Crafters who only wanted to level one or two specific classes were at a serious disadvantage compared to others crafting the same items because they lacked the cross class skills needed for the efficient rotations.

The skill "homogenization" that SE implemented was formalizing something the crafting community had developed on its own.

SE could have removed the ability to have cross-class skills but then that would have created a balancing nightmare trying to create the recipe requirements for each class. Imagine working out durability, progress and quality needs when one class can only restore/reduce durability loss, another only gets CP recovery, a third only gets Control boosts, etc.

All that extra work wouldn't have really done anything because you'd still have the handful of crafters that would work out the macros for each class while the rest of the community would copy those macros once shared online. Once a macro is doing the work, there's nothing to make the class feel unique.

[Iscah]

The only way to get access on other classes was to level up their assigned class and select them as one of the limited number of cross class skills you could have.

What happened? Serious crafters were leveling all classes regardless so they had all the cross-class skills and could grab the "must haves" from other classes.

I don't really count that as "used to be unique" though, just "used to have a more complicated route to acquire all the skills" if it's designed from the start that you can cross-class what is missing.

And what I mean about all the crafts being the same is that there's no sense of doing different actions on different types of crafts. Every item is approached the same way with only the exact numbers to differentiate them. No sense of approaching something delicate with a different strategy to something large and broad-strokes.

I don't know what a crafting system would look like that could take such things into account, or whether I'd even enjoy it, but I do know that repeating the same strategy on every single item for hundreds of items across the crafting logs feels tedious.