An educated rant: Why pentamelding is %@$&*!-backwards

[SnowVix]

Having a fully pentameled green ornate set is almost if not better then Savage gear. Not by much....but it's pretty close.

This is blatantly false. No amount of substat will make up for losing out on 29 points of main stat, and 13 points of substat that are completely inaccessible because you're 20 item levels down on a chest piece (which is the only piece that Ornate exists for).

[Kandraxx]

Well that’s basically what you get when you try to make a carbon copy of WoW PvE without knowing what you’re actually doing. The whole “endgame” PvE in this game should be scrapped and the resources allocated to more side stuff, as it’s not really good.

[IdowhatIwant]

Well that’s basically what you get when you try to make a carbon copy of WoW PvE without knowing what you’re actually doing. The whole “endgame” PvE in this game should be scrapped and the resources allocated to more side stuff, as it’s not really good.

Lol, then go back over to WoW cause I guess they are doing it right with the daily x resource grind. I think the end game is bad in FFXIV, but I think the end game in WoW is worst.

[Eraden]

I can tell you right now that if you want to stay on the cutting edge of gathering, prepping gear is NOT cheap. I've estimated from my own experiences that getting a guaranteed pull of 2 1000 quality reducible items from an ephemeral node for the cost of 400 GP, requires somewhere around 3600 Perception and at least 3000 Gathering. To get that much perception, you have to optimize, use gathering food, and pentameld the hell out of your gear.

[LaylaTsarra]

Yes make it so others can't do it and they'll have to level crafters for themselves.

And seriously they've made it easy for penta melding now that you don't have to do the melds one at a time and fail and keep going until you get one that sticks. It's pretty easy for someone to do it for you now as long as you have the materia.

[Conundrum]

So the new tier comes out and you want to do damage to the bosses. Right? Wrong. The ability to pentameld is locked behind unnecessary side quests and gatekept by the gil markets. Seriously. Has anyone ever questioned why you need CRAFTERS and GATHERERS so you can overmeld on COMBAT CLASSES? It's just a timesink that punishes people who want to do real content instead of blowing away their subscription time on garbage. Imagine you have your driver's license and you want to drive a car, but before you could even step into a car you had to learn how to learn how to play the violin. FFXIV is a world where only violinists can drive cars, and the actual racers are left taking the bus. And when you dare to point that out, all the violinists say "well it's not fair! Go learn to play some Vivaldi!!!". So you go "ah well, might as well look at a youtube tutorial on how to play this thing" and you realize that the violin is more expensive than your rent. It's prohibitively expensive to even get things melded. Seriously, it makes no sense to brickwall the people who want to actually play the game instead of jumping through pointless hoops. Solutions are to

1) Divorce pentamelding from non-combat classes, and give it to people who reach the level cap of an expansion OR
2) Make materia drop from current extreme trials and normal raids. When you clear a savage fight of the tier, then you're 100% guaranteed to have the overmeld go through.

It's basically crafter welfare. Most MMO try some form of it, to force people to be customers to the crafters. It's one of the things I really dislike about FFXIV is it makes crafters mega-rich compared to everyone else.


It's strange how people don't like dealing with crafters...well...it would be strange if most them weren't effing thieves. in their pricing. (of course they try to dress it up as "muh supply and demand")

[DerpyWhiskers]

It's basically crafter welfare. Most MMO try some form of it, to force people to be customers to the crafters. It's one of the things I really dislike about FFXIV is it makes crafters mega-rich compared to everyone else.


It's strange how people don't like dealing with crafters...well...it would be strange if most them weren't effing thieves. in their pricing. (of course they try to dress it up as "muh supply and demand")

This is just totally incorrect on several aspects. First, crafting doesn't get anyone rich in this game lol. If ever it did, it certainly doesn't now. By the time the crafter spends the many millions of Gil and months getting crafts and gear all up and together, with melds and all, then weeks to months getting the skills and macros dialed in, the crafter is very far into the red in time and money.

Ok yay then ready to craft and make some of dat sweet Gil back!?? Aw nawww sonnnn, now ya got a few things crafted n ready to sell at barely any profit at all, then welcome to the market bots! Welcome to the hell where, after all that work, things sell for LESS than the materials bc of ppl with retainer bots.

Hmmm well, geez I should be gathering this stuff for free then crafting it instead of buying mats. Aight homie... ok more months and millions getting DOH's up, geared, skills figured out, melded. Ok yay now we're ready to make money! Ok, now get to crafting kiddo! Hours and hours per day crafting stuff to sell, after months and millions invested, then the stuff DOESN'T EVEN SELL bc the normal human gets undercut repeatedly within seconds by what appears to be countless bots.

So yeah, how exactly is this "crafter welfare" lol? Believe me, the regular human crafters and the regular human buyers are BOTH losing to bots. My couple lucky income spurts have been just lucky foresight, I spent DAYS AND DAYS hand crafting a few 99 stacks of the AR Cotton bolts in HQ to sell the day the new recipes dropped. I made just a smidge over 1 Mil with that spurt, but that's not repeatable really. Been crafting almost 10 months and TBH I'm probably still in negative Gil compared to investment but idc.

And again, as other's have pointed out repeatedly, nobody is "at the mercy" or "held hostage" by crafters. Those materia clusters are raining like crazy from Roulettes, Hunts, etc. You can have the NPC do the double meld and that's enough to get into a raid with. Or ask anyone near an Aetherite for a meld and they'll do it for free using your free materia from Roulettes, Hunts, etc.

As for gear, rn the Classical crafted gear looks like about 120K a piece on Faerie and honestly at that price point it's not even worth gathering or buying the mats to craft as the profit would be so small, it could be considered a loss for the time invested.

[Conundrum]

crafting doesn't get anyone rich in this game lol. If ever it did, it certainly doesn't now.

I didn't even bother reading passed this sentence, it's so comically inaccurate.

[Vyrerus]

This is just totally incorrect

Success and wealth in MMOs is always a snowball effect. Once you've leveled crafters/gatherers and geared them in one expansion, it becomes even easier the next go of it.

Everything in FFXIV can generate gil for the player. Gatherers and Crafters, even if you're not using them for raw gil gains by playing the market board can still lead to far higher, steady wealth accumulation.

Leves give a timed allowance for gil and other rewards. This is a raw reward gated by time and materials, but the time gate means you never have to worry about rushing for materials. It's small, but it's easily done with auto crafting for even the lower rewards on the simpler leves.

Being able to meld for only the cost of the materia you gain by the many means is a big saver.

So even if you're not some kingpin mastermind, then by having crafters and gatherers leveled, your gil amount will basically rise automatically the more you play with everything you do. If you focus on gil accumulation over combat, then you can make a ton of money. You just have to learn to play the market and be patient. The biggest spurts always come at new gear patches from the fastest people, but there's always some moderate niche that can be filled that bots aren't getting their grubby mits on. In the past it was generally stuff gated by combat requirements, like crafted primal weapons or replica high allagan gear.

The real issue is that bots do control the market, but that can be viewed positively in at least one aspect. That being that no tyrannical player can really control the market either. I remember in FFXI some folks who had all the time and money to make gil via crafting would create monopolies on a lot of items on the auction house, and you literally couldn't compete with them. They probably botted too, but it was one person behind the bots, rather than a conglomerate of RMTs. At least in the early days. Nowadays it's probably not much better.

[Kakure]

It's basically crafter welfare. Most MMO try some form of it, to force people to be customers to the crafters. It's one of the things I really dislike about FFXIV is it makes crafters mega-rich compared to everyone else.


It's strange how people don't like dealing with crafters...well...it would be strange if most them weren't effing thieves. in their pricing. (of course they try to dress it up as "muh supply and demand")

You know who profits when a crafter sells you a Hades Barding for 2m gil? The person who sold the primal drop to the crafter for 1.9m gil. Tomestone materials account for 50-90% of the price of crafted 580 gear. If a crafted item seems expensive, it's almost always because it requires a rare drop to make (like from treasure maps or extreme primals). A lot of crafters will even make you stuff for free if you bring them the materials.

It sounds like maybe you aren't good at making money because you just don't understand how the in-game economy works.