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What do you think of the crafting?
fistorm
Member UncommonPosts: 868
I noticed everyone around in game having mini crafting looking tables, objects like in lotro had. How do you guys like the crafting so much. I walked into one crafting guild and there was literally twenty people around there with their crafting going on, was pretty amazing to see.
Comments
This game has one of teh best crafting mechanics in any mmo.
Give it a try... you'll love it!
The crafting in this game is much more involved then most other games. It harkens back to SWG with different material qualities and being able to improve the stats on items the better you get at the art you've undertaken. Where as most games recently have been, "make this item with these materials". This game is, "use this template and use whatever quality items you'd like and keep doing it until you can make much more improved versions of it.
Also, Yoshi has expressed concerns with crafter's roles in PvP and wants to have them just as needed as someone who's out there fighting. We'll see what that means 6 months from now.
I like it more than most other crafting systems I've seen. However, that is a really low bar.
The crafting itself is tedious. At first, it seems cool but the minigame is extremely simple and the patterns are extremely obvious. There is interdependency between crafts, both from your ability as a crafter and as required materials.
However, overall I think the crafting is a mediocre feature at best. Heads and tails better than most, but still not a particularly great feature of the game.
Maybe if you gave your opinion on the crafting your comment would be more useful. All we get from that is that you spent time crafting, so what?
I loved crafting,i did more crafting and harvesting than leveling.
Also i think most players have Square Enix FFXI knowledge.This means they realize Square will make crafting quite important,not the best gear but for other reasons.Expect fishing to be very important for food but in ffxi they tied other aspects into it as well,example the Mercurial Kris a multi hit dagger which sold early for millions and still sells for a lot.
Point is get into it early and stay on top of it,you will reap the benefits down the road.I remember early on release 1.0 players were involved a lot with crystal sales,so get out their and mine or log.Housing and gardening still to come,i imagine you will be making your own flowerpots and more.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
and me
and me.
I remember during the beta phase, I was aiming for a HQ version of an item for a leve turn-in. That was one of the few times I actually had a heart-pounding moment for CRAFTING in any game I've played.
LOL, I knew someone else would do it too.
crafting is shadow of its formers self. now crafting and havesting have been watered down so much u fall asleep in middle of crafting from bordem. hq items u make are worthles as they bearly better than normal items. there currently isnt any sort of ecnomy ingame because why would there be when ou get all your stuff from quests.
as it stands right now craftng which was touted as being a major part of the game is now worthless and u shouldnt bother doing but to waste time.
I'm assuming you cranked out 10 levels or so and came to this conclusion. High level crafting is quite complex. You have to strategize your steps or you will fail. There are 14 abilities that you can do during the synthesis phase and they all have their situational uses. If you don't like crafting anyway, then obviously don't bother. But for those of us who do, its probably the best crafting since SWG and I don't say that lightly.
When I acquired the skills Rumination and Observe, and started applying them to my higher level recipes, I had this oh shit things just got real moment lol.
I had to tear myself away from crafting so I could finish off the Retainer and Dye questlines.
Crafting and gathering is crazy good in this game. I didnt realize how badly I had missed this in an mmo.
Are you talking about the crafting in WoW? Because what you described is not the crafting in FFXIV.talking crafting 1.0 vs 2.0
It's incredibly tedious and painful, with potential.
Some are going to say it's complex. Maybe it is at higher levels. At low levels it's just tedious. Yeah, it's not just click and combine. You have skills to use and crafting points. But it's still ultra simplistic and zero challenge - just a ton of clicking to make trivial nonsense (to level up). There is no player skill involved (at least not early) and not a whole lot of thinking because it's all pretty obvious.
I'm sure some people can't figure it out or have trouble with it...and I'm also sure some people have problems going potty without mommy around to coach them.
Hopefully at higher levels you can make more than just the generic white gear you get from quests or vendors (exact same items). This is where the potential lies. The battle of durability vs quality to make trivial crap to level up is pretty brutal but hopefully there's a payoff in that making high quality gear at later levels or endgame might be worth all the tedium.
Also hopefully all that button pressing and time sink end up being more like a mini game and less like an incredibly tedious time sink at some point. You have to figure you just get more and more skills as you level up, allowing you to draw out the process and make higher quality stuff. Which just makes it take way longer to do one combine. If it's just for xp, it's painful. Maybe you can market this stuff. HQ is surely better than generic.
I haven't done every crafting system but I've done a lot, and say like in EQ2, crafting is like a mini-game right away. It's a real time battle of quality vs durability and if you don't pay attention, react, and aren't involved, you're just going to fail a lot. You could argue that in the EQ2 system there's some player skill involved - you both need to react appropriately events that can screw up your combine and you need to slip in other skills as possible to boost your quality without going overboard. It's a real time tug of war between exhausting durability and shooting for high quality.
The system in FFXIV isn't real time like that, it's more like turn-based. You have a "war" of durability vs quality and skills to affect it, but you just do one click at a time at your own pace (which considering the number of clicks is some form of slow) - you click to raise the bar towards finishing the item, or you click raise quality, or you fire a skill that replenish points or alter chances of success - but there's no pressure and nothing else going on like random events hindering you or setting you back. You just make that one move at a time, see what it does, make another move, til done.
You can also do HQ versions of your subcombines. So say you're making metal armor out of plates and leather - you can make HQ combines of those, and that gives you a higher starting quality on the final item. This kind of stuff is pretty cool about the system and something that at endgame, will let you really dig in and go for it when making stuff. Assuming there's anything worth making and using.
You have to level crafts like any other class, and you get very little xp for generic combines (say, from quick synthesis, which just doing X combines automatically) vs creating any type of item of quality, so unless you have tons of mats and money, it's way more efficient to do hands on 1 at a time combining. You can do leves too which would surely help a bit. If you are just doing combines to skill up (along with crafting log but that helps less and less as you level up) it's pretty painful. The xp bonus for difference in class levels helps too but then, if your adventuring class is 30 and your trade classes are way behind they aren't doing much for you, are they?
I've never been a big fan of plowing to cap THEN doing crafting and stuff (well, I'm not a fan of plowing to cap for any reason - waste of content, IMO). I like to make useful stuff while leveling if possible - so I get a little more out of my crafting. And I just like to craft.
The crafting gear also adds a nice element to the whole system even if early on that gear is all very generic (as with all early gear - same junk from vendor/quest/crafting). Being able to craft gear to make you better at crafting is cool.
I didn't read this whole thread and I'm sure some are talking this crafting system up as being deep and amazing. But it's really more about massive time sink and unless it shifts somewhat at higher levels it's also very, very simple. The main challenge is in trying not to fall asleep while spending eternity crafting mundane crap for xp.
I don't see the system in this game being any more complicated than ultra simple systems where you just click once to combine. It is easy to create things even with all the skills and durability vs quality because it's an at your own pace kind of system that's very clear. It's no mini-game or anything. It just takes way more time. There's a lot to do to make one combine, but it's no more complex than just click "combine." At least IMO. I do not equate time sink with challenge in crafting or in PvE content.
In many crafting systems you put a ton of time and mats in and you end up using very little of what you make and maybe, at endgame, when it really matters, you can make a handful or less of useful stuff. Game progresses, next tier comes out, you can make another tiny amount of items that are marginally useful for a while. All that time and effort....to make a couple of things. The question is, will it be any different in FFXIV, or will you be spending considerably more time doing the mundane to make that handful? For a system as "complex" (not really, it's time sink, vastly more than most simple systems) the payoff should be solid. We'll see.
So I like the durability and quality thing, and having skills to dink around with while crafting, and like how you can stack mats and skills to get very high quality, but it does feel very tedious when you're just skilling up on mundane crap, and unless there's a payoff in being able to make some useful gear along the way or at least at endgame, then it will just be a monumental time sink.
Some may just like the crafting for what it is...crafting and more than just click and combine...and that's groovy too.
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I like it so far. As most has already been said I just want to add you can do guild leves to reduce the tedious part. But yes, when you want to power level a crafter class it probably will be tedious.
I am just switching between leveling my adventurer, harvesting and crafting classes. And I am not in a rush. (currently lvl 16 con, 2 harvesters and 3 crafting classes at 10).
About the usefullness of crafting we have to wait I guess.
Long weekend here in the UK, spent the majority of it gathering and crafting. HQ items are the best you'll get outside the dungeons, I invested way too much time in making sure I had the best HQ gear I could craft, lots of grinding nodes to get the HQ mats. My gathering and crafting classes are well ahead of my battle classes. In short: I like it
actually 31 goldsmith and 30 miner
crafting starts to be interesting and complex at around lv 20, before that its boring because there is very few skills.
with goldsmith I have almost all materials needed from mining, few recipes can't be done without materials from other crafts.
other crafts on the other hand (from friends experience) needs a lot of materials from several gathering and crafting diciplines to the point its hard to gain levels (past level 15 or so you can't find materials on vendors, maybe there is other vendors in the wild but haven't really found out).
well if you need advices, you can find me on Moogle server (Jareb Forgeglace, English and French speaking)