After months of putting it off, Ragar finally talks about FFXIV's crafting system and the changes he'd like to see down the road

Quick Synthesis: The Trap Button

First up is a button on the Crafting Log screen that has some use later, but is honestly more of a detriment to new crafters than a benefit: the Quick Synthesis button. Once you’ve crafted an item the first time, you’ll be given this option to make multiple copies of the same item in one go. Early on this sounds great since you’ll need lots of crafted components for your later recipes and that just saves time. There are two problems with this however: lost XP and lost HQ items. Using Quick Synthesis greatly reduces the XP you get from each of those items and it only has a base 1% HQ rate. At first this may not sound like a problem since you’re probably planning on using it for those level 1 recipes you think you’ve outgrown. This is a mistake though because those components, when made by hand, generally yield worthwhile XP for at least 10 levels past their item level, so you’re signing up for more high-level recipe crafting and more material farming/buying to level up than is necessary.

Even if you’re not worried about the lost XP per item on those base components, the 1% HQ rate plays an even bigger role with those materials. Using HQ components when crafting boosts your base Quality for a recipe, greatly reducing the amount you need to generate while also going for 100% Progress. By manually crafting your low level materials you can easily get HQ versions of, you make life easier when it comes time to craft higher level recipes because now you’re starting with a much higher base Quality. This higher base Quality number means more XP upon completion, a greater chance of an HQ version of that high level item as well as simply saving some of the work your limited CP pool has to accomplish.  

Now that we’ve established the problems with the Quick Synthesis button, how do we fix it? Whether or not it’s a trap for low-level players, it is useful for those max level crafters who can spin any materials into HQ goods through gear, skill or ability rotations they have developed or found on Reddit. There’s not much you can do with an automatic crafting option like this, so my idea is for a more manual mass-production option. This can either be done with a quantity counter on the recipe page or it can be added to the list of Quick Synthesis options. Essentially the player could be given the option to craft multiple of those components, but they still have to do the normal crafting process, including using all of their abilities. By using this method the player would gain the majority, if not all, of the XP they would for each individual craft and they can still shoot for HQ results, but they only need to go through the crafting process once for all of their components. There are risks with this method though: fail once here and you could lose all of your materials and XP, so the player has to weigh that against individual crafting or the normal Quick Synthesis option. HQ results could be done either as an all-or-nothing with the Quality or the percentage for the Quality score could give how many of the final products are HQ versus normal. This suggested mass-production option may serve the same general idea as Quick Synthesis, but it brings the crafting mini-game back into it and keeps the player involved.

This Recipe is Cheap – Time to Grind It For Five Levels

In most MMOs leveling your crafting professions usually boiled down to “what’s the cheapest thing I can make that gives me the most skill points,” repeated from when you first pick up the trade to when you get that final skill point. Other than making maybe a few pieces for yourself here and there, it was mostly grinding out a pile of junk to vendor as you leveled. Since crafted gear in FFXIV is equivalent to most quest drops (even the HQs are close or equivalent to pre-50 dungeon drops) as you level your combat classes, DoH classes do have some incentive to mix things up and craft multiple recipes to sell on the Market Board or store in their Armory Chest for future alt class leveling. In addition, FFXIV gives its players bonus XP the first time each recipe in your Crafting Log is made as well as giving achievements to encourage a “gotta build them all” attitude with crafters. The system actually works fairly well… early on. The problem comes once you start unlocking crafting guildleves.

Every five levels each of the DoH classes will have three new guildleves asking for a quantity of some recipe from their most current tier. In theory a player might use these to fill out the tail end of each block of five levels, once they’ve received their first crafting bonus for all of their new recipes and just want a little help pushing for that next tier of recipes. In practice, however, many of your recipes will require materials you don’t have on hand, that are either obnoxious to farm or cost a fortune on the Market Board. Some might assume you could just turn around and sell those crafted goods to make back the money, but for many DoH classes, quite a few of those leveling recipes just don’t sell for enough to account for the price of buying the materials. This means a lot more grinding of the recipes you can complete.

At this point it may look like the crafting guildleves have already solved the problem, which they somewhat have. However, this now moves guildleves from their original supporting role to more of a “save all of your allowances for crafting” position. This is compounded by the fact that crafting guildleves can give sizable bonus XP for HQ items; if a crafter gives HQ items to the quest NPC rather than normal quality, they’ll receive a bonus of up to 200% of the base quest XP. In addition, some guildleves even allow for multiple turn-ins off the same quest, so a prepared crafter who has done their research could end up getting 900% of the original guildleve XP for a single leve allowance. When you look at those kinds of numbers, it certainly does look like the game was balanced around grinding guildleves from 1 to 50, doesn’t it?

I have no issues with the guildleve system as it is, so the problem here is how do we give players an option if they don’t really feel like grinding one specific thing for five levels, followed by another for five more? Basically we need to give players a reason to make more than just one type of item. We can do this by providing mixed guildleves with higher rewards. Have one guildleve option that wants items from three or four different recipes (eg a full set of armor from an Armorer, a four-course meal from a Culinarian, etc) that gives a much larger bonus amount than the other guildleves to counter the extra effort. Currently, most guildleve tiers have the same bonus XP for each leve, so many crafters ignore the ones with obnoxious recipes or expensive materials. By sweetening the pot on those guildleves, players now have to weigh their options instead of immediately going for the cheapest option. Something similar can be done with the Grand Company turn-ins as well. Right now there’s only one turn-in per profession per day. Adding additional turn-in options here gives players even more options for seals (no real reason to limit this since you can grind them faster by running FATEs anyway) and gives more reason to complete your Crafting Log entries.