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Awsume...
Does anyone one know what stats cap at? or is there no cap?

That is pretty nice right there.

Shame, website it blocked by work firewall, i guess ill look when i get home.

The most useful craftable gear that I actually see worn at endgame are the Astral accessories for BLM's and WHM's trying to stock up on HP and Accuracy for T5.

Well that's depressing. One thing I loved about FFXIV was the idea of it being content driven to the core, including gathering/professions. Why bother with crafting if you can only make entry-level gear? This might just be my wrong impressions, but it seems like the rate gil is produced isn't high enough compared to its use rate for gear to actually to inflate to prices where it is both worthwhile to reach that level of crafting skill AND be a desirable purchase for a new 50 looking to bypass some endgame hurdles...

I really hope they do something else with it, if they want gear to be all drops. (I personally would have preferred some pieces at least have mixed sources - drops OR crafting).

Housing will obviously be nice, particularly for something like Woodworking. But I feel like we'll really need more cosmetic options to make it worthwhile... Maybe they can add some purely-cosmetic recipes as new armor skins, to help people customize their look, but they'll need the drops for the stats?

Oh well, I guess I'll just hold off on leveling a DoH right now. Or I'll just do cooking or woodworking.

From what the Live Letter implies, they are looking at making the DoH more relevant by adding crafted vanity slot items that people will want. This may not be exactly what crafters want, but I'm thinking it will be effective to a certain point.

I think that the "best" gear will always be dropped.

The crafted gear seems to be a "shortcut" to be able to run the last/most difficult raid.

Right now, the highest crafted gear that we have is ilevel 70. it's easily considered as the low minimum to be able to run the highest end-game (ilevel 90, bahamut coil)

Highest ilevel can be acquired by running the highest end-game (cap on number of time it can be run) or slowly farming mytho (cap on that as well)

Right now we have
ilevel 55-60: Given to you free / dropped in dungeon / crafted (Militia gear)
ilevel 70:easily farmed with philo or craftable set (vanya, darksteel, astral accessories, etc)
ilevel 80-90: Dropped from end-game raid (the highest available) / slow farming with mythos

At 2.2, my guest is that it will be

ilevel 55-60: Given to you free / dropped in dungeon / crafted (Militia gear)
ilevel 70: farmed with philo or craftable set (vanya, darksteel, astral accessories, etc)
ilevel 80-90: Dropped from raid / easily farming with mythos (no more cap) / new craftable set
ilevel 100?: Dropped from new end-game raid / slow farming with new currency

So you get your new job to 50 and want to use it in the new end-game content with your static. You don't have time to farm philo for it to be able to do bahamut coil 1-5 so it's ready to go into new raid (turn 6-10)? Then you can buy a set of craftable gear ilevel 90 and be instantly ready.

The more the game is gonna advance, with the highest ilevel getting higher and higher, the more player are gonna buy crafted set to catch-up faster with the end-game group.

It's not a bad system imho. Older, richer player are gonna be able to bring their 2nd and + job to end-game faster, and if the economy isn't down the drain at that point, newer player won't have the money to buy this gear and will either have to farm/craft for it, or do all the previous tier in step (philo/mytho farming, BC 1-5, etc)

Edited, Feb 4th 2014 2:31pm by Pryssant

Thayos paraphrased what I said in another post, but I'll put it in here again. I've always looked at crafting as a way to -save- money. I'm levelling a MNK with LNC/DRG cross class skills and I haven't paid more than a couple hundred gil in raw materials for a total of 60 levels between the two. And if I wasn't so lazy, and materials so cheap, I could have harvested it all too.

As far as making gil is concerned, I made most all of it from materia....which you get from spirit bonding gear....which you can make for free by having crafting classes levelled. It takes me 43 minutes to bond a whole set of level 50 felt gear and electrum jewelry. The last time I sold what I converted it made me about 110k. I kinda stopped bothering with the MB a few weeks ago because, to be honest, I don't need money for anything. What I do make, I drop in the FC bank for the housing fund.

There are other guaranteed money makers out there. You just have to look for them.

As far as crafting for good 'end game' gear is concerned, it did take a hit when DR came out. But, much of the i70 stuff is as good as, if not better than, DL gear if you slot it with good materia, which as I said before I get largely for free. I've been in my Vanya robe, which I have triple melded with crit materia since I dinged 50 a couple months ago. I don't have any problem keeping up or surpassing folks in i80 or i90 stuff either.

I can't agree with you here, simply because it's contrary to my experience with every MMO in which craftable items were relatively unimportant - little more than gateway gear.

FFXI countered this partly by making crafted items, by far, the norm, and partly by making items across the spectrum of levels really important. You WANTED the Republic Knuckles, or the Scorpion Harness, etc. And you'd farm and pay a premium for premium gear.

But in every single MMO I've played, the "gateway" gear was never particularly valuable, because it was ALWAYS a super temporary placeholder. It just never made sense to spend so much capital investing in gear you're actively expecting to be replaced right away. Not when other alternatives existed.

WoW eventually countered this in two ways. For one, they gave each profession a buffing mechanism, that would allow them to create a trade good that was the exclusive route to a stat buff. Blacksmithing, for instance, could sell special items that could affix a "socket" to... belts, iirc. These sockets were for gems (think materia), and you could put them on your BiS item to make it even better. And they could make gear for one or two slots that actually was, or was nearly, BiS.

But the "this will let you get into the content quick" set has never been a moneymaker in games I've played unless there's an EXTREME time investment it lets you bypass, and there's no other route to gearing (like in WoW, if you made a new toon).

But that's not the case in FFXIV. You can farm seals quite easily on your first 50, even before you start leveling later jobs, and you can use that 50 to farm gear drops for your later classes fairly easily (particularly if you're leveling that job for FC purposes).

It's more complicated than that - you can't set your scope at individual transactions.

For one, there's the motivation aspect. How willing are people to level those crafts up to 50, if that's the only tangible reward it will get them? If demand for endgame items is low, what affect does that have on the profitability of the DoFs?

For instance, Heavy Darksteel Armor is selling on the marketboard on Ultros for 37,950. The history suggests the rate these sell is rather low (1-2 a day seems most common, with some outliers of none for periods, or more for a day, etc.) There's 7 on the market.

That's a really unhealthy number. Supply is WAY above demand, so these are priced to move. And then we need to consider the impact on the DoF professions. Because there's low demand for the product, there's even lower demand for the raw materials, as players become more likely to harvest their own mats to try and reinforce the revenue stream (conversely, when significant profit potential exists, players become more likely to craft from market-bought materials, which is VERY good for the economy).

So now we have a picture where there's not a ton of profit potential for the DoH professions. Sure, their stuff sells, but it sells slowly, for way less than they want, and it requires a LOT of investment. I mean, the HQ Darksteel Heavy Armor might sell, but the normal quality failures? That's factored into the cost of production. And they need to invest a lot of time, or gil, in getting the gear to GET the HQ quality. And if they're harvesting their own mats, they need to spend the time to get HQ versions to GET the HQ version of the armor... etc.

A HEALTHY economy involves different people doing these tasks and moving the product up the chain to an appropriate selling price where there is both high demand AND profit for each of the people involved.

The problem is that there just isn't demand. It's quite low. And when you consider the cost of the HQ mats relative to the success rates of production and the cost of the items being sold, it's VERY low.

And this is made even worse for DoH professions, because even though their mats are already selling for far less than they should be (particularly the normal quality ones), that price is only going to drop as demand continues to drop.

It's a really problematic system. And what makes it worse is that this exact scenario has played itself out multiple times in other MMOs. I'd have hoped, with SE's new approach to professions, they'd have taken the steps needed to not create that lack of demand at the top.

This seems like a solid place to ask this... Does anyone have a link to how stats work for FFXIV? Say, something that discusses accuracy for casters and such? Because I don't think I've ever missed a spell, so I'm assuming it works differently for casters than melee with regards to level differences and such.

I've also always liked napkin TCing, so I wouldn't mind being able to look at the breakdowns of stat systems.

[EDIT]

NVM, FFXIVGuild looks to have the info I want.

Edited, Feb 5th 2014 9:19am by idiggory

While accurate you are picking a lull-period as a metric of the economy's health. As Yoshida touched upon in the latest live letter the game's economy is going to revitalize on set intervals, with the devs injecting more life to it. There was a lot of profit to be made on these items back in 2.0, and the same will happen in 2.2. In-between the economy will slow down little by little but that's a given.

The game is set up in a way that SE needs to be revitalizing the economy for it to function, and that's what they are doing. Either way, when you create more demand at the top you inevitably create other, more detrimental issues to the game as a whole. The devs are not willing to ruin the rest of the game by providing to the economy and I don't disagree with that decision.

Over two months of sales in the history tab isn't really a lull period. That's a solid market trend by RL standards, and a VERY solid market trend by MMO standards.

And, frankly, if you're not willing to create an in-game economy, don't create an in-game economy. It's that simple. If you think economies are problematic for your design, then actually embrace your design. Don't create a whole line of professions, turn them into jobs like classes, etc., and then just turn around and say "Oh, but that's it." That's not cool, and it's bad design.

What they're doing is using a system where they arbitrarily create content by dangling a carrot for you to chase that leads nowhere. When you are doing PVE content, and you get better gear, it's for the purposes of doing better and reaching higher difficulty content. The experience is the reward. If it was JUST a gear race, no one would bother.

Right now, crafting is just a gear race. You have to craft to create stronger crafting gear needed to create stronger crafting gear needed to create stronger crafting gear... and then that's it. There's nothing else there. You aren't getting any content. Sure, few games do well at providing content (EVE is the only one that comes to mind). But most games are pretty frank about what the crafting system is. It's not much of a time hog to get it up to cap, and then it's used for a few very specific purposes, and then that's it.

FFXIV took a route where they turned the actual process of leveling a craft into content, and then you just hit a big ravine. That's just not cool. It's really, really bad design.



That's fair, but it's not something I'll ever accept as a compelling argument for a mainstream design feature in a game. Random little minigame that didn't take much development effort, and was put in just for the random people who would like it, sure. But NEVER a main design component.

Because there will always be random people who like a system. Any system. And I think that's great. I think it's awesome that they can enjoy it.

But when it's a feature built into the game with a relatively significant amount of development time and energy, and then it's not delivering a solid experience to even a solid minority of the gaming population, I'm not going to pretend like that's anything other than a serious issue.

Frankly, crafting is one of the features they were very actively marketing from early on in FFXIV's history, before they even upped that marketing for ARR. And it's just not acceptable for there to be a false promise of content.