FFXIV: Wanting to Craft
Posted on March 14, 2023 by Aywren
This is a very peculiar post to make for me. I’ve been playing FFXIV for going on 10 years now this September, and I’ve always dabbled in crafting of some form. In fact, I have three characters who are crafting/gathering mentors, and many alts who have gathering maxed – just for the making gil part of it.
But the truth is, as I feel it, I don’t really know how to craft.
I mean, I know enough to have this one rotation that I’ve used for years that gets me by when it comes to crafting for turn ins and tribal quests. But that’s very low-level type stuff.
I have bars and bars of skills, and I only know a fraction of what they do because I only use something like 6-7 skills out of all of those. When it comes to things like Expert crafting, I don’t know where to start. In fact, last expansion, I worked my Skybuilders tools all the way up to the last step where I stopped because I felt like I wasn’t melded enough and didn’t know how to proceed with Expert crafting.
When talking to Syn about it – she immediately said, “But you know how to craft!”
And I responded, “No, not really. It would be like a battle class wherein I only knew how to use 4-5 of the skills and had no knowledge of deeper combos or what the rest of my buttons do. I could get by on easy content, but when it came to harder content, I would fail.”
And that’s where I stand with crafting.
Desire to Craft
I’m not a numbers person. Crafting in FFXIV seems to appeal to the stat and number crunchers – it’s something to min-max, and is probably enjoyable for folks that have that mindset. I’m not one of them.
That’s a perception I’ve had of crafting in the game that’s held me back from making the effort to learn all this time. It’s sorta like saying: I don’t have the skill for Unreals or Savage, so I may as not worry about learning my class the best I can. I’ll never be able to do that higher content.
I think that’s a fallacy on my part.
Between the new Loporrit quests and the introduction of the Splendorous Tools, I suddenly decided that I wanted to finally sit down and put effort into learning to craft.
Catch Up Crafting
Do you need to put effort into melding your crafting gear to have the stats to pull off higher crafting content? Yes, yes you do.
But there’s a BIS version and a much more affordable “budget” version.
It wasn’t until I checked out the melds on the guides above that I even realized there was a new set of green crafting gear on the market – the Indagator’s set. This came out in 6.3. I had the Master books for it, but for some reason, I never bothered to look to see what they made.
So not only did I not have the previous set melded (I figured it wasn’t worth it for the first set anyhow), but I was a set behind and still not melded. My gathering earns me enough to comfortably buy upgrade sets like this, so I just swallowed the cost and bought the HQ Indagator’s set for Ben.
Next it was on to melding.
You can buy materia with scrips, which basically rain down on crafters from doing weekly turnins. To my advantage, I have three characters who can complete weekly turn-ins for these scrips, and then spend them on materia to funnel towards Ben.
And that’s what I’ve decided to do.
As of last week, I’ve managed to start the melding process. But you know how that goes. With 17% and 10% chances at actually successfully melding, it takes a lot of materia. This week, I’ll continue to do the same – likely something that will be weeks worth of scrips.
Cleaning Up Quest Lines
Somewhere, I read that you had to finish all the old Crystalline Means crafting quests from Shadowbringers before you could unlock the new tool relic quests. As that’s a goal I set for myself this month anyhow, I did finish up at least two questlines over the past weekend, with one left to do.
This was fine because I enjoyed the stories, and wanted to finish up the quests anyhow. There were a few annoying points (one that required gathering from a timed node for some reason), but overall, they’re not too hard to knock out and earn additional scrips from.
As I noted, I thought you had to finish all of those quests before the new tool quests appeared, but apparently not. As I still have one quest line in the Crystalline Means to finish, but I was able to see and even make progress on the new tools if I wanted. Not sure what’s going on there, but it’s fine by me.
I also hope to sit down with some crafting information – maybe find some videos – that fill in the blanks of knowledge for me when it comes to what crafting skills do. There are soooo many skills, most of which I don’t fully understand, even when mousing over to read the tool tips.
I suppose I can also look at some of the macros that are out there and try to take them apart to understand them better. In the past, I’ve just plopped macros into the system and used them without a second thought. That’s what most crafters do, honestly. But I’d like to know more.
I’ll update here on the blog with my process. Wish me luck!