[Read Description] FFXIV: A Beginner's Guide to Crafting Basics

crafting is not something that lends itself well to being explained the goal is simple but once you really get started the difficulty rises far beyond expectations you're given dozens of skills some just upgrades to your previous skills but without invalidating the use of the old skills the system is fun to explore and plenty to learn while doing so but in the end it's a numbers game you have to figure out what those numbers are though a cost of 18 versus a cost of 32 is that 14 higher cost worth it it depends i am here to do my best to give an in-depth explanation of crafting that is also beginner friendly this is a contradiction no matter how you look at it i didn't fully get crafting myself until hitting level 60 and getting help crafting the best and slot works crafting gear when that was the best gear this was back in 3.3 or maybe even 3.4 more than a year after i first joined ff14 even after this video you may be confused or even completely lost still so let me further say this you won't get it not until you actually attempt to put teachings into practice either way this is technically a part two to the ff14 your first day craft video i did i will be going over some concepts again but much faster and if you are truly just getting started you may want to watch that first card on screen and in the description i'll be covering only up to and including level 50 to reduce the length and also keep things more focused i will however be using level 80 footage to prove a couple points i'll attempt to keep that footage to a minimum as i don't want to confuse anyone with concepts that won't be relevant it is purely just to prove a point just remember going forward that there is a full 30 levels of additional features and skills beyond this video at least during the creation of this video in shadowbringers ideally this will still be relevant in future expansions but it wouldn't be the first time the developers have completely overhauled crafting if you're seeing this in the future either they didn't or i did a good enough job with this one that i am confident that it has remained relevant thesis statement aside let's get into crafting the basics and how important those are even at end game the base idea of crafting is very simple gather materials start the craft max out the progress bar and receive an item but when you look deeper this is inaccurate let me go into the stats and we'll see why this is so inaccurate you have four stats level which matters at end game crafting and breaking into the next expansion craftsmanship which is what increases how much progress is gained from synthesis actions control which increases how much quality is given from touch actions and craft points or cp which is how we use our crafting skills at the same time crafts themselves also have four stats difficulty which is actually how much progress is needed to complete the craft durability which is spent by using simpson and touch actions and quality which is actually broken up into two bits a zero which is the base quality determined by the materials we are using if we use high quality materials items with a special icon in the name and a shiny picture this base value goes up using all high quality items will give the maximum amount of quality as a base listed next to the much higher number than the difficulty this very large number is the huge requirement to guarantee the craft comes out a high quality with a 100 chance high quality on an item can either boost the base quality on a future craft or in the case of gear gives it the base stats of the item yes high quality is the base stats normal quality or as i prefer to call it no quality is a stat penalty to whatever you create so if you create a level 58 sword but do not high quality it it will be at best a level 54 sword in power you can tell by comparing this level 56 kantana made to be high quality and this level 58 katana of no quality despite the level of the level 58 katana being higher its stats are far weaker but if we look at the high quality version the stats look a bit more accurate without actually doing the math on it this six eye level difference in power is essentially a 12 penalty on the no quality item so while it seems counter intuitive to say craftsmanship is the least important once we get into the higher levels can you really say you succeeded in a craft if you didn't make the craft high quality when you're dealing with end game especially the answer is no a no quality craft is a failed craft this is a bit fatalist so let me make things a bit less dour while you are leveling you are not going to see very much high quality even if you keep up on your gear this is especially true if you don't immediately upgrade to expansion level gear when heading into new expansions but that isn't the end of the world proper use of our skills which we'll get into later and enough base high quality materials can make up for a stat deficit if the deficit isn't too large further wall leveling what you make is probably just a means to an end you'll likely be only crafting leaves and class quest turn-ins you won't be doing it for profit yet this will merely make the process of leveling slower this is the fatal flaw of crafting even and why they have massively buffed exp games during shadowbringers i already told you earlier that i did not get crafting until i was at level cap in heaven's word i had the best gear i could get in every skill possible what made it so hard to learn was catching up to where the game expected me to be i did not properly upgrade my gear at level 50 instead pushing up to level 60 before doing so properly this is the trap most players probably will fall into not being geared right because they're just trying to play catch up so even after everything you see in this video if you continue to struggle and aren't already maxed out are you in a similar situation is your gear actually on par or are you like i was still trying to just catch up with where the game expected me to be if at all possible make sure you have a solid set for each expansion or be ready to play extreme catch up and push as hard as you can but eventually you will catch up there's always a level cap but there's still more gearing up to do there's the patch content which gives further harder recipes and new gear tears the final tier will be functionally the base gear set for the next expansion each set needs the previous set for you to craft it so the treadmill never ends and as we mentioned if it isn't a high quality item it's a failure and the need for proper stat spreads becomes even more pronounced this was all a roundabout way to say just how important cp and control are it's in these end game recipes that the importance becomes so pronounced the difficult recipes require rare materials and if you don't make it high quality the resulting item will be weaker than what you're already wearing if you succeeded to high quality that weaker item and the amount of quality needed is anywhere from five to eight times higher than the progress needed so control basically speaks for itself you need far more quality and the resulting item is basically not worth making if it's not high quality but what about cp well you can't very well do anything without cp almost every skill we have has a cp cost every single control skill except hasty touch has a cp cost and when you're attempting to be at the cutting edge of new crafting every single cp is going to be important literally most end game crafting rotations end up using literally every single cp you have the difference between ending a craft with 17 cp and 18 cp can mean all the difference rotationally perhaps we're at a point where we are drowning in durability so we have several filler uses of hasty touch just to be safer and use the extra durability we could instead replace one of those hasty touches with a basic touch guaranteeing the action works and leaving us with exactly zero cp but if we have only that 17 cp left over well enjoy hasty touch instead the decisions made in the end game rotations are much deeper than that example and you may be thinking this is a weird tangent for a beginner video my point is you should be starting to think about the importance of your cp now not later even at the early levels prioritizing your cp can make a massive difference upgrading your accessories as soon as possible could gain you various new options in crafting an item even when you have a few options at these low levels it can make all the difference but what about craftsmanship what makes it so unimportant well as we saw we need far less progress to complete craft than we need quality to the point that let's do a small math exercise let's take a craft that needs 50 progress to complete and our progress from a basic synthesis is 25 this means we need two uses of basic synth to complete the craft now we meld in some craftsmanship enough to bring our progress percent to 30. now how many times do we need to use basic synth the answer remains two the only way to improve upon our synthesis efficiency is to use a synthesis action that does 50 or more progress anything between 25 and 50 does absolutely nothing for this specific craft and as we progress even when the progress needed goes up by hundreds at a time boosting our craftsmanship almost never means enough to matter early levels you might see a difference but very quickly craftsmanship loses its luster now obviously we will use it still 49 versus 50 progress gained is huge in this scenario and would take very little effort to get that difference but we need far more quality and far more control to achieve our goals and the cp to use the skills to boost our quality to begin with to sum it up in a single sentence craftsmanship shows little to no returns beyond the minimum requirement speaking of building though meld your gear if you want any real levels of success since you're actually crafting you'll be spirit bonding gear and getting materia for free and if you can meld for free since you're a crafter you can reuse the material over and over and every single stat point will help while your leveling this is a lot about just the stats but i really wanted to emphasize how important they are take away enough stats from even the greatest crafter and they'll have absolutely no way to succeed but stats mean nothing if we don't know how to apply them so let's actually start talking about our skills something to realize is that while all skills will remain on your bars the uses will be more or less common than those around them for more obvious examples let's take a look at the durability restoration skills masters mend and both levels of waste not with some basic math we can calculate how much each skill is actually worth take the cost of each skill and divide them by the amount of durability they restore mast is meant 30 waist not 20 and waist not 2 by 40. by a wide wide margin waist not 2 is the most efficient and saves us the most cp on any long craft but what if we don't need all that extra durability maybe we only need 20 more durability for the craft the 42 cp more waste not 2 requires over waste not 1 could be used elsewhere this all sums up how we have to balance the craft as we progress we budget the minimum number of synthesis actions towards completion progress subtract that from our resource pool and we end up with three bars to watch cp durability and quality we must balance the spending of the first two to max out the third but if we have extra resources in either cp or durability at the end of the craft that's potentially wasted resources if we aren't getting 100 quality and we have left over cp that cp that needs to be reinvested perhaps our issue is we're hitting zero left over durability early which means we'll want to use a durability restore that might cut into rcp elsewhere or maybe we're hitting the reverse not enough cp and too much durability the durability restore isn't helping us so reinvest it into other cp skills perhaps buffs or the stronger touch actions this further emphasizes how important cp and control are when it comes to building your stats the further we get into crafting the more important and more effective proper balancing of these bars becomes and it's better to realize this early on that the less efficient skills might actually be more efficient due to what resources you're sitting on specifically we have other tools beyond this such as tricks of the trade for regaining cp and hasty touch for spending durability tricks can only be used on good and excellent condition procs and almost always will only be used on the good procs since excellent procs are too useful in most cases to use tricks on but that's not an ironclad rule good meanwhile are good but not good enough to force you to use them as touch actions guaranteed this is not something you can always count on though you may go entire crafts without seeing any good or excellent procs the extra 20 cp could be extremely useful in every craft you do but not every craft you do will give you good procs or give goods in positions where you can afford to use them you also have to weigh in how using tricks of the trade will affect any buffs you currently have going for example let me show you a strategy i often employed and some of the mid-tier levels i started to use waste not twice which would be a total of 40 saved durability but at these early levels every single skill we use spends 10 durability 5 durability functions the same as 10 durability so 15 and 20 durability restored are both two skill uses 35 and 40 durability restored would similarly be both four skill uses as a result the eight steps that two uses of waste not last for one of these eight steps can be used for anything that doesn't spend durability a buff like innovation or even tricks of the trade if a good prox during the eight steps but that's only one step we can afford if we use two steps for non-durability spending moves we'll lose an entire skill usage but then a third won't affect anything more but we'd already be in deep in the hole and a whole lot of lost cp so don't go beyond the one use later on 5 durability is actually going to be something much more significant but for now this trick makes for good practice of making actual use of your skills beyond the description coming up with your own strategies but earlier i also mentioned hasty touch this is something you rarely ever want to actually use it may cost no cp but with only a 60 success rate it's something you cannot trust to help you but if you have the extra durability and no left over cp for extra touch actions hasty touch could save a craft in a hail mary attempt there's no sense ending a craft with the extra durability so if you need more quality go for it these are more situational well situations but there's a few skills you always want to use the first is gotten early enough and that is in a quiet basically the entire meta of crafting is in a quiet so strong of a meta they nerfed the strategy at one point and yet it was still the meta in that time that should say everything and inquired itself explains itself pretty non-descriptively every stack of any quiet up to max of 11 stacks gives a bonus to your control stat for an initial activation cost of 18 cp each stack beyond the first is 20 to your control so a maximum of a 200 percent bonus to your control stat but also remember that stats are non-linear so it won't functionally be a 200 bonus to your quality but much higher all for just 18 cp now obviously you have to build up that bonus but as you progress you're going to see higher and higher stack count by the time you hit late levels there won't be a single craft that you finish before hitting 11 stacks of interquiet to start though we're gonna see only low counts but counts that will still benefit you nonetheless this should be one of the absolute first steps you do any craft learning this tactic early is further beneficial when you hit level 50 and earn by regards blessing this is a touch action that spends all of your stacks of in a quiet in exchange for one gigantic boost quality this is our finisher every single craft we do 24 of your cp is completely dedicated to finishing up with this one skill 42 when you consider you begin within a quiet but there's two other skills we will add into this mix innovation is a skill you get halfway through the trip to level 50. this is a multiplicative bonus to your next four touch actions based on the base efficiency so a basic touch is 100 efficiency which basically means there's no modifiers one hundred percent is the base value so 150 percent to a basic touch will make it to 50 percent more quality this is different to in a quiet which boosts your control stat forty percent control boost from inner quiet can be worth more than the fifty percent from innovation depending on how much control you currently have but confusingly as i said innovation multiplies the base efficiency so standard touch does not become 175 efficiency it becomes 187 because 50 of 125 is an added 62 this can however be the same worth as at least two basic touches for zero durability cost and half the cp cost having the same 18 cp cost as one basic touch the math works out in its favor if you have the cp and proper position in the rotation for it the other skill is great strides for a massive 32 cp you get a pitiful 100 bonus efficiency to one touch action or the worth of one basic touch or at least that's what the tooltip sounds like what they should actually say is it increases the efficiency by double the base potency so standard touch would become 250 percent efficiency add in the 62 from innovation and it becomes 312 efficiency the other benefits are that it lasts three turns so you have time to prepare it and that it costs no durability the reason i bring these up now is because of how this all combos combine innovation and great strides the next skill you use gets a bonus of 2.5 times the base efficiency keep this to the side for now let's go back to inner quiet at a maximum of 11 stacks that's an additive 200 boost to your control stat or a times 3 multiplier to your control which does not scale linearly for my control stat in this craft this ends up more like being a 4.2 times multiplier this is rounded down for an easier number now consider these two buffs together the in a quiet buff multiplied with the efficiency of the touch actions you use so a 2.5 times efficiency multiplies with the 4.2 times efficiency multiplier of a maxed in a quiet stack and becomes a 10.5 times multiplier on basic synthesis now add in by regatta's blessing which caps at 300 efficiency when at 11 stacks of in a quiet add in innovation and great strides this becomes 750 efficiency remember base efficiency times 2.5 now multiply the 7.5 times efficiency by the 4.2 times and we have a massive 31.5 times bonus versus a normal basic touch so rather than just costing 24 cp or anything simple like that when planning out any and all crafts 92 cp is dedicated to this one combo that's without factoring in just the journey to get that many stacks as possible the cp to keep your durability going long enough just this combo is 92 cp i hope that even further emphasized how important cp is given 92 is going to be just about a third of your cp at level 50 and even by level 80 it'll still be costing around a fifth of your cp to maybe a six it's extremely expensive a combo but it's the most effective way to craft high quality items it's quite annoying it takes so long to get to at this point but it's worth the wait beyond that you may still struggle to make rotations as you level as i said twice already i struggled to get crafting until level cap back in heavensward you have even more grinding to get the end game than i ever did even with the massively buffed exp so in the meantime i actually recommend some of the resources on the balance discord while i would warn not all the guides for every job are made for newer players and you'd be better off in the discussion channels asking questions the disciples of hand and land section has so many guides that not even all of them are listed one of them actually includes leveling rotations paired with what leveling gear you should have for each rotation while this is almost completely eliminating self-thought it's a start for you to actually see how some of these ideas get properly applied but as you level further and further the freedoms you have increase almost as proportionally to the amount of cp you have you may end up hitting a point where it all clicks when you finally hit that point to confidently craft on your own i have two more topics i want to cover and those are the ideas of macro crafting and manual crafting the first is a shorter topic and what most high-end crafting boils down to macro crafting as it sounds is letting the in-game macros craft for you though not as bout like as it sounds this truly is the end game you cannot trust conditions to ever be in your favor that's all on rng so if you can do a craft the same way every single time and get a high quality item out of it every single time then you're probably going to do it macros by design are inflexible once started let's take this macro i have for high-end shadow ring is crafting if i attempt to manually input anything into this macro it can break maybe i'll skip the preparatory touch if i use a random other skill right before the macro executes it or the great strides crippling my buyer god's blessing by 300 efficiency and it will only skip that one line the macro will continue possibly making things even worse the easiest way to stop a macro is to have a dummy macro that doesn't do anything to hit any emergency the true skill here though is making your own macros sure you can just pull any random macro off the internet to use but using your own ideas and rotation can you yourself figure out how to make a macro that always works on your projects there's plenty of ways to even do so without actually doing the craft yourself there's team craft simulators another great resource for crafters or if you'd rather confirm for yourself in game we have the trial synthesis function this would be a great way to test out macros to make sure they work before you actually try to make the item this all comes at the cost of the condition being able to change at all remember the goal is to make the craft work in almost every possible scenario of conditions the only condition that will only ever make or break a macro is a pour on your bioregards blessing and even that might not be enough if it's efficient enough a macro or you use enough high quality materials manual crafting obviously is the opposite might have a macro that inputs the opener and the finisher of a craft but everything in between is all you this allows you to obviously react on the fly to whatever conditions you get in general this is a huge boon since there's more than just one skill that makes use of conditions a little beyond the main crux of this video is at level 53 with precise touch this ends up being worth two stacks of in a quiet one from the skill itself and one from increasing quality for the same cost as a basic touch manual crafting can massively speed up some crafts if you get good conditions other times like when we wanted to use tricks of the trade it could allow us to do more touch actions or flex our rotation a little in general though you probably follow the same flow as the macro version you might make since macros are efficiency incarnate but you're able to do more and be more flexible as a result of doing it manually though on that same line of thinking you're capable of screwing up far more than any macro provided you properly set up the macro latency and lag are the only times and macro can outright screw up this is especially prominent at level 80 and trying to do expert crafting these have special conditions that normal crafts never have well technically you can macrocraft these two with a minimum level of success if you truly want to succeed at these you need to do it manually the opener and finisher can be easily macroed that's exactly what i did but the entire middle the vast majority of the craft is manual this is something you can avoid completely but it shows just how far you can push a craft when you are willing to do things manually just don't expect to do much of that since again you don't need that level of control in most crafting provided you meet the stats you need and given just how much crafting you may actually be doing you'll want to just turn on some music or youtube and netflix and just sit back and hit the macro every minute or so and let the game do it for you it's easy to get lazy after doing crafting enough to round things off with one of the most important points though if you're seeking profits be ready to spend a lot of time crafting you'll ideally craft smartly and what sells most and only buy what you absolutely have to or is otherwise extremely time consuming to find you have to be picky you have to be willing to spend time with it but when you do the profits you make can be enormous and even when a new raid tier comes out and new raid tier flies off the shelves within minutes even then you are not going to become rich overnight a few sales might give you a nice boost but if you want to hit big you're gonna have to keep going and going and going thanks for watching my attempt to make an in-depth but newbie level crafting guide that goes up to level 54. brevity's sake i say over a nearly 40 minute video this was probably one of the most exhausting scripts to write deleting entire pages multiple times rewriting select paragraphs and generally attempting to structure this was hard to do but i hope it at least clarifies a few things and gives players a better foothold into crafting be sure to use the resources provided as you go further and i really do hope it all works for you as a base take care and may the power of vanna did hogs lay waste to your enemies [Music] extra special thanks to all of my patrons over on patreon and an extra extra special thanks to jamie cotterill kathy knock lemon meowfie if you'd like to become one of my patrons the link is down in the description thanks for watching you

Channel: WeskAlber

Views: 95,398

Keywords: ff14, ffxiv, shadowbringers, beginner, learning, guide, crafting, crafter, gather, disciple, hand, land, concepts, craft, materials

Id: vlLzhgaU3U4

Length: 39min 15sec (2355 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020