[rant] Blue Gatherer ScripFollow

You've been warned.

So I've never had a ton of gil. I managed to scrape together enough to finish my Zeta weapon back in 2.x using acc melds to fill in the holes. Even then the whole process cost me a ton of money.

I'd wanted, in 2.x, to get in to high-level crafting and gathering but I never seemed to have enough money to get my foot in the door. I leveled my crafts anyway and used them for what I could, mostly helping me level up lower level jobs and spiritbonding as I went (mostly accessories). Gathering was done very late in the 2.x cycle. In fact I got MIN to 50 like a week and a half before HW launched.

I did research at the time to figure out what it would take to progress in that aspect of the game, and everything came down to one thing above all: Cash. Money. Dinero. Gil. Lots of it.

Then Yoshi P started talking about the scrip system for HW and I remember thinking "oh cool, there must have been a lot of people in that same boat.. want to participate but don't have the money." So here was this system that was supposed to be an alternative to paying huge wads of cash to the MB gods. You'd spend time grinding this currency that you could exchange for gear. Cool. Perfect. I can do that, no problem. After all I'd just spent all that time grinding my Zeta weapon from an Atma weapon in about 2 months. Grinding I could do.

So last week my MIN hit 56 and blue scrip was unlocked for me to gather. Awesome, let's get that started. So I look up a timer and go where I'm supposed to go, hit the node ..... unlock the item .... ok let's try that again. Wait for the next window, hit the node, now my item's unlocked already, so now I can collectablize it: Bzzzz. Nope. Not even a chance I can accumulate enough collectability to get scrip for this.

So ok, maybe I was pushing it a bit. Trying to do it as soon as it became available may have been overly ambitious. After all I was wearing NQ vendor gear. The HQ gear was entirely too rich for my blood and spending oceans of gil on leveling gear is kind of offensive. So fine. I'll wait.

Earlier today I dinged 60 MIN! Yay! Woo! Party!

Picked up the level 60 MIN quest and it asked me to go get an HQ of something that didn't appear to have an HQ chance the last time I gathered it (adamantite ore). Hmm. Ok well maybe I had to be 60 for it to HQ. The window's about open so I'll go there now and find out. I flap on over there and....newp.... still 0% chance to HQ. Well my HQ+ abilities all say they don't work on something that starts at 0% so that's a bust for now. But ok, I reason, I just dinged and I don't really have any gear. I picked up the NQ mainhand tool and the NQ offhand tool, but everything else is still basically that same level 55 set from earlier in the story.

So I head to the MB to see what I can see in the way of level 60 gear besides the mainhand.

Well that's certainly expensive.

I manage a couple of NQ pieces. The HQ prices are ridiculous. And much to my dismay, the higher level accessories are really still not better than my level 50 ones, with the exception of the earring which I'd already made. There are no level 60 accessories at all.

So! Now I must have to go out and get scrip, because I can see that the level 58 blue scrip gear is superior to the level 60 NQ crafted gear I'm seeing/wearing. So I grab some perception food this time to help me eke out as much collectability as I can and I head out for the lowest level scrip item on my list, light kidney ore. This is the same item I tried to gather for scrip the first time back at level 56 and failed.

Still failed.

Not by as much, but it doesn't really matter. Failure is failure in this case.

So I go back to doing research. I MUST be doing something wrong. Maybe my rotation is bad? Could be.. sounds reasonable.. let's see.. Every rotation I'm seeing requires 600 GP and more perception than I have. In fact they're all telling me that I should have been able to collect the scrip item at level 56... and I should have had 600 GP at level 56. Curious. I've had 575 GP for..basically..ever.

Now I could probably get to 600 GP by melding GP onto my leveling gear. But then wait. I thought the scrip system was an alternative to doing exactly that. I thought the entire point of scrips was that I did NOT have to buy HQ gear or do/buy expensive melds. That I could spend time instead of money to obtain better gear and progress in this aspect of the game.

Well it seems that I was wrong about that. It seems that the stated purpose of scrips was either a lie or so badly designed that nobody bothered to take into account the possibility that someone might not be starting out with lucis tools and penta-melded level 50 gear. I mean.. seriously.. if I have to have super expensive gear in order to get the currency that replaces the need for super expensive gear, then what is the point of that?

This appears to be the first instance I can find of a stated FFXIV design goal failing utterly to deliver on what it's supposed to be. I mean EPIC fail right here.

So I don't really know where to go from here. I have 60 MIN now. But so what? Not only can I not gather scrip, I can't even finish my class quest. The scrip system appears to be a complete failure as far as I'm concerned.

It's a little worse than even that to my knowledge

Crafting for Scrip basicly means you throw your gil away. You dont get anything in return from it but Scrip. You know how expensive gear gets and for how much you could have sold it otherwise. You're taking anywhere from a 50,000 to a 300,000 gil loss in some cases to get a minor amount of scrip.

The gear you can buy might make itself back you might think. But the Lv.58 gear you get from it, while awesome, is equal in stats to the gear you can buy/make. However, it has no slots for melding so in the long run it's worse than what you could have gotten if you made it yourself. It's the same for the Gathering gear, no slots.

It's good to bridge a gap, but i've not seen any real worth from it so far.

Or your could slow the hell down, gather your own ingredients, and make a ton of money while leveling your crafts. You've just been doing it competely wrong. Instead of buying stuff off the MB, you should be making your own and selling the stuff you don't need. Sure it takes longer, but it also doesn't cost you a single gil to to do it.

Edited, Jul 18th 2015 7:41pm by Turin

After coming back this morning I tried again using GP food to push me over 600 and was able to gather both the light kidney ore (2x) and the red quartz (1x) for scrip.

So I was wrong. It CAN be done, though it requires MB food to do it. And since none of the scrip gear is an accessory, none of it has GP and so it will continue to require food until I can scrape together enough perception to do it with 575 instead of needing a 600 GP rotation.

I still say that this design is a failure as it still requires me to either meld gear, buy HQ gear, or buy HQ food. Buying HQ food is not ridiculously expensive, but it will be if I have to do it for long enough.

I have 570 perception and 563 GP and can get 2 collectibles from each node without needing food.

Yeah, you only need food if you're way under the perception soft cap for this.

I made a killing with Goldsmith and Woodworking though. The market was also less volatile because you couldn't purposefully undercut people or gouge people into oblivion.

Ideally, sure, but in a lot of cases it's not that easy.

I had all my crafters and gatherers leveled to 50 prior to the expansion. This is obviously helpful and is an advantage that not everyone has, but a lot of things I might need as a level 60ARM I can make by myself. If I can farm my own materials and make my own materials, I generally will. But look at some of the trade-in items I've seen and what they require a lot of them require leather or lumber that my lvl50 LTW and CRP can't currently make. Even if my CRP *could* make the lumber, I'll have to level my BTN up to gather the mats to make it. All that leveling takes time, and while I'm sure plenty of people have capped all their DoH/DoL jobs already, and while I'm sure I will eventually, I just don't have enough time to do so now. So that's one roadblock.

That also seems kind of counter to what SE claims to want from the crafting system. "We want people to specialize and not feel like they need to level every single craft to succeed at crafting"... but oh btw, if you want to craft collectables as an ARM you'll need to level up your LTW, CRP, and ALC to make the mats you need. Weak.

Besides that, it seems a lot of recipes take a lot of base materials to make nowadays. If I'm going to be crafting anything from titanium as a collectable I'll probably need 3-4 ingots each... that means I need to mine 15-20 ore for each collectable I want to make (and the ores don't show up at every node, slowing things down). If I want to make a whole bunch of that particular collectable I may have to spend an hour+ mining the huge amount of ore I'll need to make them from scratch. Higher level collectable turn-ins generally are adamantite items for ARM... ok, each takes 3-4 nuggets which means I'll need 12-16 ore to make one collectable. Adamantite ore comes from a timed node that pops twice every in-game day, so I can mine what... 20-25 ore every hour? That doesn't seem very effective, even moreso when I can take that ore and use it to craft something (like barding!) that will make me tons of gil on the marketboard.

Even creature drops are problematic. A lot of armor I can craft requires ALC solvents to make. Ok, great, my level 50 ALC can make those. I'll just go farm the deepeye tears myself since they're 4-6k on the MB a piece. But wait... there only seems to be one group of deepeye mobs in the entire game currently. And it seems like (at least on my server) there are always 3-4 other people trying to farm them, so I've got to compete with them. Also, they don't drop all that often, and I need 4 tears to make 1 solvent. I'd imagine dhalmels are the same way... you might need the hides to make dhalmel leather, but AFAIK they're only in one zone (well, there are 2 in Neverreap...) and you'll probably be competing with others. That doesn't seem very well implemented to me when a mat is so important and there aren't that many mobs you can get them from... at the very least, I'd love to see this adjusted.

But yeah, in a perfect world it won't cost you a single gil to make. Just time. Lots and lots of time. Some people might have that time, and good for them... but I generally don't. If the system stays the same way as it is, that's fine, I'll live, but I don't think a little tweaking would hurt.

For a while our Free Company ran a gathering group for those wanting to level crafts and collect items the company needed. It was nice! Everyone focused on gathering 1 or 2 items in their level range and monetary rewards went to those who contributed most in each group. It helped me get through 'wool' which took hours to collect solo. It fizzled out when people started getting 50. Might be a good time to resurrect the group.

As with a lot of problems with this game, I don't think its necessarily a ***** up rather than gating and walling to make up for the lack of end content.

Its busy work. Look at the prices of Law gear, nothing prevented them from making the esoterics the same prices as the 450/week cap prevents you from gaining a full set within a day or two, let alone upgrades are through Alexander savage.

Edited, Jul 24th 2015 6:47pm by Theonehio

I agree. Would have been nice if one could work on red script with blue script gear. Thats why I didn't buy anything off the marketboard except for the admantite main and offhand tool for miner prior to 3.05. I'm currently at 570 with a HQ adamantite main and offhand. Blue script left side except for the belt. Belt is ilvl 90 bought from churning mist vendor. Then my jewelery is still all the ilvl 55 stuff. That puts me at 576 gathering, 570 perception and 563 GP. Currently, the 2 options I have for red scripts are adamantite ore and sun mica. With current stats, I got quality of 451 on adamantite ore(need 470ish for red scripts). Ate food that put perception up to 592 and that only got me to 459 quality. I'm thinking if I could get to 600 GP so I could get a 3rd discerning eye, I could probably do it. That limits me to 2 nodes. To cap each week would be very painful.

I believe you can also get red scripts from the folklore nodes, but would definitely need to buy gear and meld to get those. I might look into some melds this weekend and see what I can come up with. Part of me wants to say ***** it, the other part of me is interested to see what I can come up with on a budget.

OP unless you are in a dead poplulation server (which in this case get into high end crafting is pointless as your stuff will tank on saling) otherwise gil is not the problem. I mean: yes you need a lot of gil to get all stuffs prepared in order to get into end game crafting (lv60 2 star), but it's never hard to get gil in this game. Don't be lazy, check out the MB on the low lv stuffs (mainly tools and gears for DoH/L) which you can easly HQ with your current lv with almost no cost (you can garther the mats, and it does not take long to fill all your 40 selling slots) these stuffs are selling between 10k to 30k each and half of them will be sold during 24h (just undercut the board twice a day: when you login and before you log off). In less than 4 weeks you should have a heathy funding to support the same business for HW DoH/L gears, the margin is 100k+ per piece, again do your reaserch on MB (it's rather a business skill than crafting skill). Lv up all your crafts to lv60 so you can have 8 to 16 different opptunities per day for scrips turn in and do the cheapest one of them (normally cooking).

BTW: you only need to meld 3GP to a ilv137 HQ gathering set to get 600GP and you are set for both blue and red scrips turn in. It's dirty cheap if you craft them by yourself. Even if you want to go higher, you only need to meld the stats to 600/645/600 for ilv160 1 star gathering, I can do this with only grade 2 and grade 1 materias with only one forbidden melding per gear piece. Go figure out.
On the crafting side, you dont even need to meld anything, ilv137 HQ set with the 43CP HQ food is more than enough for both blue and red scrips turn in. If you have a hard time doing them with this set, work on your rotation.

Ofc you just cant get all of these done in the 1st week of red scrips as you were not well prepared in the 1st month of HW but still, it only takes a month if you start out today.

Last if you can take the grinding but hate playing MB (idk why but let's suppose so), with the lv58 scrip gear (you do need the HQ lv60 main hand, buy that at least) and 550GP you can still get 1 red scrip collectable per node, it's slow but you choose to grind, use this rotation: Hit to open, Utmost Caution, Methodical,Utmost Caution, Methodical,Discerning Eye, Utmost Caution, Instinctual, Methodical, collect one.

If you are on Behemoth contact me, I am more than glad making you the whole gathering set for free with an additional 4mio payment per week as long as you can grind me the red scrips "favor" items...

Edited, Jul 27th 2015 4:31am by crystalszero

Edited, Jul 27th 2015 4:43am by crystalszero