I think no one is going to be surprised that I’m posting yet another guide on Crafting since it’s the task I’ve been primarily doing for the past few months.
I truly don’t think there has been a day I haven’t spent a few hours crafting since returning full-time to FFXIV and though my favourite elements of the game are typically related to battle and combat as soon as I found my rhythm in crafting I haven’t turned back.
Though I have always been moderately familiar with Crafting since I started playing FFXIV, typically completing tasks like Custom Deliveries and Tribal Quests whenever they are available, there were a good number of things I didn’t realize existed in Crafting such as Expert Crafts. While yes, I was aware that players spent Crafters’ Scrips to unlock Master Recipes, I didn’t realize that they had a unique method of crafting that required players to learn new types of conditions that could ultimately lead to a player failing their Crafts more frequently.
I honestly thought that the most difficult type of crafting players would have to complete were Collectables and man was I ever wrong.
This year I made it one of my goals to branch out of my normal routine and try to focus on tasks I haven’t allowed myself to do before. I spent a few months levelling all of my jobs to 90, and picked up some side tasks like the Blue Mage, but as soon as I discovered the Firmament and Diadem it was GG game over.
It was here that I was first introduced to Expert Crafts and though I had the highest level Scrip Gear with Materia melded into it every time I tried completing one I felt like bashing my head into a wall because they were just so darned difficult. So, I turned to my husband who is a Master Crafter and quite frankly one of the most knowledgeable players I know to see what I could do better since I was struggling to no avail.
You see, as my husband is a Master Crafter who spends a good chunk of his time selling the highest-level Crafts he always has the latest set of Crafter Gear each expansion so he can rake in millions of Gil without having to obsessively farm. While I have my own methods of doing this, being able to pull in a few million a day, I don’t typically do this with difficult crafts and thus never needed to have the best Crafting Gear and realistically never needed to put Materia in my gear until recently.
Many of our discussions were around whether or not I would be able to create Macros for the Expert Crafts I needed to complete to acquire the achievements from this side content. You would think that since I am 10 levels above the content it would be ridiculously easy to complete this content, this is somewhat true but you will still need to focus if you don’t have Crafted Crafters’ Gear.
At the end of the day, all Expert Crafts are a lot more challenging to do than regular crafts, meaning that even the lower-levelled ones may still give you some problems if you don’t have the right stats. Depending on what resources you’re regularly crafting some stats are going to be more useful than others as some items are more difficult to synthesize and others are more difficult to make High-Quality.
Somewhat similar to Gathering it’s quite difficult to have a catch-all Gearset that can manage to do all forms of content due to the differences in breakpoints, governed by Dicculty and Durability when it comes to Crafting, a player may have to fiddle with some stats to complete niche content by using Macros as the recommended melding guides will not typically allow for this.
Again, this is predominantly true if you are using Scrip Gear which cannot be melded with more than 2 pieces of Materia as Crafted Gear will allow you to meld 5 pieces on, therefore giving you more leeway when it comes to stats and being the ultimate way to rely solely on macros for your crafting.
Before I start diving in I want to state that I will not be covering CP in today’s post. If you are curious whether it’s going to be important to use CP Materia, I would strongly recommend checking out this post.
Note: If you have any questions about FFXIV that you want me to cover feel free to leave them in a comment below, you can also ask me while I am streaming on Twitch, YouTube or in our community discord.
WHAT IS CONTROL AND HOW DO I GET IT?
Control is the stat that governs how much quality a player gets from each of their Touch Abilities. Essentially, the higher a player’s Control the higher the likelihood that a player will fill their quality bar before the end of a craft.
Players will find Control on the lefthand side of their Gear, though if players would like more they can meld pieces of their Gear with Craftsman’s Command Materia.
WHAT IS CRAFTSMANSHIP AND HOW DO I GET IT?
Craftsmanship is the stat that governs how much progress a player makes from each of their Synthesis Abilities. Without enough Craftsmanship, a player can accidentally fail a craft, essentially risking losing the Materials they utilized to begin the craft.
Though players do have a chance to retain the items used for the craft when it fails, it is generally more advisable to finish a craft at whatever quality is at than to risk it failing. Of course, there is always nuance to this comment, for example, you may want to fail a craft when it comes to a Custom Delivery because you didn’t reach the Collectability you require, but in my opinion, I would just rebuy the item and start again because RNG sucks anyways.
Craftsmanship appears on the lefthand side of a player’s Gear though players can meld more of it with Craftsman’s Competence Materia.
SO WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT CRAFTSMANSHIP OR CONTROL?
There’s no concrete answer as to which is more important between Craftsmanship and Control as it highly depends on what tier of resources you are crafting and whether or not the resource is an Expert Craft.
Technically you will always want your Craftsmanship to be higher than your Control, but generally, a player will get the majority of the Craftsmanship they need from their Gear and will not need to add too many extra pieces of Craftsman’s Competence Materia to complete the majority of Crafts.
If players are only crafting intermediate Crafts that are 10 levels lower than them they will not need any extra Control as Trained Eye will max out your quality in one step no matter what. This process is extremely easy to macro and quite frankly at that point I would strongly recommend you get more Craftsmanship so you can make the macro two steps instead of three (if you want to min-max).
Players can also do this for Custom Deliveries, however since Trained Eye is not possible to use while completing an Expert Craft, Control tends to be more important.
While yes, players will need a decent amount of Craftsmanship when Expert Crafting, it highly depends on what level Expert Craft you are doing and what opener you utilize.
I tend to stick to the Rapid Synthesis opener, taking as much advantage as possible with the initial Synthesis buffs and ensuring that I can spend as much time as possible raising the quality of my Craft.
I must say, on many occasions, I have gotten the Malleable condition for the first few steps making the need for high Craftsmanship less important as the amount of progress I can make in a single hit will often complete the Synthesis before I’ve even touched the quality. Of course, this can be managed by using Final Appraisal, but this tends to be the reason I would prefer higher Control than Craftsmanship as I mostly work on Expert Crafts these days.
Similar to regular crafts though, if you are only focussing on lower-level Expert Crafts, higher Craftsmanship can be nice since you won’t have to rely on an opener that involves RNG.
Although I’m currently focussing a lot on Expert Crafts, I do typically Craft resources of all different levels, especially when I get a rare item with desynthesis or from a random loot drop. I’m one of those players who tries to Craft upwards to sell items for more and though players can make a pretty penny from simply selling raw resources, I don’t often since I want to put my Gear and knowledge to use.
DO MY CONTROL AND CRAFTSMANSHIP STATS AFFECT QUICK SYNTHESIS?
Yes and no. While there is a baseline of Control and Craftsmanship a player will need to ensure that a craft is successful in creation, there is no way to guarantee that a craft is High Quality.
It doesn’t matter how much you out-level your craft you are or how many stats you have, you either need to create a macro that you can manually initiate to guarantee high-quality resources or you will have to bite the bullet and accept some normal-quality resources.
Realistically with the changes made to crafting, high-quality resources are much less in demand these days and most players will buy normal-quality resources instead unless they are from the most recent expansion, though realistically these resources take more effort to craft anyway due to a player not being able to “out-level” them.
Nonetheless, Quick Synthesis simply requires breakpoint stats and this is typically covered by the Crafter Vendor gear.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion like many things in FFXIV the stats that you want are going to highly depend on what it is you are trying to achieve. For example, my Gatherer Gear is horrible for max-level farming and while I own a well-melded set for this content, it is sitting on my Retainers since they do the majority of late-game Gathering for me while I focus on Gathering that requires tremendously high GP.
In my opinion, you have more leeway when it comes to Crafting stats, especially if you are not focussing on Expert Crafts or late-game Crafting and even then a player will typically stick to Quick Synthesis rather than manually crafting their resources or using a macro. Of course, this depends on what you’re using the resource for, but nonetheless, I recommend whatever Materia Teamcraft suggests as they make these suggestions based on the average stats needed for all crafts that are in the current expansion.
In my opinion, it is never worth having multiple sets of Crafter’s Gear. While I do sometimes recommend this for Gathering, the reality is that you can make do with whatever Crafting Gear you have for all content, it’s just a matter of how quickly you can get the Crafting done.
Though I wish I could macro the majority of my Expert Crafts, especially those from the Firmament, the fact that I can even complete them is the most important factor. Not to mention, for me, it would be a bigger shame to be unable to craft any item in the game at any time.
If you’re an intermediate Crafter or a Crafter who never thinks they are going to complete Expert Crafts your stats genuinely do not matter. Just buy yourself the highest level Vendor Gear or the latest Crafters’ Scrip Gear and Quick Synthesis everything.
This will save you a lot of time and Gil since players who are serious about Crafting, who will be buying the majority of resources, do not care about the quality of intermediate Materials.
While yes, sometimes some players are only in search of HQ materials they tend to be fewer and far between and when I switched to selling both NQ and HQ materials I noticed I was making much more Gil because things were selling more frequently and in higher stack sizes.
But I’m curious, what are your thoughts on the topic? Do you have a preference between Control and Craftsmanship and if so, what Crafts are you focussing on? It would be nice to hear as many opinions as possible as what I enjoy doing and the content I focus on will not be the same for every player. Let me know in the comments below!
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