Crafting and You..Follow

I still haven't touched crafting & gathering yet. I'll probably want to get into that soon. At least for the materia system and doing my own repairs. Tired of seeing all those empty materia slots on my gear.

Making anything once you have the recipe unlocked is easy, between Ready Hand and the durability refill. It's the HQ gear that people go for. HQ Gear stats are basically equivalent to items several levels higher, so they will always be better than quest and vendor gear.

I did Weaving (lvl 20) and Botany (lvl 16) this past weekend. The materia melding quest doesn't unlock until level 20, and you can't get the grade 1 carbonized matter until I had botany to at least level 16, because the matter is in level 20 trees. I found them right outside Aleport near Limsa Lominsa. I was able to collect lightning, wind, water, ice and earth shards from botany at that level. I do not recall ever seeing fire shards. Weaving uses a TON of lightning shards. One to make the thread, one to make the cloth, one to make the actual item. The best place to get them is east of camp black brush outside Ul'duh. The level 15 vegetation is among the cactuars that are on the hillside.

I would usually stop once an hour, go there and farm up 150+ lightning shards then head back to the weaver's guild to continue. AS far as materia goes, weavers can only attach materia to items that are made, or could be made with weaving. You also can't attach materia to items that are higher level than you are. IE; as a level 20 weaver, I couldn't attach materia into my THM's level 21 gear.

Hope this info is helpful :)

It's also worth noting that each piece of gear indicates what level crafter is necessary to meld materia to the gear, so there is no guesswork involved (luckily). It's intuitive as well, like Mathisyn described: the only crafters capable of melding materia to gear are those capable of making the gear itself (with some exceptions, I'm sure, but I haven't seen those yet).

Edited, Jun 24th 2013 4:56pm by Klarus

I'm going to have to amend my previous statement. Just re-got Botanist back up to 16 and... the Carbonized Matter and Dark Matter have been moved to Western La Noscea. The 4 tree circle that had them and the Wind/Ice/Earth shards is gone as well. Still not the same zone as the Mining ones though.

If you examine another player, you'll noticed two greyed out buttons that say "Affix Materia" and "Repair." They don't seem to be working at the moment, but I assume that's how a tradeskiller can work on someone else's gear.

I wasn't playing 1.0 when Materia was released, and I don't have any 20+ gear to convert, so I can't confirm anything about Materia yet. I have not seen anything about combining materia yet, but that could easily fall into the "not working yet" category.

I tried out leatherworking for the sole purpose of materia melding for my lvl 20 PUG.

Up until lvl 15 LTW all the materials can be purchased at the guild merchant but soon after that I struggle alot to find the mats. There was a need for metals, minerals, animal hide etc. Most of the stuff cannot be purchased at npcs. I really enjoyed it.

I did finally get LTW to lvl 19 but then I found out painfully that the catalyst required to meld could only be found by miners and botanist with none on the markets. Also, the crafter's level has to be higher than the gear they are trying to meld materia on.

The market is going to be needed big time. There is so much cross over in materials. I don't think anyone would want to level all the necessary crafts. If you're starting up at the launch I highly suggest getting together with a varied group of crafters and gatherers or else you'll have a hard time raising your level.