3 star crafting rotation for HQ relic turn-insFollow

Hi all,

First off, this isn't a guide, just a handy group of tips for those looking, and who dont want to run through lists of greek sounding CZ, IQ, SH, HT, MM, Ing, GS, BB, CS code:

I'll start by saying that I'm by no means the best crafter, but I have worked out a few things that may help you if you weren't already aware.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/
Use the lodestone (with your chosen crafting class active) and this site to build your crafting gear setup, and determine what your fc buffs and hq food will give you. Log down your Craftsmanship, Control, and CP.

http://www.ffxivcrafter.com/
This site is amazing. No idea who made it, but you can go in and simulate your crafts without being in-game. Allows you to theorize your approach without wasting resources in-game. Only down side is that it assumes that all your RNG steps succeed, but that isnt bad considering.

So with Boulbaisse HQ and the craftsmanship +10 and Control +10 FC buffs active, it puts me at 421 craft, 394 control, and 389 cp on my leatherworker. I'm pretty much fully melded ilvl 55, with the new ilvl 70 55 ears and neck fully melded, have the artisan's glasses and the pinga supra, but am still working off of the non-perfectly melded ilvl 55 offhand tool.

So I want to try crafting perfect vellum using the shark oil, pumice x2, and aged vellum, with nothing hq prior.

I will run the following rotation.

Comfort Zone
Inner Quiet
Piece by Piece x2
Steady Hands II
Hasty Touch x5
Comfort Zone
Masters Mend II
Steady Hands I
Hasty Touch x4
Steady Hands I
Ingenuity II
Great Strides
Byregot's Blessing
Rapid Synthesis
Careful Synthesis II

The make or break step is the Rapid Synthesis, which should be boosted a bit in success rate, but still can fail. If you are uncomfortable with that and want two rapid synth chances just to be sure, cut that Hasty Touch x4 up there to x3 and you will have a bit more insurance, but your quality chance will fall to 20 something percent on a perfect run. The piece by piece are 90% I think and usually do not fail, but if they do, reclaim and chalk it up to RNG. You can reclaim all the way up to Byregot's Blessing if for instance, you get a really crummy success rate on your hasty touches.

With this setup and stat configuration, if all hasty touches succeed you should finish the craft with a 66% chance to HQ. Not bad for no prior hq materials.

These HQ 3 star rotations are heavy RNG and there is no perfect 100% every time rotation as far as I know. Also keep in mind that this does not factor in goods or excellents.

Hope this helps. Maybe you folks who are a bit better at this can give me some tips.

Edited, Dec 12th 2014 4:50pm by Valkayree

Edited, Jan 15th 2015 2:34pm by Valkayree

Tell me about it. Its insane. At my current stats, with FC buffs, I dont even have to pop food and I can HQ the perfect vellum with NQ items. But these 4 star crafts double the quality required. I've been experimenting with 2 PbP and then a SH2 and RS in the beginning to save time, but even then I need either a RS at the end or two CSII to finish up. I've only managed to get one HQ water logged strap so far, and that is just when I was cranking out the five regular water logged straps for my supra and used a HQ hippogryph Leather and it HQ'ed off of a 2% chance. All my real attempts either I bust taking risks or I try for it at 40-60% and it fails.

Ah well, one day.

Are you doing this using macros that you set up to perform the same steps? If so, it could be that key steps are getting missed due to lag / not enough delay between steps. For example, if Inner Quiet fails to fire, the crafting simulator shows that you'll wind up with only 8% chance at HQ based on quality.

If we can't figure out a simple answer to why your quality is so low and you can't get any feedback from a GM, you could try posting a crafting attempt with step by step details (i.e. the action that you do and the durability, progress and quality immediately after the action, at every step).

I messed up there, I meant the mosshorn and rose gold choker, ilvl 55

I dont know if this still is the rule-of-thumb, but way back the general idea behind the items came down to a stat cap being bound to the item, and not to the quality.

For instance, a item could have a stat cap of 9 INT and 9 MND, and while the HQ version already had +9 natively, the NQ, which natively had +8 allowed you to meld in an extra +1 to reach the same levels.

For most gear this idea is perfectly fine, and it would save you a lot of gil going for the NQ version and melding in a piece of 200 gil materia.

But the problems start when you're going for gear of or beyond level 50.

My Goldsmithing outfit for instance. My HQ body has Craftmanship +92, Control +31 and CP +3.
In comparison the NQ body of the exact same type has Craftmanship +81, Control +27 and CP +2.

If the same rules apply, the stat cap of it would result in a maximum Craftmanship of 108 (+16) and 36 (+5) Control.
It's not too bad to reach (or get close to cap) by using all 5 slots of the HQ Body. Yet impossible to get near by using the NQ body since it needs 27 Craft and 9 Control.

It's a rediculous notion to "save" yourself 8k on buying the NQ variant compared to the HQ variant when you're going to need to meld it with 200-300k of materia anyhow. Let alone the additional costs of the extra materia to get near the other stats.

Even for DoH/DoL accessories with no native stats other than CP/GP. The diffirence between HQ and NQ is easily a good 3-4 points of CP. Sure you can meld that in, but why bother when the HQ already has that (with the slots you would have used for it open for other materia).