Crafting In The Adoulin Era

Ok, so Seekers of Adoulin is out, tons of new gear is out, people are all about all this ilvl gear, which i can understand.

Really this post is more a question to all the fellow crafters...

Is anyone else gotten discouraged, and want to just give up on crafting all together?
We used to be able to make great gil crafting... now with everything SE has done to detour the RMT, all they've done really is push them into the crafters territory and they ruthlessly undercut, even eachother. Leathers that i used to be able to purchase the hide at 600k, and resell the leather for 1.6M... is down to hide 400K and leather 480k? where is the profit in that? the other mats I use to craft the leather, cost more than that 80k profit margin as is.

Farm the items yourself and then craft them to make a profit. That's what most people I know do. Or shout adverts for your services with your fee.

That's why you craft cooking.

Because no matter what, people will be hungry!

HQ gear aren't worth as much as before because of new gear coming out very frequently. Consumables is good gil but you have to sell in bulk.

Also crafting mats are expensive because there aren't many people doing delve.

This is not really true. It took me three months to sell a Donderbuss+1 and I only was able to get 9mil more than the cost of materials.

Basically people don't want to spend gil on rare items now out of fear that they will just be made obsolete in the next patch. So you're stuck selling rare items for cheap, which means unless you can make the NQs at almost no loss or even slight profit, the notion of crafting HQs for profit is a whole lot of work for not a lot of reward.

Things have really flipped and the NQ market is what drives crafting profit now, outside of a small number of synths. HQ is still bonus of course but nowhere near what it used to be.

9mil isn't a profit? Damn. I wish I had that much money.

#firstworldproblems

Well, considering that it was a T0 synth with materials costing 11M, the average number of synths to get that synth with the bonuses and what not is around 33, meaning ~350mil average investment to make it.

So yeah, 9mil is pretty awful. I lost about as much when Eminent Gun came out and had to sell of my remaining two Donderbuss for loss. 4M each, so I lost 14mil. It is ***.

And Josiah, I made it when it was still the best gun available, before 119. People just don't want to spend money on rare HQs.

For a few weeks there was a lot of money to be made on the crafted materials needed for the base AF quests. The margins are smaller now but it was easy to make 1-2+mil a day just hammering out sheets/threads/cloths etc with just a 70ish craft and making 40k+ a synth.

All crafts have their ups and downs, people will always undercut and crash markets to protect their 'turf' and run off competition.
You will also have to compete with people that just enjoy crafting for the sake of it and care less than you about profit.

If you aren't diversifying your activities to make gil and expecting crafting to be your sole way to make money, prepare to be frustrated.

In recent months its been far more lucrative to spend a good portion of your time to farm RME upgrade mats/Reforge mats for gil.
From a gil/hour perspective I cook less often now because there's better ways to make gil right now.

It's not just some periodic swing in crafting that's happening. Their shift to vertical content model has undermined the HQ market for all non-consumable crafts. The value calculation for high level HQs has changed substantially.

These days I just tell people to do Cooking.

Cooking isnt even that good money-wise. Its super easy to level and unless your idea of a good time is producing tons of hq sushi and rcb's, selling a few and then getting into an under-cut fest, cooking is not that amazing.
I do it once in awhile, swoop in, make a few mil, undercut and bomb the market then take a break lol.

yeah, but that's not so dissimilar to the profit you'd ultimately make on even the "big ticket" crafting these days though. It's just less stress (less investment) and more tedium (listing lots of things rather than one or two).

And afterwards, I come in with my 30-50k per dragon meat hoarded during this huge rush to buy/produce/undercut/sell, wait for those who gave up, and start selling buns for 160k+

I sometimes undercut just to speed up the process to get people disinterested and leave the market.

The idea is to buy all the supplies as you can, hold on to them, produce when you can corner the market, and watch the money roll in...

Cooking is really profitable if you have high fishing skill.

Plus, if you smart about it, you only have to craft once a week/every two weeks and sell what you have for a moderate profit, while stocking up on supplies for the next big crafting session.

yeah from a highlevel crafter non-cook perspective, most of the money lately made was from converting reforge mats into finished items.
If you play that game you have to have the gil nest egg and fortitude to watch something like an exalted log explode in your face, but yeah you come out ahead.
Crafting is a long term game and you gotta learn to ride out the bad bumps

If only there was a fishing rod that could catch cerberus/dragon/hydra/gabbrath

I agree with you completely.

I just have a different method of procuring money. I like selling bulk for a small profit per sale over selling a large item once a month. But to each their own.

If there was then the prices/sales would be lower. Just saying if you farm your own mats, you can meet the sales demands.

Has anyone noticed that on 30 "Successful Synthesis" that they get more HQ on the 30th synth? I just HQ'd while skilling up 3 times so far this morning and I'm well under the item cap. I had a LS mate notice the same.

Anyone else notice? Maybe it's just luck at the right/wrong time?