Estucheon Stage 2 - HQ Brass Jadagna +1

These shields are the worst to grind out, mostly because of the limited amount of guild points you can get per day and then have to to turn around and get craftsmanship points to buy the shield mats. Spheres aren't bad cause you can buy them depending on availability, but the cost can be great. If you don't buy them, farming them can be horrible and a time sink that can rival leveling back in the dunes when the game came out.

Then, there is the stigma that just cause you have a shield you're rich... when the reality is that you usually break even.

with just minor planning, im sure it wont be the GP the bottleneck.

Exactly. Plus the thing people tend to not mention is, when using the cards to make spheres at least (cards were best option for me since they stack, I only have one account so doing Palborough wasn't viable time wise plus, you can Master jobs killing the VT mobs that drop the cards). Anyhow, even with Moghancement: Desynthesis or Moghancement: Lightning (tried both), you literally get about a 38-40% return rate on the cards becoming spheres, the rest blow up. And that's not even thinking about all the breaks where you don't lose the card (which is about a 50% break rate) so, you go through it feels like 100 billion crystals.

AND you have to desynth tons more cards since you run out of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 spheres much faster than the Tier 1 spheres even if you use much less of them, because on avg out of say a stack of 99 cards, you may end up with 10-15 Tier 2 spheres and about 8-9 Tier 3 spheres. And then the worst part for me at least was literally trying to stay awake while doing the focuser. I can't count how many Tier 2 and Tier 3 spheres I basically wasted because I would pass out for just a few seconds mid skillchain and by the time I'd jump awake and hit that button for the Light SC or w/e, it would be too late and I'd just get 1 spirit for that T3 sphere and 40k NPC mat.

Trying to compare making a mythic or anything even back when it was at it's most difficult it's just not even in the same ballpark.

With 2 rings plus kitron macaron my rate is a bit higher than 50% (without food it drops around 40%). Cards in particular can be made under ionis so suposelly you can get a higher rate

I did Ionis, rings, food, praying, didn't matter. I kept track of everything from when I hit 11% spirit and up, average ratio of spheres from cards never got above 40%. I know two other fellas with shields and they had the same experience.

I kept track of losses making spheres from cards (ionis, rings, food, etc.) while making two shields and always got max of 30% (usually 25 to 30%) loss per batch of cards (usually a few thousand). I have read and heard of worse rates and I’m not sure what’s up with that.

Did you mean 70% of spheres out of the cards? Thats very good.

I never kept track, too depressing. I just kept my head down and kept going until that spirit bar was full.

I always crafted with Mogenhancement Desynthesis, Ionis, Rusk, facing SW while chanting to a painting of the full moon.

These discussion over the weekend were pretty deflating but I have appreciated all of the honesty from you guys. I don't even know if I want to complete my shield anymore, and that sucks because I have enjoyed the process so far. I am currently only Phase 1 and have completed leveling the Craftsmanship to 100%, currently blocked by guild points for analysis crystals. But I have sincerely enjoyed it, and reading ahead doesn't seem like Phases 2 and 3 would be too much of a problem. Everything I am hearing about Phase 4 (and the finished product) just sounds .... awful.

Looking ahead, I have also spent some time here and there farming cards down in the caverns but the drop rate on those isn't too good. Not to mention, I am not sure whether I need to farm all elements or just picks a few specific ones to spam over and over. If the desynthing rate is 30-40% like you guys say, I don't know how I would ever be able to farm enough cards to even finish.

I make more money farming and selling spheres than my friends with a finished shield anyway..

I had a lot of cards left over when I finished my shield. I didn't know just how much gil and how fast they would sell as I didn't buy any spheres. There were hardly any sellers on Cerberus at the time.

It's worth getting to stage 4 just to be able to craft spheres for sure.

I didn’t mean 30-40% desynthing rate but the loss rate while desynthing. I used all cards that I farmed and yielded spheres from 70% of the cards. I did not keep track of break rate but usually needed 30% more crystals than I had cards.

OK I must have read that backwards, thank you for clarifying. So it sounds like I am going to need to farm up around 130-135k cards if I decide to finish Phase 4 ... LOL. See you guys next year, let me know how Odyssey turns out.

You don’t need quite as many cards, actually way less. I could give more exact numbers if I had my notes with me. I’m thinking 20k but that’s also a lot to do manually. I think I remember one card being worth 5 spirit.

I used every sphere that I got and didn’t buy any extra. With the T3 synths it cost me about 100M in catalysts.

for reference, 18k-ish cards got me to around 40k-50k spirit and that was with selling every single one of the hq3 light/dark spheres for gil along the way. I'm a bit farther now, but I haven't been counting cards

I farmed all elements and alternated skillchains to end in light then dark (usually I'd repeat one type two or three times, then switch to the other, repeat). Reason for that is, on the focuser portion, if you just spam the same skillchain over and over, it causes you to have actual breaks (think of a mix of a furnace blowing up in synergy and just, breaking a synth during normal synthesis). You will get breaks along the way no matter what you do, but they just happen much more often is what I mean if you spam the same skillchain. Especially after you reach 50% of your needed spirit on the focuser, they break more often.

Now, you don't ALWAYS get a loss of spirit on breaks, but you will get a loss of spirit on breaks more often (and a larger loss) if you just spam the same skillchain over and over. I had a couple of times where I'd break and lose over 400 spirit, which you will find out takes often around 90 mins of focuser work to accumulate and a ton of spheres. It's a pretty big punch in the gut, so I highly recommend writing down a couple different skillchains for each chain type (couple for light, couple for dark) and alternate them. Now of course like always, I'm sure there may be someone who jumps on here claiming they just spammed one skillchain and never had an issue but from my experience and from several other shield owners I have spoken to, they'd most likely be lying.

Now I wouldn't necessarily give up on the idea of making a shield, I'd simply think long and hard about which one. Raising your craft skill has become pretty easy these days, so even if you have GS at 110...you could easily drop it to 70 and raise one of your other crafts to 110 in about a week (more or less, depending on your play time). Just research each craft, find out which crafts have the most consistently selling money maker items, research the cost of mats for said items and their availability and choose wisely.

Really the biggest thing making people feel so left out in the crafting scene is how recent crafts are gated behind the shield KIs. Isn't having the shield enough of an advantage, SE? Remove the KI requirement. We can't even attempt to lose money trying to make our Su5's... it's just emptiness.

Even locking the sphere recipe behind stage 3 shield (plus 100% craftmanship) just make those less available in market.

Well not that i really complain as due to that many good camps are still available in many servers.