Zyrusticae

http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/15004-making-crystals http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/finalfan ... pid=960613 If someone HAS managed to make them, that'd be great... for them. Me, I don't plan on leveling a third craft (two is hard enough, good grief)...

No, you don't understand... you automatically gain the ability to make an item when you are of high enough rank. You don't actually need to "acquire" the recipe to begin with (and the game has no way of recording this anyways); that's just for your convenience. There is simply no way to convert shards into crystals at the moment. You can try any permutation but it simply does not work. You CAN, however, convert crystals into shards... although this is a pretty useless option since crystals are considerably rarer than shards to begin with.

I believe that is the intent, yes, but the recipes simply do not exist currently. Hopefully something that goes in for release (if not, well... sucks to be you, smithers!)

I tried that. To be frank, I already know more than he did at the time he made that post. It doesn't work with high fail-rate crafts (the friggin' nuggets, in particular). To be more specific: White and gold have the highest success rates, with gold being higher than white, and all success rates are independent of which type of synthesis you use. Red is the lowest of the solid colors, and from what I have seen, when it fails, it fails catastrophically. Obviously, with the rapidly fluctuating colors, there are only two options: Suck it up and hit rapid craft, or wait and hope it stabilizes (and it will... eventually). You CAN succeed in crafts just by spamming the rapid option, but it'll result in extremely low-quality crafts. It also doesn't work if you keep failing, as you will lose more durability than you gain in progress, not to mention the craft can get unstable and eventually (literally) explode. Also, I was talking about crystals, not shards. I don't recall ever acquiring a single crystal throughout all eleven ranks of my mining. Maybe fishing or botany are different, but that's just maddening if it is, as it would just make blacksmithing and armory even more gimped next to the other tradeskills.

I've been trying to craft. Trying so hard! But, okay, see here... the most basic crafts available all require crystals. Crystals are exceedingly rare drops from specific mob types. Basically, I have no choice but to find a mob that drops a particular crystal element and then farm that mob endlessly to get materials for my most basic of crafts (turning ores into nuggets). But wait! I can't actually complete the craft for that most basic of recipes, for reasons completely unknown and alien to me! Even more dishearteningly, I've somehow managed to grind my way up to rank 6 blacksmithing (off of SO MANY FAILURES and occasional successes in local levequests), and yet the failure rate seems to be as INHUMANLY SADISTIC as ever. I just don't understand it. It's like they're doing everything they can to dissuade people from ever going anywhere with it. This isn't even mentioning the fact that the first axe upgrade recipe requires a material component that nobody knows how to acquire (red ochre buffalo leather strap)....

Yeah, I dnno what the story NPCs are always going on about with joining this or that guild or whatever. There's simply no way to actually do that, leaving one scratching their head in confusion. I imagine it's something that'll be in in the proper release, or something. As for guild marks, you start gaining those from guildleves in the rank 20+ range.

For me, this is my single biggest gripe with the game's performance. I find that Limsa Lominsa performs poorly because it is constantly loading in new data, even though I have gigs of free RAM it could use to to prevent that. The constant stuttering has convinced me that I MUST start in either Ul'dah or Gridania, both of which appear to have less stuff that needs loading or are just simply better-optimized all-around.

I, personally, will run Ambient Occlusion on pretty much any game that supports it... with the only exception, thus far, of Final Fantasy XIV, simply because the performance with it is abysmal. It's rather perplexing. I have an Nvidia GTX 260, and I have no problems running Crysis, Aion, Champions Online, APB, any Source Engine game, Mass Effect 2, UT3... all with ambient occlusion enabled with the settings cranked. It's only FFXIV where it causes the game to devolve into a literal slideshow. Whoever programmed that feature really, really needs to go look at how the other game developers do it, or even just steal Nvidia's version, which runs in pretty much any game with a minimal performance impact (and looks nice, too). Meanwhile, EQ2 just... I don't understand it. It really runs just terribly on my system. I mean, I even have a nifty quad core (Q8300 clocked at 3GHz each core) and it just ran like dirt on dirt. Mind, I kept the game in SM 3.0 when I tried it, and never tried using the regular (primitive) shading model with CPU shadows instead, but considering how old the game is I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that it's GPU bottlenecked. Hrm.

EQ2? Really? EQ2 runs like a dehydrated dog on my system at maximum settings, whereas Final Fantasy XIV runs smooth as butter... except in Limsa Lominsa, for some reason unbeknownst to me. Well, I do have to turn off Ambient Occlusion, but I imagine the grand majority of players do as well. It's just a terribly poorly optimized feature, especially when considering how many other games have it and run just fine with it enabled...

I have to admit, the 8-day thingy for the collector's edition is an ingenious (if totally bastard-like) move on the part of Squeenix. That being said, I'm still not entirely sold on the game in the first place, so splurging an extra $25 on this thing, even for that sizable of an early start, and even with all the extra goodies, is just a bit too much for me. Maybe something'll click as I play on and convince me.

I find this hero complex hilarious and amusing. I mean... it's an MMO. Let's be honest here. An MMO's story simply cannot work if every single player is this or that special individual who is destined for extremely great things. I mean, you can PRETEND you're the only one who's gone through the events in question but that is obviously never going to be in true in actuality. An MMO's story is much easier to stomach when they (the writers) assume you're simply one of many, who happens to be slightly more competent and slightly more lucky than the uninteresting masses (re: the NPCs). And yes, the story DOES change as you rise up in ranks. Because they recognize just how accomplished you are. Which means, y'know, you can't expect them to treat you as a "hero" because YOU'RE A BLOODY NEWBIE. You're RANK 1. People like you DIE TO GIANT INSECTS AND RODENTS IN DROVES (and don't forget the dodo birds!). If you want to be treated as a hero you have to get stronger, get noticed, become someone who is actually of consequence and not a useless nobody with a bizarre sense of entitlement. *Ahem* Seriously, I don't get this mindset. It's an MMO. Screw stereotypical "I'm special" heroic stories, I want the story of my character and not the story so many silly children pine for to fulfill their power fantasies.

Ul'dah is my #1 most favorite of all the zones. The fact that it's the easiest zone to find Bombs to kill (which drop fire shards and crystals by the scores) cements its position as the one I most definitely must start my main in.

Just so you know, the storyline quests continue every 10 ranks (1, 10, 20, etc.). So, yes, it most certainly doesn't end.

Heh, my first post here as a complete an total newbie to the Final Fantasy MMO universe: - Crafting drives me up the friggin' walls. I kinda like the fact that most people won't see equipment upgrades until they're well into their teen levels, as it makes them a really big deal compared to, well, every MMO out there, but OHMYGOD could they have made it ANY more newbie-unfriendly?! I predict a huge falloff as players just try to get into it and FAIL and FAIL and FAIL and FAIL and FAIL SOME MORE FOOL over and over and over and over again. It's ridiculous. There's no curve to it whatsoever. It's completely, unfailingly unintuitive and completely, unfailingly unforgiving. If Square is serious about drawing customers that were turned away by FFXI they have GOT to do something about crafting, especially since it's the ONLY way to get new gear. - The game requires a gamepad. Absolutely no question, you will not be able to enjoy this game with a mouse and keyboard. Or, rather, your experience will be completely compromised without one. It's possible to enjoy it that way, but I'd rather run far, far away than contend with the horrible UI lag with a mouse and keyboard. - You have to make macros to quick-switch classes. I'm just... scratching my head with this one. You have to make macros. Or else you get to manually, slowly, painfully reassign every single action every time you switch classes. Which, uh, kinda defeats the purpose of such a feature in the first place, doesn't it? ...I think the UI designer at Squeenix needs to be replaced. ASAP. Seriously. Too much fail here. It's inexcusable. - Guidleves. I don't quite understand them. I mean, I understand they work best in groups so you can just keep chucking out quest after quest, but the loooong cooldown and the automatic failure on disconnect (lol, and with a game that crashes this often) is pretty, well, unforgiving. These things aside, though, my impressions are largely positive. But then, I have a high tolerance for BS (hell, I played APB for about 400 hours over the entirety of closed beta and the first month of release...), and I can see many things that will turn off less-hardcore players, which is a bad thing as that's exactly the customer base Squeenix was trying to attract with XIV in the first place. But, well, I can see myself getting into it, as the ambiance and the immersion and everything is more well-done than any game I've played in recent memory. Just have to get past those little niggles... And the crafting. Oh, boy, the crafting...