synergy questionFollow

Do you have to be in a party to do synergy? If i have all the req'd skills to make the item, do still need someone else in party? does that person have to have synergy lvld also?

Synergy skill is meaningless in that you do not need any skill level to attempt to make an item.

It's important in that whoever feeds the fewell will want high level skill so that the furnace doesn't explode after every feed action.

If I have to make an rare/ex item for someone, I'll typically have the operate the safety lever every time I get to about 25% impurity ratio. This speeds things up, prevents explosions, and requires absolutely no skill.

You can never lose the synergy ingredients due to a failed synergy attempt. When the attempt fails, you click on the furnace again, and all of your materials will be returned to you. If you don't have room in your pack for it (which can happen with multiples of the same stackable ingredient, because the game insists on you having space for all of them unstacked), the game will tell you to sort your inventory and make space.

There's no time limit to retrieve your materials either. It doesn't even have to be retrieved at the same furnace, AFAIK. I took a long break from skilling up Synergy. And when I started up again recently, I was surprised to find some ingredients that I had left in there months ago.

It takes synergy skill in the mid 40s to be able to successfully create a Fisherman's Smock, you will either need to skill up synergy or find someone with sufficiently high synergy skill. Either way, you will still need to do the quest to obtain a synergy crucible ("Synergistic Pursuits"), which is what allows you to claim the use of a furnace.

As long as you have the crucible key item, someone else can do all the work. You just have to be the one who starts the process by claiming the furnace, and then add all the materials (which in this case is just the Apron). After that, anyone who is in your party can perform the synergy operations for you.

Check out the wiki resource on Synergy. You may find it useful.
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Category:Synergy

Sylvons' reply is right on except for one detail:



According to the wiki, the smocks are level 41-45ish recipes. I suspect that the goldsmith's smock level of 43 is correct or else I likely would have updated the page when I made mine. I can't say for certain about the others.

In any case, this doesn't mean that 43 is needed to be successful. Far from it. I had messed around with synergy and leveled to 3. Then I decided I wanted one of those nifty Duchy Earrings that caps at 30. It took me 15-20 tries to succeed, and I had leveled to 5 by the time I finally did, but I WAS able to make one.

Smocks are a bit higher, and take a bit more fewell, but should be doable if you are persistent enough. The blown attempts won't be a waste because you're spending fewell for skillups, which you will end up doing anyhow if you continue leveling synergy. You may need to skill up SOME before you succeed, but by no means do you need to be in the 40s.

On the other hand, if you just want the smock, or you want it now, asking for help will be the fastest way to get it made.

Edited, Jan 14th 2011 4:33pm by VxSote

When synergy first came out, skilling on smocks was a popular option as there were not a lot of known, higher-level recipes. It still works, of course, but there are plenty of other options (silver nuggets for example, and later mythril/gold/plat as well) that are easy to do, should you wish to upgrade your smock sooner rather than later.

The guilds each have a 15k GP item (if you are high enough in your craft - I'm not sure the level required) which you can synergize into a stall (MH furniture) that gives an additional +1 to your crafting skill via a "mega-moglification". The synths have an elemental balance of 99 (element varies), which is convenient for skilling up, and they are currently the only known synergy recipes at level 80 (all others are 79 or less).

I finished my stall for the goldsmithing skill before leveling synergy past 70, so I'll have to buy another GP item to cap synergy later (or wait for new recipes to be added).

If I ranked them in order of importance:

Feed Fewell
Safety Lever
Thwack
Repair
Valve/others


Since everything right now can be made with only one person operating the furnace, the only 3 skills you should be using is Feed Fewell, Safety Lever, and probably Thwack. You should never be touching the valve (damage you take should be the least of your concerns with explosions), so there's no reason to put any points into it.

Repair is a bit of a wildcard, in my opinion. You will usually gain nothing and lose a bit of fewell if you try to repair your furnace when you're the only one operating it. At the same time, having lv5 repair skill makes a significant difference over lv0 and if SE starts adding exceedingly more difficult recipes in the future, you will want to have someone operating the furnace that does nothing but repairs.