Is crafting "dead"?Follow

Hi im pretty new to ffxi, ive only played for a few days now, and I love this game.
I have a lvl 14 white mage and I was planning on leveling up some crafting skills mainly to enhance my stats or make some kind of potions to make soloing a little bit more enjoyable.
Anyways I partied up with someone that has played the game for a while and they told me that "crafting is dead" and it's a waste of time and money to level a craft skill.
Is crafting worth it ?
Can anyone answer this for me please?

(edit: didnt want to bump. Thanks alot for the input.)



Edited, Feb 6th 2011 6:08pm by squallornothing

Edited, Feb 11th 2011 5:04am by squallornothing

Consumable market was always steady. But even that has looked quite remarkable as of late.

Crafting isn't "dead" but it is top-heavy, as is most of the game. Judging by the bare AHs in the starting cities, new players have not picked up crafting - which means that people starting to craft now will have very little competition.

There will be a merger of all Auction Houses soon - and it would be pure speculation to say how that will change things, but it will change things.

Each stack of crystals you sell on the AH can probably pull in more gil for you if you crafted something with them instead. Yes, it will take more time and effort, but more gil is good - and it will raise your crafting skill in the process.

The earlier poster made a good point about brass ingots. However, you'll need to raise your goldmsithing skill a bit to be able to make those ingots. One synth that will help get you there is making stone arrowheads - a nice use of flint stones clogging your inventory. But making stone arrowheads should provoke you to make stone arrows (you can make them with no crafting skill). This will get your cloth and goldsmithing crafting skills to level 2, and your woodworking skill to level 3 - and will provoke you to level your archery skill. All of this will support your later development.

The days of making big money from synths is long gone now for new crafters. You'll struggle to level up due to the shortage in consumables a previous poster highlighted and once you get to the levels where you used to be able to make money from HQ items like scorp harnesses and haubs you'll find the market dominated by veteran crafters who can afford to price you out of the competition due to the fact dropping a few mil in loss synths is chump change to them.

If you are determined to take up a craft still, I'd lean towards Synergy as it's the only craft that is still receiving regular updates from S-E.

I did say, "used to". =)

As for consumables, even with 100+3 alchemy I struggled to make decent money crafting. I had a bunch of mules, farmed my own materials where I could, drove myself borderline insane with the inventory micro-management of ingredients and I still found it an uphill struggle competing with the RMT crafters on my server.

As unappealing as it is to most people, I would suggest that anyone looking to eventually be able to craft something that's "worth it" should probably take the time to level up synergy (along with subcrafts). If you're dead set against synergy, I would choose a craft that deals in consumables. Scorp Harnesses and Haubergeons have come and gone, but it's a safe assumption that shihei will always be needed.

It seems to me that as far as expanding the crafts go, SE is only really interested in expanding synergy. I would not expect too many more worthwhile non-synergy synths to be added.

Synergy is fortunately skillable while solo and doesn't cost THAT much either.

Edited, Mar 28th 2011 9:13pm by Fynlar

After so many years of FFXI a lot of the old big money items are either now obsolete, or so plentiful now that demand and price has significantly dropped. However there is still nice profit to be made with a little research. As has already be mentioned, the consumables market will always be in demand, you might not be making big $$$ synths, but AH'ing fast selling items in bulk can add up quickly.

Crafting materials also seem quite stable, and so with a decent HQ rate, playing sensible and farming/buying your mats from an NPC you can make a nice penny off those.

The days of hyper inflation and capping your gil with a 100 craft are long gone, but you can still make enough to get by relatively comfortable, just remember the key nowadays is crafting smart.



It probabally varies from server to server, but I just started levelling WW for the same reason. And I was surprised at how quick and easy it was compared to other crafts I have levelled. Heck it was also quite profitable, most of my synth choices to 70 were either profit or break even.

Arrowheads on my server seemed in good supply (Maybe I got lucky and skilled my WW at the same time another player was skilling on arrowheads). As for fletchings I have no idea as to availability, I had 97 Clothcraft (Now delevelled to 89) and so could make my own.

Also for starting some crafts; Some mats are hard to find and you will have to farm, that's still true. (Like GS is a bit pricy/difficult to get to 60 now but I'm grinding though it now.)

The consumables market is where the gil is; also anything synergy is big money.

it's been almost a year since I got my woodworking to 100 but what I did when I was stuck on fletchings was to level clothcraft as well and then keep them back till I could use them for skill up for woodworking.

In 6 months, I got 100 WW, 100 fishing and all subs at 60 and already had a lvl 100 cooking mule.
I guess your solution is best if you really don't want to level cloth craft though. :D