As far as I can tell, the cheapest way to skillup from 84-91. I'll be making a lot of these, but losing 9k/synth is still cheap compared to making composite rods. After losing 100k to gain .1 Alchemy, I switched to these... so far I got .6 for roughly 120k, that's not too bad, considering. Once I get to 88 or so I'll probably try Icarus wings or Cannon Shells.
I've been trying to skill on these for some time, starting at 84+2, given how many para pots I had saved up. Skill rate has been horribly slow. Like, .1 every 10 synths... plenty of material loss, etc. but that was expected. If you'd like to try to skill on these (which I'm still in the process of doing at time of posting), I'd suggest just sitting at the Tenshodo vendor in Bastok. Lowest price from low demand seems to be 3,125g, and max stock is about 25 per day. Due to guild price fluctuations on demand (Tenshodo always seemed to have this, but supposedly new in the last patch), you can't really camp more than 2 game days in a row without a price spike to 6k each, at which point the idea of trying to skill on these gets much more expensive (all that additional NPC buying price is a loss in gil for you, after all). I'm trying to make a trip there once a day and clean stock for 2 game days... slowly making progress. Vendor holiday is Iceday.
As for desynthing... I got bored of running to a different building to sell these to NPC, and tried ~20 in total. I got the following (still with ~84+2 skill): NQ: Para Pot HQ(1?): Iron Nugget x6 HQ(2?): Elm Lumber ...and a lot of critical failures. Someone else has posted that Tama-Hagne is an HQ result, so there's HQ1, 2 and 3, but who knows what order. I got Iron Nuggets several times, so I am guessing that's HQ1. Elm lumber is also semi-valuable and the synth might have paid for itself if you're lucky enough to get it =P It might seem stupid to break these over and over in desynth, but getting para pots back isn't even so bad when you consider they're rarely on AH (probably), and making them from base ingredients > dust > pots is more time-consuming and runs up more of a tab.
...As for furthering my Alchemy, I'm going to try Espadons, while hoping for some cermet recycling in desynth to save gil. Really though, in the mid-to-upper 80s these are a bargain to make, and the key ingredient is an NPC-bought item... not anything painful to farm or garden.
would having smithing skill help in the desynth you think? idk hmm desynth has high failure rate no mather how much skill you have >< maybe u could mule them until they come up as the guild point item of the day. wait, do these ever come up as the guild point item? hmm... or you could make really cheap Ninja's (wait, if they were cheap they wouldnt pay Ninja lol) really happy by undercutting. or you could just NPC em... yeah NPC em.