a coupla questions for the 'leet..

[kargath]

So I'm sitting here on my LC100..and..well, a few questions come to mind that I hope I can ask the true "veterans" here...

The first question, is how can you sit down and shoot for a tier0 (dusk gloves) knowing your odds are like .01%? Worse yet, knowing you can smash b. hides into leather, and then smash the tiger gloves. The worst thing I've ever done is a string of 8 amemets in a row - granted it paid off in the long run (luckily), but still, it wasn't exactly what I would call "fun". This experience is totally weak sauce compared to what I've seen on these boards...

How do you grow the chops to even attempt these? I've done about 50 amemets and they STILL irk me. Even tho I'm used to seeing a hide go boom here and there...

I guess maybe if you can afford the loss, it's no big deal -- which leads me to my second question...

Which came first? Your 100 craft or your gil? Did you sell kraken clubs, get rich, THEN try tier0'ing? Or did you farm/craft your way up to that first b. hide, and get lucky with that dusk piece?

It seems to me that you need to amass a great deal of wealth before trying these items without breaking chairs and quitting the game...but I don't see a mass of money available with careful market watching and odds and ends synthing be it belts, seers, noct or whatnot.

Did you use your craft to build amazing wealth or were you already wealthy before starting/tier0'ing in your craft?

Just some random thoughts/questions.../shrug

[Skeetaru]

tier0 is about 1% give or take first of all. I believe it to be more 1/64ish but w/e. People who craft dusk gloves are pussies BTW, Unicorn Leggings are a helluva lot more nerve racking.

Now more to the answer: crafting is a big rush for me, whenever I hit a tier0 it prolongs my FFXI life. As for where my money came from its two fold. Back when Operation Desert Swarm first came out, some blm friends of mine and I made sort of a mercenary group, having people come up with ks30 orbs and splitting their gil. I also had a ton of KS seals and spammed that KSNM religiously. At the time pre inflation i had alot of gil at the time just from this and leveled Bonecraft with it. Then inflation hit and I was buying Venomous Claws for 10m and selling HQ Harnesses for 20-25 mil. You can imagine how much money that made me ^^

I certainly don't envy people who just got into crafting or never made alot of gil, I think without gil I couldn't play this game.

[BerenTebogo]

So I'm sitting here on my LC100..and..well, a few questions come to mind that I hope I can ask the true "veterans" here...

The first question, is how can you sit down and shoot for a tier0 (dusk gloves) knowing your odds are like .01%? Worse yet, knowing you can smash b. hides into leather, and then smash the tiger gloves. The worst thing I've ever done is a string of 8 amemets in a row - granted it paid off in the long run (luckily), but still, it wasn't exactly what I would call "fun". This experience is totally weak sauce compared to what I've seen on these boards...

How do you grow the chops to even attempt these? I've done about 50 amemets and they STILL irk me. Even tho I'm used to seeing a hide go boom here and there...

I guess maybe if you can afford the loss, it's no big deal -- which leads me to my second question...

Which came first? Your 100 craft or your gil? Did you sell kraken clubs, get rich, THEN try tier0'ing? Or did you farm/craft your way up to that first b. hide, and get lucky with that dusk piece?

It seems to me that you need to amass a great deal of wealth before trying these items without breaking chairs and quitting the game...but I don't see a mass of money available with careful market watching and odds and ends synthing be it belts, seers, noct or whatnot.

Did you use your craft to build amazing wealth or were you already wealthy before starting/tier0'ing in your craft?

Just some random thoughts/questions.../shrug

I've broken over 30 hides lifetime at least, so take this advice to heart because that gil lost doesn't make me blink when it happens.

UNLESS YOU CAN AFFORD 3-4 DUSK SYNTHS EASILY WITHOUT BREAKING YOUR BANK, DON'T SYNTH DUSK!

There's plenty of T1 that require 60 cloth and all of 100k to do 12 of at very minimal loss that will net you 300k-ish profit per hq.

Do these like your life depends on it, alternating between synths every time you HQ 1 or 2 until you have about 5-6 mil, then start doing 2-3 dusk synths at a time, depending on your servers cost and loss / synth. Fact of life is, less money you have to lose the more you will break, always, so get ready to lose 700-1mil per synth at times depending on server, and cry over it, then keep synthing.

You'll HQ, eventually, I've done batches of 12 dusk gloves before and ironically my HQs have come on 1/1s but I still prefer to synth in groups. Leather is really hard to make BIG money if you don't already have BIG money, but looking through the pages, I made back to back T1's the other week and sold them for a combined 5x the price of what any of these Genies sell for, or 2-3x the price of Dragon Harness +1's and shit like that.

Fuck, on my server 1 of those HQs was the same price as Cursed Togi -1. Leather is ridiculous money, but only if you can scoff and losing 20-30 mil over the course of a few months, which does feel good tbh.

[kargath]

that was some tremendous feedback...wow, thank you. One question tho..I though a tier1 LC synth with a 60cc subcraft made the synth tier0? the whole min(main, sub1, sub2) thing...

Anyway, it's nice to hear comparisons on how folks start out...I amassed a small fortune myself camping VE back in the day. sold at least 15 pins but no more than 20 and I was making money hand over fist with my 99 cooking mule...SICK coin. Between the fly and the food I had at one time 7 mil (pocket change in those days). I PL'd and farmed (when inflation was beginning to REALLY peak) my way thru LC up to 88 when the price of wyvern skins said 88 is where my leathercraft stops. Keep in mind, I leveled ranger and thief simply so I could leather craft...the idea of being able to track down my own hides appealed to me and treasure hunter + flee just sweetened the deal.

I quit for 2 years, and came back to about 4 mil and 5k wyvern skins. Gee, guess what I did with that?

Now that I've hit the end of the road (well I still need to cap GS), there's no more emperor hairpin, no more tremor ram farming and no more analyzing the market - shit just doesn't sell.

Here's my new rule since I've been back:
1) it won't sell
2) if it *does* sell, see rule #1
* sole sushi/sushi mats being the exception to this rule

I even tried making parchment...no stacks on market and last stack sold like 2 months ago. I put up one stack - just for shits'n'giggles ~ which sold overnight for a nice 20k or whatever - and when I logged in the next day there were 12 stacks of parchment up lol.

...so...getting perspective from you guys has, I think, extended MY ffxi life.

Thanks.

[BerenTebogo]

Sorry, meant things that are T1 when you have 60 + support clothcraft

[zhan]

Sorry, meant things that are T1 when you have 60 + support clothcraft

I wonder what those could be .




But yea, what sath said in his first post is pretty dead on.

[Thistle]

The first question, is how can you sit down and shoot for a tier0 (dusk gloves) knowing your odds are like .01%?

Which came first? Your 100 craft or your gil?

Not every high level crafter does that. I know I'm not the norm, but I enjoy the skilling up part of crafting. I got to leather 100 years ago, all subs to 60, then said "Hmm, that's it? What's next?". So I started crafting mules. Unfortunately my bone mule has to stay at 77 (her whole purpose in life is making RR items and I don't want her to HQ the pre-synths), so I missed out on the fun part of skilling her. Last week I decided to start a WW mule, and he's mid-60s now.

As for your second question, when I leveled leather my highest job was WHM 30 (I've always hated XPing). Lord that sucked, I couldn't hardly farm for anything, so I learned about doing pre-synths and the grunt work that other crafters didn't want to do. I made enough money to go to 100 that way, and I sort of enjoyed it, so I kept up with it. I never had tons of money back then, but I had enough to support my skilling habit.

[Raineer]

I got rich in CC by practically never crafting T0's (the fact that I didn't waste my gil on them is what made me rich). Only T0's I made were contracted or someone gave me the mats. Only one I tried "alot" was Mahatma Body, mainly because there was never one available to buy and I needed to make one for myself. Went around 0/100 and gave up.

[tymora]

I avoid T0 and T1 that many people are making and only makes those that few are. Usually the more expensive the materials, the less people will try. (Assuming the item is useful)
If the NQ is break even or even profitable, then you can do T0 till you drop. Of course, don't wreck your own market. Make more only after the previous has sold. That way, you can keep the prices stable at a reasonable level.

There was a case of a moron coming in to wreck my T0, T1 market by mass-dumping, but I think he went backrupt. (No more news from him on the AH..)

Just take a bit of patience.

[kargath]

I avoid T0 and T1 that many people are making and only makes those that few are. Usually the more expensive the materials, the less people will try. (Assuming the item is useful)
If the NQ is break even or even profitable, then you can do T0 till you drop. Of course, don't wreck your own market. Make more only after the previous has sold. That way, you can keep the prices stable at a reasonable level.

There was a case of a moron coming in to wreck my T0, T1 market by mass-dumping, but I think he went backrupt. (No more news from him on the AH..)

Just take a bit of patience.

heh, I tried this -- very carefully. I used ffxiah and a comprehensive leather guide and I spent all night a while back doing some hardcore analysis on the new market I returned to.

Come to find out, NQ bison gear yields a very spiffy profit - especially the body piece. But before I went apeshit, I checked the sales history of course, and found out that it's not a very popular item (duh). I made 2 skilling up and figured I'd let them rot on the ah for nice far distant return...and kept only 1 on market.

And rot they did. After 2 months I finally vendor'd them. I knew the sales history was poor, so it was not big.

So there's danger here to be aware of, sitting down and grinding out 12 things...

[kihre]

I started clothcraft almost immediately after starting the game (NA Release), and made gil from things that would drop to me while leveling up. Yagudo Necklace desynths and other things. When i got high enough level, I started mining and leveling smithing that way while making gil at the same time. The way I figured it, is i should be doing two of the below things at the same time:

1) Leveling/meriting
2) farming/gathering mats
3) skilling up or cleaning something
4) skilling a craft while doing #2 (without going back to town with the ingredients)
examples: Farming rams and making the leather for 3 hours straight (and if you're REALLY efficient, use the horns for bone, too), Mining and leveling on the ingots (copper, zinc, iron)

Either the things i'm gathering are for skilling up or (for the last two years) for a batch of T1 something-or-other... or even the expensive ingredient for a T0 synth making the NQs break even and HQ pure profit while getting xp at the same time. I just feel that two of the above should be happening, or it's a waste of time... unless the amount of the one thing is great compared to the time put into it (a good merit party). It might be easier for a clothcrafter to do this with rainbow mats, but if you had bst you could farm tarasque skins while slowly getting xp, or if you had bone you could go lvl up on wyverns. This sorta 2-birds-with-1-stone thinking helped me not have many loss-levels in clothcraft, except the 99-100 stretch. But by then i was making good bank with mahatma slops and prism capes, I just decided to have the luxury of being "done" with clothcraft.

I guess what i've tried to say it's not the gil or the craft that came first, they sorta came hand-in-hand for me with a lot of work.

Also: Big ticket T0 items for me haven't been always terrible. The loss received from a batch of 12 blessed mitts or trousers is small, maybe 500-600k after reselling (and farming the rainbow stuff, synthing and HQing gold thread) and absorbed easily by doing other T1 things for profit. That small loss is MUCH less noticable than the large influx of gil once you HQ something, and I think that's what draws high-end big-bank crafters.

[Zhais]

A few months ago, noble's tunics sold at break-even with aristocrat's a couple mil profit.


boy how I spammed the hell out of that <3 somehow I'm still poor tho

[Izzy]

I had gil way before I had 100 smithing. I sold a Kreigsbiel to some moron for 31mil and basically funded myself with that.

[kargath]

kihre,

your story if 2 birds with one stone is very similar to the mentality I picked up...never go out to do only 1 thing when you can do 2 or maybe 3 things at once.

For example, the highlands was a veritable gold mine...I'm sad it isn't really like this anymore...
1) farm rams
2) field synth leather and horns, sell half/use half
3) farm lightning ellies for several stacks of clusters
4) use the clusters on either:
a) thump quads out there for their backplates and get the occasional DS ingot
b) take clusters back to sandy and fry belts for a stack or two of iron ingots/sheep leathers

For a while there I was levelling leather, smithing and bonecraft all for free

Another thing I figured out on my own is that fishing and stealing can often go together at certain times at certain levels and locations...when my fishing was mid 40's I'd fish in batallia downs near the orcs who carried silver beastcoins. Fish a while, thump an orc...fish a while, thump an orc. I've levelled gs to 28 nearly free.

Now that my fishing is 50, I look where I can skillup fishing where there are beastmen who carry silver coins, as I still need them. boo-boo Penn: there are silver gobs near where I can skillup on shall shells. Fish, thump gob, fish, thump gob.

After a while, I got free gs mats, a few skillgains in fishing and a few stacks of shalls on the market.

I'm learning, albeit slowly that this game truly favors the patient...

I'll try gardening gs mats (gold nuggets/coins) and see how that goes...never been much of a gardner, but I'm not expecting much as I've only planted the junk just a few days ago...

So yeah...I'm all about finding ways to double up goals into one activity

[Valisk]

I had gil way before I had 100 smithing. I sold a Kreigsbiel to some moron for 31mil and basically funded myself with that.

Wish I had done that Used about 18M of my KS99 gil to HQ the now obsolete Kaiser set. (Kreig dropped for me after the RNG nerf >.<;; Had a ls member sell his like one week before the RNG nerf and got like 40M for it, then after the nerf, could only sell mine for 11M QQ)

[Xavierus]

For crafting, I think the best thing I can reccomend for the T0 synths is simply not to do them unless at least one of the following criteria is met:

1) The normal quality item is either a break even or a minimal loss to you.
2) You have a large enough amount of gil that attempting to make the T0 synth isnt going to put you in the poor house if you fail to synth one.

That being said, I think your best bet is to find at the most, a T1 synth that is profitable for your craft and stick with that. I wouldn't advise going onto T0 until you have met the above criteria.

For me, I made my money doing alot of farming during the final phases of inflation in early to mid 2006. I also did BCNMs and KSNM 30's as well. I saved the majority of my money and in early 2007, I began to skill up alchemy. Do not get me wrong, alchemy is relatively inexpensive to skill up, but it does still require a decent amount of gil.

Basically, from what i've found out, if you were wealthy prior to the rapid deflation we have seen in the past 1.5 years due in part because of constant removal of gil, you are likely reaping the benefits now. For me, what I was selling for 1.3 and 1.4M gil a 4 months ago, I am not being forced to sell for 800k. The prices of hte materials have dropped about 25% compared to a 40% drop in the price of an hq result, but meh, thats life >.>

Xavierus

[Narse]

I made my money to level Bonecraft slowly. Initially I took all my crafts to 60 to see what I liked doing before I decided what I wanted to do (with the exception of Gold, which I knew I couldn't afford, and Smithing was only in the 30s or so when I settled on Bonecraft). I found I could make a lot of money by selling materials, even with other crafts. I would buy flax flowers from the airship vendor and sell stacks of linen cloth for good money, sell stacks of ram leather, silver ingots, etc. When I got to 100, I wasn't a rich man, I think at most I had only ever had about 2mil at any given time, and Venomous Claws were about 4mil a pop. I partnered up with a linkshell money who had gil from Woodworking and he would have me synth Scorpion Harnesses and gave me 1mil every time I hit a HQ. We decided around our 3rd session (generally 3 or 4 at a time) to try Leather support, since we knew I was hitting tier 2 on Bone already, and discovered that with my leather gloves and adv. support, I had an abnormally high HQ rate, thus discovering that SH was tier 2able a good year+ or so before this was common knowledge.

Of the next 50 synths after we determined I was hitting tier 2, I went 23/50 on HQ, with one break. At that point, I now had the money to fund my own SH synthing and I dominated the market for a good long while before it came crashing down. Managed to fund my KC, Speedbelt, and half an Aegis on Scorpion Harnesses though, I can't complain. Had a good ride while it lasted. A lot of the tier 0 synths just don't have the profit I want, so I don't tend to synth them often.

[Kaelan]

The first question, is how can you sit down and shoot for tier0s knowing your odds are like minimal?

Being able to do some simple math and figure out probabilities, profits and losses (and of course taking into account things like material availability, sales rates, competition, etc.) is 90% of the work. When you go beyond just eyeballing things it's amazing how easy it is to figure out what to synth and what not to synth. The standard calculator in windows and a little time is all it really takes (although I just wrote a program myself that does all the heavy lifting way faster than I ever could if I want to compare several synths really quick)

Which came first? Your 100 craft or your gil?

Well, if you sit down and just really think about it, assuming you weren't filthy rich before starting to craft (I'm guessing most of us probably weren't - I definitely wasn't), the most logical way to go about it is to go up slowly. Do safe synths that make a little money, then slowly move into more expensive synths as you get money from the cheaper ones. Gambling with risky synths is always a bad idea. What a lot of people don't realize is there's a ton of money to be made in synths that aren't risky at all - they just look like they are when you eyeball it. Work the numbers out and you find out it's actually a lot more solid than it might look. And then you go up from there.

I got to 100 Bonecraft ages ago through a combination of farming and money from other places (BCNMs, farming other stuff, etc.). Once I got there, it took a while to hit me, but I eventually figured out how to find out what makes the most money (which I think is a lot more important than just knowing what's making money right now). Then I just worked from there - I don't think I've ever had a big net loss because of this, even though it's made me like 80% of the money I've ever gotten my hands on. Used that to fund Leather to 100, which I'm playing with right now and took a friend's cloth mule (which I have access to) from ~50 to mid-90s.

[Alathar]

Gambling with risky synths is always a bad idea. What a lot of people don't realize is there's a ton of money to be made in synths that aren't risky at all - they just look like they are when you eyeball it. Work the numbers out and you find out it's actually a lot more solid than it might look. And then you go up from there.

This is very good advice. Doing some synths by eyeballing them, I think to myself "probably not worth it." If you pump it out on a calculator (or Excel, where it's easy to change your variables if ingredient/product prices change), you'll realize that things are a lot more profitable than you think. In some cases, you're looking at a pretty much guaranteed profit at current market conditions. Of course, there's nothing to stop a random fucktard from crashing your market. I tend to keep tabs on a lot of different synths, since the market for items seems to me to be cyclical. Someone may bomb an item's value, but over time the price will raise again as supply-demand levels out and it will be worth making again.

When incorporating that stuff, for tier 1 I recommend you assume a 5% HQ rate. I've always heard 10% is the norm, but that hasn't been my experience. Regardless, if it's still profitable at 5% HQ and you HQ at a 10% rate, that's just bonus profit.

[Weeks]

Personally, I had gil and #1 on my wishlist by a longshot was Dusk Gloves +1. Unfortunately, right as I got enough gil to afford the pair I had my eyes on, the price kicked up drastically to about 22 million. I'm not positive, but I think it was the sudden fad of DRK zerging. So I sat down and did the math one night and determined that it should take me roughly 12 million gil to level my leathercraft to 93 and tier 0 myself a pair. An expected 10 million gil savings was reason enough, but additionally I decided that when a little sanity comes to the Cerberus Hide/Mantle market, I'd be able to craft myself a +1.

So I got started, got to 93 and started synthing Dusk Gloves, and lucked out on my 9th synth. I've moved on and am now 99.2, but I don't think I'm going to attempt another non-commissioned Dusk Gloves until the market corrects itself. There are four other crafters currently crafting away on them, including one who crafts Dusk on a massive scale, floods the market, and is constantly driving the NQ loss up to 150k. The reward simply isn't worth the risk unless you're that guy, who can stand to invest ~18 million gil in something that is not going to sell quickly even at 20 million.

EDIT: BTW, I'm neither crafting 'leet nor incredibly wealthy. Just adding my experiences to illustrate that putting pen to paper and doing the math tells you quite plainly whether to invest in a synth or not.