The weapons are not even safe. These raid tiers are like going through expansions. Shit is getting replaced on day 1 of a patch.
Melee
i245 - 81 Weapon Damage
i240 - 80
i235 - 79
i230 - 79
i220 - 77
Magic
i245 - 111
i240 - 110
i235 - 109
i230 - 108
i220 - 106
Don't forget there will likely be new gathering materials for the new equipments as well. I think 1-2 hours is really underestimating the time needed to craft a whole set of equip for 8 people after a patch.
World first groups will probably be well into A10 while their craft FC mates are making their gear. They won't lose anytime and once the new gear is needed it will be sitting and waiting for them.
It's significant because it will give a primary stats boost and a weapon damage increase over Midan. Any DPS increase reduces the time in a fight and the amount of time available for someone in your team to make a mistake.
Edit: For my group we tend to have our crafters up when the patch goes up and the rest wakes up around 3~4 hours later so it was worth it for us to craft/gather last time since it did give us an increase even tho we didn't fully craft the whole sets for everyone till 2~3 days after.
Yeah I'm not really thinking in terms of world firsts since I've never raided more than 6 hours a week. In terms of groups just looking to get their first wins in the earliest week possible the crafting time is miniscule.
game watch interview, something about alexander here as well I think http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs...w/1016850.html
He specifically said that the hold up was designing the fight format - he did this when he was talking about level 60 versions of Titan/Ifrit/Garuda. This does not include the testing - which to them takes 7 days (according to his latest post).
Now, don't get me wrong, he can't hire say 14 guys and do 7 more fights a month or something - but he can certainly hire some out of thesub money to expand the teams which are clearly bottlenecking content creation. Otherwise, as he has seen, he will lose the sub money.