Asyria Wrote:Zyrusticae, shards don't come exclusively from mobs, you also pick them up from gathering.I tried that.
As for the inhumanly hard crafting, there's a trick.
We, the players, are meant to discover these things by ourselves but luckily for you, while many have tentatively succeeded in making things work without really knowing how, there's this one guy who figured out The Secret Of Succesful Crafting!
Ta daaaaaa!
http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/12420-try...ksmithing/
To be frank, I already know more than he did at the time he made that post. It doesn't work with high fail-rate crafts (the friggin' nuggets, in particular).
To be more specific:
White and gold have the highest success rates, with gold being higher than white, and all success rates are independent of which type of synthesis you use. Red is the lowest of the solid colors, and from what I have seen, when it fails, it fails catastrophically. Obviously, with the rapidly fluctuating colors, there are only two options: Suck it up and hit rapid craft, or wait and hope it stabilizes (and it will... eventually).
You CAN succeed in crafts just by spamming the rapid option, but it'll result in extremely low-quality crafts. It also doesn't work if you keep failing, as you will lose more durability than you gain in progress, not to mention the craft can get unstable and eventually (literally) explode.
Also, I was talking about crystals, not shards. I don't recall ever acquiring a single crystal throughout all eleven ranks of my mining. Maybe fishing or botany are different, but that's just maddening if it is, as it would just make blacksmithing and armory even more gimped next to the other tradeskills.
