Explaining The Removal Of HQ Materials In Endwalker

During the recent Live Letter two weeks ago, Final Fantasy XIV's Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida disclosed a change to high quality items in the upcoming Endwalker expansion. Basically, the developers were reducing the number of high quality items in the game. Yesterday the changes were posed to The Lodestone.

In order to reduce inventory bloat, the following adjustments will be made in Patch 6.0.

HQ Items Unobtainable After the Release of Patch 6.0

• Items gathered via botany, mining, and fishing
• Materials dropped by enemies
• Materials obtained via tomestone and scrip exchange
• Non-craftable materials obtained from certain content

Equipment and crafted items (including intermediary materials such as iron ingots) will continue to be obtainable as HQ items.

Unobtainable HQ Items Held in Possession at Launch of 6.0

HQ items affected by this change that have been acquired prior to Patch 6.0 will remain in player inventories.

Please note that these items will be “HQ” in name only, as they will not increase crafting quality nor provide any bonuses upon delivery for leves, Grand Company delivery missions, company projects, Crystarium Deliveries, etc.

Furthermore, these items cannot be traded or bought/sold via the market board.

Miscellaneous Adjustments to HQ Items

In accordance with the above changes, botanist, miner, and fisher attributes and actions that affect gathering yield will be adjusted. In addition, quests, challenge log objectives, and achievements which require HQ items to be gathered for completion will be adjusted as necessary.

Any affected HQ items can be traded and sold on the market board by manually setting the quality of the items to NQ.

Judging by some of the things I've seen the developers do, I don't doubt the game needs the server space. Not only will removing the high quality crafting material save space on the market board, but in inventories as well. How much? I looked through my retainers' inventory and found 221 stacks of high quality crafting materials. The changes in Endwalker won't free up that many slots as I don't have the normal quality equivalents for all those items. 

I do have some concerns about the affect on newer crafters. Having high quality items available made my life easier when doing the crafting quests. Also, the items came in handy when obtaining my Skybuilders' Needle. Will making the crafting quests harder result in more people just buying items off the market? 

Overall, I think most players will find the change positive just due to the inventory issues we may face in Endwalker. If I can get an extra 100-150 slots just by turning a lot of my crafting materials into normal quality, I can go ahead and do the clicks.