Over the weekend I buckled down and ground out the Splendorous Tools for my last two crafting classes, Alchemist and Armorer. I mentioned my final grind on Twitter Sunday and was told that since I was crafting, I could just use macros. A perfect example of the "Tell me you don't have a crafting Splendorous Tool without telling me you don't have a Splendorous Tool" meme.
The final two Splendorous Tools in Endwalker a crafter needs to obtain requires crafting expert recipes. With the Splendorous Tools equipped, and fully pentamelded crafting gear, I can probably go back to the Shadowbringers expert recipes and use a macro. But for current content, players must perform the crafts manually. So at the top level, players have to perform the tasks themselves.
The way the quests work, players have to craft high quality collectable items and turn them in for a special material that the quest giving NPCs turn into a higher quality tool until the player obtains a Lodestar tool. I probably averaged crafting 25 expert recipes for each of the last two sets of turn-ins per crafting tool, or 50 recipes per crafting class. With 8 classes, I probably performed around 400 expert crafts in total. And these were just what was released in patch 6.5. A new tool was released in each of the previous point patches that was challenging to make, but not like the expert recipes.
How long did it take to do the expert craft portion of the questline? When working on my first Lodestar tool, I probably spent 8-10 minutes per craft. But on Sunday, I was down to a little less than 5 minutes per craft. Overall, I probably spent 35-40 hours just crafting expert recipes.
I can just imagine the rather rational question readers may ask. Dawntrail's release is in a little more than two months. Was the effort worth it? If Dawntrail is like Endwalker, the answer is maybe. In Shadowbringers, I obtained two of the Skybuilders' tools and pentamelding the other main tools. With all my crafting gear pentamelded, I was able to get to level all my crafting classes to the level cap and create level 90 gear for my white mage job without obtaining new gear and tools. Gear that isn't outdated the moment an expansion launches? What a concept, right?
But I did say maybe. The special ability of Lodestar tools is that increases to quality receive are 175% higher if the material condition is Good. I have the feeling that bonus will come in handy, but I know some people really rely on macros and the ability would be wasted on them. Making decisions based on material quality is something important to those crafting by hand to make their crafting more efficient. Those relying solely on macros might want to concentrate on pentamelding a regular tool for the stats.
Now that I have best in slot for all my crafting and gathering classes, I can return to finishing the main story questline. I will, of course, craft a new set of white mage gear. Right now I can make iLevel 640 gear. Not only will that make the rest of the expansion content easier, but should get me a good way into Dawntrail as well. I didn't start replacing my adventuring gear in Endwalker until I reached level 84.
Maybe not the most exciting blog post, but I put in a lot of hours reaching this point. A lot of content creators bemoaned the lack of a grind in the Endwalker post-patches. But for me, I'm glad my crafting grind is finally over, at least until the next expansion.
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