Before 5.1 hit earlier this week, I knew that there were going to be changes to crafters. However, sometimes I can be the kind of person who deals with things they don’t like by pretending they’re not there, so I just…didn’t read up on what was going to happen.
I’m both glad and sad I did that. Glad because I know I would have freaked out over it all, and sad because I wasn’t prepared.
When I opened up the game on Tuesday morning, I was flabbergasted to see the state of my poor crafters’ hotbars. See, I use a grand total of four PC hotbars for my crafting abilities, because I do tend to use a fair chunk of them if a craft ever goes awry. Which it just will sometimes when you’re also trying to watch Netflix.
After the patch, this is what my specialist armorer’s hotbars looked like.
I then spent a good three hours reading through the actual descriptions to see what I could learn. And here’s what I’ve learned so far.
The changes are going to make most high-quality macros obsolete.
A few months ago, I met a fellow crafter who was nice enough to share her macros with me, because at that point I was doing most of my crafting manually. Two of her macros were designed to make anything basically below level 66 a guaranteed HQ.
Each of those macros had several steps, and relied heavily on abilities like Steady Hand, which don’t exactly exist anymore. And at least for max-level crafters, they don’t need to.
Instead, level 80 crafters gain something called Trained Eye, which was introduced in Shadowbringers to help with low-level crafts. On any craft at or below level 70, you could give up 250 of your CP in exchange for an automatic 30 to 100% HQ without using up any of your craft’s durability. It was both a little broken, and a gamble.
Now, with 5.1, that ability has been changed to a guaranteed 100% HQ on anything 10 or more levels below.
That’s right.
One button that lets you skip the RNG entirely with no chance of failure.
It’s certainly going to make my life easier, especially now that if I really wanted to make a macro, it would only need two or three steps. But I’m a little wary about what it means for people working to level up their crafters to take away things like Steady Hand and Comfort Zone, which were necessities for me below 70 to level myself up.
Quick synthesis is now so much less of a pain in my butt.
I used to hate quick synthesis because by the time it processed a craft, I could have probably loaded the crafting screen, hit the buttons, and made the thing myself.
With the changes in 5.1, the time to actually process a quick synthesis has been significantly reduced—which makes it much easier and less tedious to do mass crafting either for the market or for your own use.
As a bonus, from what I can tell they’ve also significantly improved the chances of getting high-quality items from quick synthesis, which isn’t a big deal for me because I mostly make housing items but will be a huge deal for mats crafters and gear crafters.
It's much easier to be a weaver.
Obviously, with only a week to really dig around in the changes, I haven’t discovered everything. But one thing I did discover is that my favourite crafter, the weaver, got a major change that I am very much in favour of.
See, one of my favourite things about the culinarian, and the reason why it was the first one I leveled, was that it gives me multiples for everything I craft. Which really makes life easy for things like leves.
With the recent patch, they introduced that for the weaver, too. It’s not everything, but so far, it looks to be most of the crafts that are most painful for me—things like bloodhempen yarn, a staple for Hingan sofas and chairs, and yarns that require mob drops.
I like it so far, and while I don’t necessarily want it to be a thing for every crafter, I do hope it becomes a thing for the leatherworker as well, which is easily my least favourite crafter because of its complete reliance on mob drops.
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