I have to say, I really hate what they’ve done with DoH and DoL’s in Heavensward.At 2.0, crafting and gathering was fun. I made all my gear and gathered all the mats that I needed.

Things started turning sour when SE started listening to the people on the forums complaining that they couldn’t sell stuff at high prices because they had too much competition. For them, a “good economy” was one where most of the competition was driven off and they could drive up prices on the Market Board. Fast forward to 2.5 and we had 4 star crafting and unspoiled nodes that required forbidden melds on gear and mastercraft demimateria. Desynthing was also implemented with restrictions, preventing players from being able to cap all desynth skills, locking players out of content. Another thing we have to thank the “forum econimists” for.

Sure, I had already made peace that crafting and gathering was no longer fun for me, I refuse to come home from work to log-in to my second “job” to get my DoH and DoL equipped. But I was hoping that from level 50 to 60 in Heavensward crafting and gathering would go back to 2.0 levels so I could have some fun again. Boy, was I wrong.

Before Heavensward was released, SE announced specializations. Awesome, more locking players out of content (thanks again “forum econimists”). But then, I actually did some crafting and gathering.

Reached level 52 on my WAR and saw that one of the new rings was an upgrade. Got my Miner and found out that Mythrite ore was “hidden”, took me over an hour to get a stack of something that is a very common synth for several crafters and uses up 4 at a time.

Saw an unspoiled node pop and rode my trusty chocobo towards it. It depopped right when I was reaching it introducing me to yet another bad change to gathering, the new nodes are up for only 1 eorzean hour instead of 3. Meaning that I now have to camp the damn things to get stuff.

This had already pissed me off, but the best was yet to come. My Miner reached level 51, saw that the new hands were an upgrade for my Retainer at least, so I decided to craft it. Got my Leatherworker to 51 to make things easier for me, checked the mats needed for it. Looked up where you get Coerthan Tea Leaves from. Holy ****ing ****, the goddamn things come from one of the new unspoiled nodes. Jesus ****ing Christ. Worse, most DoH are walled off by these mechanics in later synths.

Developers, this kind of crap should be reserved for level 60 recipees, not for stuff used for leveling up your classes/jobs. You are paying far too much attention to the people that complain about low prices on the forums and far too little attention to the players that actually play the game and have fun with it. It’s a sorry state of affairs when the intent behind the Heavensward crafting and gathering content is to drive players away from it so that prices on the MB are kept high. The effort behind leveling and gearing DoH and DoL classes is severely unbalanced compared to the effort required for the DoW and DoM classes