Critical Break: FFXIAH.com's Recipe Feature

Critical Break is our new crafting and economics column written by Qtipus. Q is an experienced crafter and also well versed in using the Auction House to turn a decent profit. Enough so that he was able to fund his own relic, Gungnir. Every Tuesday you will find Q's rants, raves and good crafting practices here. This week, Q uses the FFXIAH to his and your best advantage.

This website has come a long way since it's inception. Initially, it lacked a lot of search features that a site like Somepage (not linking due to it's issues with malicious scripts) and Wikipedia would provide. While it has always given you the ability to tell if an item is a consistent seller or a streaky seller, it didn't always provide recipes. This particular section has made crafting decisions a lot easier. It doesn't offer up guides like Wiki does for paths to level 100 does, but it offers up something I feel is a lot more valuable.

A mostly realistic look at costs involved in each particular synth.

You shouldn't take the numbers you see for a particular synth as the absolute value of the synth itself. Only use the end value as your starting point, especially with synths that have multiple sub synths involved like consumables usually do. Shihei are a good example.

A quick glance at that link shows you that a single stack of Shihei has profit value of approx. 2.8k. What it doesn't take into account are the NPC values for some of the ingredients. Distilled Water and Windurst Tea Leaves used in Black Ink have a much lower cost than the AH price. The Moko Grass portion of the Bast Parchment synth falls into the same category. You can purchase it from an NPC for far cheaper than you can purchase it on the AH. These particular pieces may not look like much to 'save' when it comes to actually running around and collecting these things, but it does add up and it does give you a little more wiggle room in the ever-present under-cutting douche bag AH battle. HQ rate also makes a huge difference. Make sure you take the time to look at the individual synths in a particular synth to see if there's a super cheap way of acquiring them other than the AH.

The other great thing about this feature is it gives you the selling rate right there. When skilling up a craft, it obviously takes money to acquire the materials. Sometimes farming materials up is the better option (like Lizard Skins in Crawler's Nest...really save yourself the money and go spend an hour down there with some TH...you'll end up with something like 3 stacks/hour), but if you're making something that's cheap to skill up on and you need to resell it to reacquire your gil, check this part first. Sometimes it may be better to go farm up some mats to lower your cost and NPC the results.

Green Ribbon would be a good example of this. They don't sell for anything on the AH (1k ea.) and their HQ's sell rather slow at a rather decent profit margin. The NQ ribbons, depending on your fame will NPC for approx. 2-2.2k. This means if you buy your thread off the AH (buy the thread and make your own cloth...don't be lazy), you're going to lose 1-1.5k/NQ that you make skilling up.

Some may look at this and say "WOW! That's a minimal loss for skill ups!" but remember the point here is to not lose gil. Spending some time down in the Crawler's Nest with some TH will likely yield a few stacks of silk thread pretty easily among other things you can actually synth down into thread (Crawler Cocoons). It's all a matter of taking the time to do it instead of being impatient and not worrying about losing money. Knowing ahead of time if the item actually makes money and sells fast thanks to this recipe feature will help in determining if it's better to go farm some of the mats up to offset the costs or just straight up buy it all off the AH and either NPC or resell the results.

The phrase "Time is Money" means a lot of different things when it comes to crafting. Time spent farming to make money can apply. Time spent buying off the AH and reselling at a fast pace can apply as well. This is the phrase I think of most when utilizing FFXIAH's recipe feature. Unfortunately for some...gil is the equivalent to that week's paycheck and it's value against the time spent earning it aren't the same as the rest of us.

It still takes a little research on a crafter's part, but the information provide here will definitely give you a solid idea of what to expect from a synth in terms of profitability.