Expert Crafting in FFXIV
Expert crafting in FFXIV is a more difficult type of crafting that players may experience at endgame. This guide will explain what expert crafting is, their various conditions and how best to tackle these difficult crafts.
What is FFXIV's Expert Crafting?
Expert crafting in FFXIV is a more difficult type of crafting with a focus on manually crafting your items instead of macro crafting. These crafts have much higher progress and quality values than normal as well as a range of new conditions which you are expected to react to while manually crafting.
Making the most out of these conditions will be what gives you success. Expert crafts do take time to learn and it can take hours to fully understand.
Expert crafts also remove the Excellent and Poor conditions leaving you with the following:
- Centered allows you to increase the
success of RNG skills by 25% such as
Rapid Synthesis. - Sturdy reduces the loss of durability by 50% for your next action.
- Pliant reduces CP cost of your next action by 50%.
- Malleable increases progress by 1.5x.
- Primed makes your next buff last two more
steps such as
Innovation. - Good works just like normal, increases quality by 1.5x
- Good Omen guarantees that your next step will be a Good allowing you to better utilise it.
Each condition has a roughly 10-15% chance of appearing on any step but different crafts will have different conditions available. Right click(or press square) on an expert craft and select "Potential Conditions List" for a list of what conditions that craft has available.
Endwalker Expert Crafts
Endwalker currently has three sets of three expert crafts available. That being the
"Water Otter" sets". The
first and third sets are used to build a landmark on your Island Sanctuary. The
second set is used to craft a 
Smaller Water Otter Fountain which
is an outdoor furnishing with the same design as a landmark you can set
on your island.
Each craft has 3 crafters available to craft that item making it easy to divide your specialists up.
Increasing your Reliability With Expert Crafting
When you first begin to expert craft you may find that your reliability on these items has room for further improvement. Here is some general advice on how to improve your expert crafting reliability:
- Practice makes perfect. It took many experienced crafters days to fully get a hang of the system when it released so it may just take you time to build up experience, especially if you have spent your crafting career macro crafting everything.
- Make sure you are crafting on a specialist. This gives you extra stats and new skills to help improve your chances of a successful expert craft.
- Have
Crafter's Delineation's available to use for your
specialist skills. - Have HQ food and potions at the ready. These generally want to be food that buffs your control and CP as well as a CP potion. You may find that craftmanship food works better for you. It can depend on your stats.
- Use the in game trial synthesis. Expert crafting can be painful when you fail crafts seemingly out of your control. Trial synthesis will help you get practice in before materials are lost saving you gil.
- On your first chances to. Make a note of the quality gained from
Byregot's Blessing with buffs and also
with a good condition so that you know if you need to fish for a good at the end of your
craft or not.
Crafting your Expert Crafts
Below you will find each of the three main stages of expert crafting. Opener, Quality and Finisher. Click on the relevant section to learn more.
Opening Phase for Expert Crafting
This guide will focus on opening with 
Muscle Memorywhich
allows you to quit early if a craft goes badly. The goal with this phase is to
be 1-2 reliable skills away from finishing the craft with 
Basic Synthesis.
Bad luck can ruin this so if at least one 
Rapid Synthesis occurs under
Muscle Memory's buff you can still recover later.
Start your craft with Muscle Memory and apply 
Veneration
unless a condition you can benefit from appears. You want to limit how many skills
you use so that the Muscle Memory buff does not expire.
| Condition | Advice |
|---|---|
| Centered, Sturdy or Normal | Just use Rapid Synthesis. Nice and simple. |
| Malleable | Check the calculations tab or use  Final Appraisal to ensure you do not finish the craft early. After that use Rapid Synthesis. |
| Pliant and Primed | Use  Manipulation if possible unless Muscle Memory is close to wearing off. If so use Rapid Synthesis. It is better to use Manipulation on Pliant than it isPrimed. |
| Good | Rapid Synthesis if you need to. Otherwise  Tricks of the Trade or  Precise Touch. |
| Good Omen | Rapid Synthesis generally speaking, Good Omen
simply allows you to prepare for a Otherwise Tricks of the Trade or Precise Touch. |
Keep repeating until Veneration runs out. You can make
up for any missing progress with Malleable
conditions later in the craft.
Here is an example of the opener:
Quality Phase for Expert Crafting
In this phase the aim is to get to 10 stacks of Inner Quiet as quickly and as efficiently as possible so that the majority of your CP can be used in the final phase.
To start with, if you did not use Manipulation and your durability
is lower than you feel comfortable with then apply Manipulation now.
Some people may not feel comfortable with less than 20 durability while others
may be okay with 10, it is entirely up to preference and experience.
You may also want to use 
Heart and Soul now so that you
can benefit on normal conditions during this phase.
| Condition | Advice |
|---|---|
| Normal |  Prudent Touch is going to be your main action but you may consider Manipulation
if you are low on durability or  Innovation if you have a lot of IQ stacks. You can also use your free Tricks of the Trade or Precise Touch from Heart and Soul. |
| Centered, Malleable | If you still need progress, go for Rapid Synthesis. If not just treat it as a Normal condition. |
| Sturdy | You can use  Basic Touch and combo into  Standard Touch and  Advanced Touch if you get very lucky.
It is essentially a cheaper Prudent Touch. The other option is Prudent Touch so that you can slowly gain back
durability over time. |
| Pliant | You want to use this for your big CP skills. Manipulation is the go to or  Preparatory Touch if
you have the durability to spare. Otherwise just treat it as a Normal condition. |
| Primed | Manipulation if you do not have any stacks remaining, Innovation is
also a really good skill to use here. |
| Good | Precise Touch is generally the best option but if you have low CP or feel like you need more then you can use Tricks of the Trade. |
| Good Omen | Prudent Touch and just treat things as a normal skill if early in the craft especially if you plan on following up with a Tricks of the Trade, otherwise you could prepare buffs such as Innovation to gain more
out of the Good next step. Late craft you may also want a  Great Strides to then roll into Precise Touch or even Preparatory Touch for a large amount of quality. |
Once you reach 10 stacks of Inner Quiet, you want to progress to the final phase.
Finisher Phase for Expert Crafting
Once you have 10 stacks of Inner Quiet you can move to the Finisher phase. This will involve you using all of your remaining CP to gain the majority of your quality and then apply buffs to finish the craft.
As a general rule keep 106CP and 25 durability to the side to end the craft.
the full amounts you need may vary such as needing only 99CP if you can
end the craft with a Basic Synthesis or needing 35 durability
if it will take you two synthesis skills to end a craft.
In this stage, Good Omen is
incredibly useful to allow you to plan ahead by buffing skills pre-emptively
or even giving you extra touches under Innovation
because you do not need to 
Observe into 
Focused Touch combo you can use any touch
and then Precise Touch
To use up the remainder of your CP you want to apply Innovation if it is
not already on and then either spam 
Trained Finesse if you have a lot of CP
but not a lot of durability. Or you can combo two lots of Observe → Focused Touch which
is a really powerful combination and also allows you to fish for
Good, Pliant
and Sturdy procs such as in the below example.
Some examples of adjustments you may want to make are:
Once you are down to the CP you left to the side. You can end
with something such as the example below which also uses 
Careful Observation and 
Crafter's Delineation to fish for a good proc.
Changelog
- 28 May 2023: Updated to 6.4.
- 23 Mar. 2023: Guide added.
More FFXIV Content
This guide has been written by I'nanghal Shikhu (Discord - Shikhu#3190). He is a Crafting & Gathering theorycrafter, mentor for The Balance and also a guide maker for Teamcraft alongside Icy Veins. He also managed to obtain 10 top 12's on the leaderboard during the Ishgard Restoration rankings.
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