[Spa]

is smithing that expensive to get it to 60 atleast? i know before it wasnt that much but now darksteel ores are 20~22k on my server. since its 20~22k and when skilling on these will go very slow, but how much would it take to get it up to 60 ?

[Gman]

It's gotten ridiculously expensive. Darksteel ores were 6k each on my server when I started playing 1 year ago, now they are 16k+ each. Hard to believe... either gil sellers manipulated the price, or they have just become more rare.

Either way, there are still huge profits to be made with high level smithing. There was a guy in upper Jeuno the other day de-synthing Antican Pauldrons (2k each) with a lightning crystal (180 gil) and getting a darksteel ignot as the result (27k)

Not sure what level smithing is required to do this (I imagine pretty high) , but wow look at the profit. 2200 gil ---> 27,000 gil from a 10 sec synth. Same can be done for all the gobbie parts, and most other beastman armor. This is mostly where the money is in smithing.

[CarbonFibre]

The increase in price is due to inflation as a result of gil selling/buying, money becoming easier to come by as more and more players achieve higher levels, and the fact that there's much more demand for the ores as there are probably many more crafters now than there were a year ago. I'm not really sure how the update affected mining, but this may be a factor too since it's a sometimes a pain to zone a lot in certain areas. If you can't handle or choose not to pay the price of ores why not go mine your own (assuming you have the time)? You could probably save a large amount of money in doing this and you could sell or synth some of the other stuff you get as well.

Darksteel is like 15k or so now I believe, and it may still be around 14k. The price fluctuates between 13k and 16k in Bastok I believe, although I haven't checked lately. The first time I ever checked I don't think the things were much cheaper.

[Jei]

I used to mine a lot. Back in the JP days, mining can be really slow during japan's afternoon-evening. I made 50k/hour when Gusgen were empty (darksteel was only 6k back then) and can be as low as 5k/hour when the place is packed (get to mine like 3 times -_-?). These days with US +EU play time I'm quite sure mines are all packed... don't count on me tho I haven't checked out mining spots for a long time.

Anyway it's time versus money. If you have no way to make huge money in a short time then mining will save you tons . But if you for example can do a quick BC and get a few million gil worth of drops then spending money to buy ores will give you easy relaxing and convenience way to train your skill.