Most of my Disciple of the Hands are level 50 now and can craft the one-star recipes just fine. The two-star recipes require 347 Craftsmanship or 318 Control, but here I'm coming up short.
I have the blue tool you get upon completing the level 50 crafting quest, a left side of HQ Patrician's Gear, the one-star green offhand, and a right side of HQ electrum gear. Yet, I'm still around 30-40 short on both stats, and I cannot unlock the master recipes without two-star materials. Nor can I upgrade my main hand weapon without some upper-star tier materials.
I tried melding some materia to my gear, but frequently encounter item stat caps that prevent me from gaining much from the materia ("the selected item's level is too low to maximize the materia's potential"). Heavensward crafting gear is also currently not available to me.
How were people able to bridge the gap between one-star and two-star crafts at level 50 in ARR?
Best Answer
EDIT Alternately, you can use leves to grind your way to level 51 and buy yourself a set of HQ Archaeoskin XXX of Crafting from the market. Expensive gilwise but definitely the fastest way to go about it.
There are some one-star green items and jewelry that boost your crafting abilities as well.
I've found this link useful; as per this site's protocols I'll summarize here:
You will need to craft or obtain the following items at HQ, all of them at most one-star:
The trick is to overmeld absolutely everything as far as you can. This will be the most expensive part, as success chances start dropping quickly past the first overmeld; this image shows the optimum distribution that never hits the various items' stat caps:
At that point, the automated set of macros described in the article will all but guarantee 100% HQ on two-star items. They're a little more convoluted than I really want to put into this answer, though...