Crafting HQ Gude for low level crafters.

I've been following this guide to significantly help my HQ rates.  It is made for low(er) level crafters, but it does have some requirements.  You can find the guide here (it's quite a read), or read more about it after the break

This method is not foolproof, but it does significantly increase your HQ rate.  Before I used it I would struggle to get to ~20%.  Using this method it's pretty easy to get to > 95%.  While the guide says they're not required, I have found that HQ mats do make it much easier to hit 100%.  It doesn't have much requirements, but it does require most crafting classes to 15.  Basically you'll need the following (in order of what I think are most important):

1. CUL 15: Hasty Touch - This is your bread and butter (pardon the pun).  This lets you do a touch action for free.  The downside is that it has a 50% success rate.  Which is why you'll need
2. CUL 37: Steady Hand 2 (or) ALL Classes 9: Steady Hand - Steady hand raises your success rate of any action by 20%.  This means if something says it has an 80% chance, Steady Hand raises it to 100%.  Or, in the case of Hasty Touch, if it's at 50%, it raises it to 70%.  Steady Hand 2 raises the success rate by 30% (so Hasty Touch is 80%).  It may not seem like much, but that extra 10% really does help.  If anything, for 25cp, it gives you 5 free Basic Touches.
3. ALL Classes 11: Inner Quiet - What you'll need next is inner quiet.  It doesn't seem like much but as you gain stacks of inner quiet, you get a bonus to control.  The higher your control, the more points towards your quality you get with each touch.  Plus, with each stack of inner quiet, you get a bonus to rumination so the more stacks you have, the more CP you get back when you use rumination.  I don't know the specifics but I think that after 10 stacks, you get back 60cp.
4. ALC 15: Tricks of the Trade (TotT) - While crafting, if the condition of your item is "Good," you can use TotT to recover 20cp.  Shouldn't you use that "Good" condition to get a bonus to a touch action?  In general, no.  You'll find that extra 20cp is much better used towards a Steady Hand or Manipulation or something than the small bonus you're going to get towards one touch.
5. GSM 15: Manipulation - Manipulation will recover 10cp per turn for 3 turns and costs 88cp.  Practically, it's very useful with a 40 durability synth (like for HQing mats), but not as much when doing 60+ durability synths.  For those you're going to want:
6. ALL Classes 7: Master's Mend - Everyone should know what this does.  Increases durability by 30 for 92cp.  At 25, all classes get Master's Mend 2, which increases durability by 60 and costs 160cp.  It sounds like a lot but for long synths (70/80) it comes in very handy.
7. CRP 15: Rumination - Rumination comes in handy at the end of a synth, after you've gotten to your HQ goal and you want to actually synth the item.  Chances are by this time you've got a lot of stacks of inner quiet, so rumination will give you about 60cp that you can use to recover your durability and get ready to synth the item.  All that hard word HQing it won't matter if you don't actually make anything with it.

So now we've got down what you need to do the method, now here's the actual algorithm:

• Inner Quiet - Always start out the synth with Inner Quiet
• If Condition is Good, Tricks of the Trade
• If it's not up, Steady Hand
• If durability is 20/40, Manipulation.
• If durability is 10/70 or 10/80, use Master's Mend II
• Otherwise, spam Hasty Hand

A few caveats:

• First and foremost, this method does still rely on the Random Number Generator (RNG).  Because of this it can still feel very frustrating as you'll get breaks when you think you shouldn't.  Unfortunately you can't eliminate the RNG until you have a craft or two at 50.
• The hardest part (at least that I've seen) of trying to HQ things, is getting to 20%.  Once you're past 20%, the gains come in bounds and 100% is a hop skip and a jump away.  For this reason, it's much easier to start with HQ mats.  If anything it gets you enough that one or two touches gets you past the 20% mark.
• If you have a lot of CP (usually early on in the synth it's easy to top off) then TotT isn't worth it on a Good.  In this case, I just go with a Hasty Touch on a good condition.
• If you hit an Excellent rating, use Advanced Touche if you have it.  It's never a waste of CP.  Combined with the bonus of the Excellent, Advanced Touch will boost you either to the end, or significantly past the 20% mark.
• Before 25, you can't use Master's Mend II, so I use Master's Mend at like 30/60 or 40/70.  I also interchange it with Manipulation.  Depends on how much I need durability.  I play it by ear.

That's about it.  It's still difficult to get an HQ, especially on items that are at or above your level, but this guide should help make it a lot easier.  With all these HQs it should be easier to level up as you can HQ a bunch of items and turn in the triple leve quests for tens to hundreds of thousands of XP per leve allowance.