Ok, let's try and figure out crafting. I've been doing a lot of it for the past couple days and this is how I think it works, feel free to correct me or add stuff.

When you start crafting something, it glows white. It seems to me that this white glow represents "stable" and from a white glow it is easy to successfully perform a crafting action (such as standard/rapid/etc). In general, Standard will succeed more than Rapid and Bold.

Usually after your first crafting action, the item will begin to glow multiple colors, this is "somewhat unstable" and it seems that a crafting action is less likely to succeed while it is glowing like this.

You can use Wait, and sometimes it will revert back to white again, making the next synth easy and likely to succeed. But you're penalized for using Wait over and over (the durability penalty stacks each time) and eventually it's worth taking the risk of hitting the craft while in this somewhat unstable state.

It seems that Standard succeeds more often than Rapid/Bold when used on one of these somewhat unstable elements, and should be your risk-taking action. If you try using Rapid/Bold on one of these items as they glow multiple colors, you seem not only more likely to fail, but theres a chance you'll cause your item to become "very unstable" or "chaotic".

Occasionally, the item will glow a specific color. This seems to be a "harnessed element", such as Earth or Fire. I'm yet to see it be a color other than one of the crystals required in your synth. I've noticed this to be a good thing, and while the item is glowing a color that matches your synth's element, the Bold synthesis (for quality) and Rapid (for speed) seem to have a very high chance of success.

If an item becomes "very unstable"/"chaotic", because you risked hitting an unstable item too often and failed, you've basically messed up. It's very hard to fix this and still complete your synth successfully. Waiting too much for the problem to go away makes you lose 30+ durability, and hitting the item will likely make it lose 30-50 durability, and sometimes still be chaotic too.

In summary, I think, in my experience:

White: Safe. Use any Standard/Rapid/Bold, whichever suits the item you're making and why you're making it.

Multiple Colors: Risky. Use wait a couple times and hope it goes back to white. If it doesnt revert after 2-3 waits you should risk hitting it with a Standard (which is more likely to succeed than Rapid or Bold). Failing on this too many times will cause elemental chaos.

Glowing a Single Color: Good. Now is a good time to hit it with a Bold, if you're going for quality, or Rapid if you need some more progress.

Chaotic: Screwed. You can survive this if you're lucky with Wait or if the item doesn't immediately blow up after one hit, but if it does your durability is likely to be too low to actually finish the item. There are probably abilities you can learn later to help with this.

That's my experience. Anybody else do a lot of crafting and seem to feel it works differently?

i could usually recover from "chaotic" unless i was trying a synth that was above my level

_________________
RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Unless I'd hit some kind of crafting fatigue then I would constantly fail a synth 6 levels below me (rank 5 synth at rank 11) the moment it ever went chaotic.

I was beginning to suspect some kind of fatgiue though, going by what I know about Miner fatigue. Instead of lost exp and skill, you just gradually break/miss a lot more often, until eventually you would break every single swing. So the fact I'm having trouble surviving chaotic stuff could be fatigue creeping in.

I'm yet to have my exp bar change color though.

Well, I saw the 3 stats under Synthesis ( Craftmanship, Mag Craftmanship, and Control).

How do these stats affect crafting?