You have to manually craft each material 1-by-1, with an ever-present chance of failure.
Just, for the love of god, only do so in moderation, and with liberal save-scumming.Use the crafting system to upgrade equipment where possible.I usually have my Denam as a dagger-wielding Ninja until postgame. Daggers can be incredibly powerful on Ninja if you stack DEX where you can, especially with crafted gear.Once you unlock Ninja, that's also one of the most OP jobs in the game, being both speedy, tanky (with the Steelstance ability), and deadly with dual wield.But Canopus - who is the best unit in the game, by the way - can mostly stick to his Vartan job for its increased mobility. For human units, the best job for ranged abuse is predictably going to be Archer.Crossbows cannot fire beyond their range, but get access to very powerful Finishing Moves early on.Bows can fire well beyond their stated range depending on elevation, which you can see with the Trajectory ability.