Originally Posted by
Stompa
When Magian weapons arrived they were /saluted by many people including me, as what I consider 'democratisation of weapons', meaning anyone could solo a weapon with powerful augments (magian99 weapons still have some of the best bonus augments in the game) and a higher base damage than the best AH weapons. You could farm a magian on your own time-frame, a few hours after work or w/e, you didnt need to /sh for alliances or beg people to farm Aby nm drops for you. Granted magian were never as good as REM, but they offered an inbetween tier of weapons ; far more powerful than AH weaps, and entirely soloable at your own casual or OCD speed depending on the player. I totally applaud SE for the magian weapons system, I wouldn't have added the geodes/etc. stages but made those stages like earlier stages, thus enabling you to build your 99 weapon with no gil cost at all. I still rate the magian TP bonus weaps as the best offhanders in the game, and they cost 0gil and you can solo them casually if you want to. Also the PDT and MDB weapons are excellant pieces and again soloable by anyone.
We had hoped that SoA would have more of these type of solo-effort weapons, maybe a few notches more powerful than magians. I don't include bayld weaps, they have no useful augments just dmg, but they are soloable they just suck compared to magians.
What SE has missed completely this last decade, is an alternate gradual-progression points system for obtaining any weapon in the game. For example if you can't farm Mythic or w/e in the normal way, there should be a soloable points-based system where you can grind out a few hundred points after work, and they add up slowly over the year, and you need a lot of points to get a weapon that would be much faster with a Mythic static group. That way casual players who have busy lives, could actually obtain any weapon in the game, just very slowly, but the feeling when you log-in would not be total hopelessness, there would be a flicker of hope coz u know even though its going to take ages, you can chip away at it solo. I had honestly hoped that, after the popular Magians, which were very soloable, SE would add similar powerful weapons progression system in SOA, that you could build even if you don't have time to hang round with alliances all day long.