Thread: 3.0's Coming... What are the Craziest Game Changes you can Think of?

Originally Posted by Donjo

There are far too many situations where crafted gear is superior to the highest iLvl gear. From the mouths of the devs themselves, crafted gear is meant to be "catch up" gear. Use it as it comes and it's equivalent to last tier's raid gear. Put any materia in it and it's now better than last tier's raid gear. Any situation where the fully melded piece actually exceeds the highest iLvl is a mistake. Take a look around and witness all of the BiS builds which consist of crafted gear for over half of the pieces. Then, wonder how much more people would want to stuff in if VIT caps weren't an issue. It's undermining the value of raiding, and if it goes too far a lot of people will stop raiding altogether.

EoS spamming Embrace while under Cleric Stance should be roughly equal to Regen. They're quite equal here.
I'm not just talking about Two Tanking in FCOB; I'm talking about two tanking everywhere. If a fight was ever designed to have two tanks, it should be literally impossible to circumvent that design. The Tank population is low enough without people deliberately excluding a slot normally reserved for them.

People might enjoy trash if it was actually fun to fight. But, then it wouldn't be called trash, would it?

First of all, situations where even with full i130 you still want to use a crafted piece here or there come from the fact that stat assignment on premade gear is arbitrary and blind. So you end up with gear you can't use due to accuracy requirements or just gear that doesn't benefit your class (Summoners anyone?). Of course i110 melded is better than plain i110. That's the whole point of materia - to exceed the stats given. You might notice that meldable 110 was not in the game until level cap was raised so it's all fair game. I haven't heard of anyone who was proclaiming that "Oh no, this gear is too good, I don't wanna raid now because this gear helps me raiding too much!"

All we have on the devs stance regarding crafted gear is an uncertain account from a twitter user. Supposedly somebody asked Yoshida and he said that the gear was meant for catchup. But there's no video account of him saying that or an official interview so you'll excuse me if I'm hesitant to take that information as fact. And if developers really think that i110 crafted gear is meant for catchup, then they're hopelessly and completely out of touch with their own game, because the price and availability of this gear is utterly disproportional with its usefulness. With how many rare mats it requires, and how you need a well-equipped crafter to make it, it's hard to see i110 crafted gear as anything but customizable pieces that can give you an edge over regular 110. Not to mention that only crafted i90 with Vitality melded allowed players to tackle Savage SCOB back in 2.3 at all!

I honestly don't see how crafted gear in any way undermines the value of raiding any more than obligatory gear reset does. What you propose will destroy high-end crafting.

Originally Posted by Karen_Cerfrumos

Crafted Gear

Yes, SE is completely out of touch with what they intended versus what actually happened. This is what I've been trying to say this entire time!. SE has screwed this up so badly that only crazy solutions could possibly remedy it. Crafted gear was in a good place in 2.0. i70 stuff was, except for those Tank Accessories, not more powerful than i90 gear. It was instead the next best thing to have while progressing toward it. Things got a little more iffy with Crafted i90, but that pales in comparison to the situation we face at i110, where over half of all Crafted pieces are BiS.

You're correct in saying that people won't cry "oh, this helps me raid too well so I won't raid". Those people will try to raid anyway. The situation we actually want to avoid is "oh, I can craft/gather/hire other people to craft this gear and get an entire set of BiS gear better than the raid drops on day one? Why do I have to raid at all?" No matter what walls or RNG or whatever you put behind crafting, it's easier to do than raiding. Until such a time that crafting and/or materia melding is reworked to require as much skill as high end raiding does, having any of the results be explicitly better than the gear that requires actual skill will undermine the skillful task. If crafted gear continues on the trend it is currently on, this will happen.

You completely underestimate just how dangerous this is. If the people who are just in it for the gear skip raid to take the path of least resistance and get their BiS through crafting, then only the people who are in it for the challenge and/or story will go raid. This won't be enough people to sustain the content. Just as Savage Coil did not get refreshed, SE will stop making raids altogether. This will invalidate the highest level of crafting and by association the highest level of gathering; there's no longer content worth using that stuff on. Now the game is hemorrhaging subscribers. The hardcore community will leave the game entirely, leaving just the more casual players alone in a world where progression has literally halted. They won't last long either.

The dream of Crafted Gear being consistently BiS will kill the game.

Originally Posted by Donjo

The dream of Crafted Gear being consistently BiS will kill the game.

Starting with Savage, biggest prblem with that was it shared the same lockout timer as normal SCoB. IF they had been on seperate lockouts the level of participation, in my opinion, would have been much higher as then you could clear normal after reset and then spend whatever days rest of the week battering at Savage. That limitation kinda shot em in the foot before the race started.

For crafting. Crafted gear+non tradeable key item dropped from raid bosses, combine to make alternative set for progression. Similar to FFXI, have base item (crafted) hand in to a NPC along with key items gained from raid for alternate set. Albeit, key is making that alternate gear on par with drops.

With thinking is the same as what we have now with twines XD just the initial would be crafted. So crafted on par with tomestone gear which would have added problem of invalidating tomestone gear :S Only solution I can see is to put crafted on par with dungeon drops, or slightly lower.

Interesting conundrum overall.