Idea: Materia Refining

[Shiwayari]

Hello,

I just had this idea a while back and thought I'd post it maybe something would come from it..

While the materia system will somehow change in 2.0 as i hear and this idea would make some things a little worse, I think it has something to it if materia don't get a complete overhawl.
I'm sure most of us trying relic have enough of the tedious RNG double melds.
What I thought would make things fairer was letting us "refine" materia. For example: Take 2 Heaven's Eye IV and combine them into Heaven's Eye IV +1 (whatever the name would be) with the same stats as the unrefined version. However, trying to double meld this refined materia into a weapon, the chance of success would be greater than with the unrefined version. This process should be redoable multiple times until a chance of 95% - 100% for the most difficult meld is reached. So combine two +1, you get +2 etc.

This does a few things-
As another example we currently have a ~15% chance to double meld materia into a relic base weapon. Some get lucky and go 1/1 some are trolled by RNG and go 0/20.
Now let's say we can repeat this refining until +4 which gives us 100% chance (it probably should scale exponentially with higher +). That would be 16 materia to get if you want that 100% chance. Meaning the avarage of materia used for double melded weapons would increase, while each individual player can be sure that it will succeed.
That's obviously much fairer.

The problems I can think of~
- It's also a part of the fail that you have to recraft the piece of gear to meld, which is the main problem for any melds with low materia cost. Maybe that could be solved by making that "refining" use a crafting process (with the refining being 100% chance) which requires high difficulty crafted materials (such as the flawless ones)

- Many more players would probably try triple melds or even up to quintuple melds, which would render a lot of gear useless. Still the avarage effort done by the community would stay the same or go up so not sure about this. I think making a quintuple meld need a +6 materia i.e. 64 materia or more for 100% would scare most away though.

There are certainly bad sides to this but I'm liking it tbh. Let's see what 2.0 does but if melding stays the same I'd rather have this as an escape route than relying on tedious RNG. So here's hoping some devs might get an idea, though it'd require more work & balancing.

[Scy]

So really watered down would be you may still end up going through a lot of materia attempting doubles, triples and so on much like you might right now. The trade off being you wont also blow through gear with all the fails, rather you just dont take the chance, say "eff" it, ill need "x" materias on average to get the x-melded gear, so ill just buy em and guarantee the meld.

The result would be more money in materia farming, less money in crafting. Unless as you said the only way to refine the materia is via a lvl 50 crafter that maybe fulfills another quest for a special key item or w/e to be able to refine the materia. Which could offset the loss of gil from crafting items by being able to sell refined materia or making up for it when selling the gear they triple or quadruple melded with the refined materia.

I think its a decent idea. I would be down for leaving the 5th meld with no chance of 100% though. That way the crazy lol 0.o /wrist isnt lost for those that enjoy it. Plus it would still leave one thing for people to make/wear that says "yeah bish, you saw that right. 5, check it 5 melds...."

[Raldo]

No thanks. You've already touched on the bad side, and it's that we won't blow up the gathered materials as much as we do now. We need that to happen.

[Scy]

If it was sarcasm then lol >< If not though, the amount of materia you'd have to go through refining would or should equate the average you'd would go through now to achieve the same level of melding. So really it would add a new aspect to that end of the economy giving the crafters something new to toy with and make some gils from still leaving in place an uncertainty to achieve the top end melding. So overall those that farm would still need to farm the same amount, crafters would still need to refine the same amount of materia comparable to what they would blow up to make a single piece. I think with some good math and economic planning it could be made to work and work well.

[Dzian]

I'd quite like to see some kinda system where I can take 2 tier 2 materias and make a tier 3 or 2 tier 3s and make a tier 4 sort of thing.

For example with 2 STR3-1 materias (+11) I could refine them into a STR4-1 (+16) or something like that.

I think it'd balance some of the prices out a bit. Sure things like Heavens Eye 4 may go down in price but the 1's 2's and 3's would most likely rise in value.

Just an idea. I can't give to many details I haven't thought that much into it...

[rina_inverse]

Join date at October 2012 and already level 50 BSM?
wow that is fast

[Raldo]

Join date at October 2012 and already level 50 BSM?
wow that is fast

Join date is the date that you sign up to use the forums, not the date that the character was created. Checking their Lodestone reveals that that character was created on or around October 7th, 2010.