Dropped Items and Materia

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Originally Posted by Viridiana

If (and that's a big if) they allowed it, yeah, I'd expect the first one to be about the same odds as putting on a fourth or fifth on any other piece.

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Say both 5%. Would you put that additional materia on primal weapons or your 3-4 meld?
Personally I will go with primal weapons because I found primal weapons easier (process much more dynamic & better chance) to obtain and it is better to have a special primal weapon rather than a special crafted weapon.

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So can you affect primal weapons drop rate? Not being able to affect the drop rate = "requires no player input"?

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Your drop rate is 0 if you can't win the fight. Once you're ready to attach a 15 str and 20 str materia to a set of gloves you have nothing to do with the success rate of your meld. To put it another way, you can be a good damage dealer or tank or healer or whatever - you can't be a "good" melder.

This post from a while back pretty much sums up this whole problem with materia'd crafted stuff being the best

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Turning a zillion cheap linen 40+ armor pieces into materia every 20 minutes in a party of 8 getting 280k SP an hour AOE nuking wolves on THM and then putting those materia into a slot machine on crafted items to achieve the best gear in the game is not a fun endgame. It is however, the most efficient thing a hardcore LS can do to gear themselves. This is an issue. After a while, people are going to give up logging in every day, if all they have to look forward to is slaughtering wolves and crafting items. We need to be able to attach to U/U, so there's a reason to go get U/U, to increase the variety of worthwhile things to do in this game.

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And, once again, the problem with items like Ifrit's Battleaxe being unmeldable is that UPGRADES from that weapon will likely also be unmeldable, meaning that someone with an Ifrit axe can completely ignore marauder weapon materia. This is called a waste of a system.


Forbidden/Multi-melding is such a Korean grind MMO idea and doesn't really feel like it should fit. All it rewards is the person with the most time to go out and do a tedious, brainless task over and over again.

Obtaining and melding materia does not depend upon or engage player skill in any meaningful way.

You can argue the semantics of "player-input" and "difficulty" all you want, but the fact remains that a player's ability to effectively play his or her combat class is meaningless in the current materia system.

What most critics of the materia system are worried about is that the best items in the game will be obtainable through a process that is a mere grind; a process that does not seriously test or demand player skill. Owning an Ifrit's Axe shows that, at the very least, you were able to overcome a fight specifically designed to challenge you. Owning an Electrum Scepter with 3 Hell's Eye IV materia on it shows... you had a lot of gil, time, and luck.

No reasonable person wants SE to simply scrap or render obsolete a system that they have put so much time and care into. What most of us want is simply a materia system that rewards a players skill in COMBAT and provides incentive and significance to the most important end game activities: raids, fights, and bosses (the vast majority of which are currently made worthless by the powerful materia system).

In the future, we may see rarer materia that drops specifically from boss fights or a return of HNM-dropped crafting materials. These things would solve some of the problems. Yoshi-P may already have a plan for our concerns and maybe all of our complaints are unneeded. Unfortunately, he's been rather vague on the whole subject and based on precedent most of us players imagine the worst. And certainly a system that invalidates gear dropped from the hardest fights would be "the worst".

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Your drop rate is 0 if you can't win the fight. Once you're ready to attach a 15 str and 20 str materia to a set of gloves you have nothing to do with the success rate of your meld. To put it another way, you can be a good damage dealer or tank or healer or whatever - you can't be a "good" melder.

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Learn how to win the fight and the fight itself is similar in a way to the preparation for materia melding. For a specific ifrit run that focuses on collecting weapons and the group is going to win, does the best player have better chance of obtaining something? They also have to be dedicated and keep doing Ifrit fights over and over to beat the RNG. Melders also have to beat RNG, which requires much less skill & many many more tries. All these are player's effort, primal fights & materia system.

Materia is certainly not a fun end game for people who spend time on playing crafting jobs. Not fun doesn't mean people participate in it should get no reward or get less reward than people who engage in more fun activities. Also, you can make spiritbonding slightly more fun yourself by organizing exp/key parties. There are plenty of reasons to go for contents that drop U/Us (still organize Ifrit runs even though I got all of them) and I am more than happy for U/Us bar primal weapons to be multi-meldable so they are not redundant and I get to play with rare items.

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And, once again, the problem with items like Ifrit's Battleaxe being unmeldable is that UPGRADES from that weapon will likely also be unmeldable, meaning that someone with an Ifrit axe can completely ignore marauder weapon materia. This is called a waste of a system.

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You can always put on parry for damage mitigations or touch of rage for tanking. So you have 2 axes with different purposes. Before SE comes up with a damage mitigation/tanking thematic weapons that is a very easy way to go. Easy upgrade from Ifrit's battleaxe if you are looking for different things other than DD.

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All it rewards is the person with the most time to go out and do a tedious, brainless task over and over again.

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hmm...You make Ifrit fights sound like rocket science....

>>Chadwick

The focus is of course on battle classes and again and again, I am more than happy if SE gives more incentive for people to do contents via making materia multi-melding available & underpowered primal weapons stronger. But before any end game content is up for DOH. I am against melding of primal weapons.

Sure, why not award players with very good combat skills with best weapons? Afterall they know their battle class better than others. And why players that have been making weaps/equips from early levels can't participate in making the best weapons in the game too? They know how to make good weaps/equips better than others.

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Owning an Electrum Scepter with 3 Hell's Eye IV materia on it shows... you had a lot of gil, time, and luck.

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Luck aside, why a player who likes a certain piece of gear, got that piece of gear stronger than primal gears by spends lots of gils & time, sounds not like an achievement from you?

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You can argue the semantics of "player-input" and "difficulty" all you want, but the fact remains that a player's ability to effectively play his or her combat class is meaningless in the current materia system.

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I am not here to downplay battle classes significance or overstating DOH's inputs. That is why I agree with making darkhold/stronghold gears meldable and making underpowered primal weapons stronger in the first place.

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And certainly a system that invalidates gear dropped from the hardest fights would be "the worst".

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I have stated many times materia system need some change via allow more melding & stats change. Never support everything of the current system and it is far from optimal. A system that making a Disciple redundant also not the best. Anyway, like what you said Yoshi might already have a plan to address our concerns.

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

Why should an axe from a slot machine be able to surpass something you actually go out with a party and fight for?

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Drop rate is as much a "Slot machine" as slotting your gear that your "Earned" as well.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

Drop rate is as much a "Slot machine" as slotting your gear that your "Earned" as well.

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yeah I remember this one time I kept failing melds because my party kept getting hit by blacksmithing sparks and dying. Luckily we pulled it together and with coordination succeeded at the meld.

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Originally Posted by Brannigan

yeah I remember this one time I kept failing melds because my party kept getting hit by blacksmithing sparks and dying. Luckily we pulled it together and with coordination succeeded at the meld.

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When did I say anything about battle?

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Originally Posted by Jamester

Luck aside, why a player who likes a certain piece of gear, got that piece of gear stronger than primal gears by spends lots of gils & time, sounds not like an achievement from you?

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I agree that it is an "achievement" in the same sense that crafting 3000 times is an achievement. It's a milestone of time and effort, but not of skill. I just feel that killing bosses is a better achievement and thus should be more rewarding than grinding out simple materia and mass producing items.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

When did I say anything about battle?

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I believe Brannigan's point is that while RNG is at play in both loot drops and melding, player skill is completely absent from the latter. They are both "slot machines", but materia is nothing but a slot machine, while a battle is so much more.

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Originally Posted by Chadwick

I agree that it is an "achievement" in the same sense that crafting 3000 times is an achievement. It's a milestone of time and effort, but not of skill. I just feel that killing bosses is a better achievement and thus should be more rewarding than grinding out simple materia and mass producing items.



I believe Brannigan's point is that while RNG is at play in both loot drops and melding, player skill is completely absent from the latter. They are both "slot machines", but materia is nothing but a slot machine, while a battle is so much more.

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And thus the probability of successfully obtaining a crafted item of equal sheer power via materia is substantially lower as a result. Point?

We're talking about a non-issue here. I mean how many people do you see in game with anything melded with 4 or 5 materia. Hell how many people with 3. Speaking tier IVs of course. How many people with primal weapons?