Materia is currently the only long term money sink for people who make lots of money.
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True the better gear is in dungeons. However, the best in slot accessories/belt is crafting. Well I guess that's still to opinion and based on which stats you care about.
http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/118...ear-Comparison shows all the stats between allagen and myth accessores. You add up all the stats with the pieces you'd go for and compare the the 5 meld piece of accessory.
Stat Caps per Belt/Accessoris:
12 ACC
12 SS
12 Crit
9 Vit (10 belt)
8 Det
For me if I went full mythology + 1 allagan ring i'd have:
78 STR
70 ACC
54 Crit
30 Det
15 Vit
22 SS
My crafted pieces with capped STR,ACC, DET, Crit, and some Vit
54 STR
72 ACC
72 Crit
48 DET
48 Vit
30 SS
I don't mind sacrificing STR for that extra buff in crit, det, and of course more survivability with Vit.
You end up sacrificing 24 STR for 18 Crit, 18 Det, and 8 SS, and 33 VIT. Its partially up to personal preference I guess but If you go with the stat weighting in this thread (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...otation-Reborn) you are losing 24 values of stat weight to gain 8.008, so if the stat weights in that thread are at all correct (I assume they are close with how big that thread is) then you gain a significant chunk of dps going from i70 to i90, period. You do lose out on VIT though, which is one of those stats that is hard to place value on and becomes a little more personal choice.
Thats certainly true, however you do sacrifice a significant amount of damage for that hp. Each stat has its place but in dungeons like coil with fairly tight dps timers you'll want to be pushing your dps as hard as you can. In that case raid gear is more desireable for raiding (as it should be imo)
A compromise would be to change it so instead of relying on RNG you will require multiple of the same materia for one meld. So a "10% chance of success" on a meld will become "requires ten materia of the same type and level".
There's worse enchanting/melding systems out there than XIV's though. TERA's has been mentioned and Aion's manastone socketing was outright awful. You had to fill up to 6 slots (sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of kinah per manastone) with a ~50% success rate and if you failed one you lost them all. The only way to get a decent success rate was to buy supplements from their cash shop.
This thread makes me happy! There are people who can do math and understand probability! I was reading the gathering thread and those people are idiots.