Forbidden Materia, meant for the hardcore or just the lucky?

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Originally Posted by grandm

there is no reason to believe what is to come in the future won't be better than materia. materia came after the dungeons that are out so it is better. but 1.21 will have newer stuff that will be better again. if not then complain

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What reasoning is there that the gear from later dungeons WILL be better? The difference in stats between materia gear and non materia gear is so astronomical how do you expect it to not be the top gear?

e real hardcore involves luck, if u think it's not worth doing it cause it involves luck and lots of gil, don't do it. Probably only a handful of real hardcore (1% of e server or less) won't mind spending gil and remeld new gears when it's out.

So the term hardcore is based on individuals. My term of hardcore is same as Yoshi, e real hardcore (1%)
Just be a semi hardcore if u think it's not worth it (2-3meld). Probably 10-20% of e population falls into that category.

Oh, I'm still set on finishing it. But I'm no fool, the actual stats on the finished gear are really not worth the time, gil and effort required to make them. Regardless, I love large time sinks like these, although I'd prefer the rewards to be a bit better than they currently are.

If I decide to sell them when they're finished, I'd be lucky to even ask for 50% of the gil I spent on making them, and would likely only get offers for 30% of it. And that's just gil spent, alone. Time and effort spent should also be profitable, but in this case they won't be. The only people who can profit off of these are the extremely lucky who happen to get a 5th meld within only a few attempts. Like I said, this system rewards the lucky, not the hardcore.

Still, I don't really care, for me it's a personal achievement type of thing and I'll have fun doing it. I'd love it if the risk vs reward was balanced better, but whatever. It'll keep me busy while I wait for 2.0.

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Originally Posted by Montijin

Why the community isn't more up in arms about this is puzzling to me. I guess most people aren't looking at the materia system in a broad picture.

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If it makes you feel any better, I was up in arms as soon as the system was announced. Forbidden Materia Melding seemed awful on paper and it's just as awful in-game. It's a complete crapshoot with abysmal success rates, unnecessary complexity (I believe we have 20 tiers of each materia) and no skill whatsoever involved.

Threads such as this are only HALF as useful as they should be, in convincing anything from the Devs.
(No stabs at anyone here.)

You need to remember WHY Materia exists in the 1st place.

It's solely here to help crafters make money.

In most MMOs, gear they make is either crappier than what comes from drops, or better, and so everyone and their mom takes up crafting.

In the end, we will have too many weapons/armor going around, lowering the value of said gear.

So what did Yoshida create? a system that removes excess gear from the system.
The chances to fail, and blow up, are not there solely to make it hard, as mentioned before, multi-socket gear could have replaced it.
The gear blows up, to remove it from circulation.

So if we are to ever remove this annoying system, we need to come up with alternative that will allow for similar results.
(And to avoid just changing the name/method of the system, where we are still annoyed, we might need to make 2 separate systems.)

The best I could offer in suggestion, after doing some math, is to lower the chance of blowing up gear.
Lose the materia, but have a chance of losing the gear it's attached to, or similar.

(I'm still a fan of attaching materia to u/u gear, ONLY by yourself, so crafters get an edge, simply by having taking up crafting high enough to attach it to their own u/u gear.)

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Originally Posted by Montijin

What reasoning is there that the gear from later dungeons WILL be better? The difference in stats between materia gear and non materia gear is so astronomical how do you expect it to not be the top gear?

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new dungeons drops will be as good if not better than materia 3 pieces, ifrit gear is so why not new gear? as for 4 and 5 piece materia gear, how many of these items have you seen? i bet you see loads more ppl with full set dungeon gera than you do with 1 piece of materia 5, dungeon gear is actually obtainable, which makes it worth the effort

No comments on the success rate, as I think it's awesome that we've now got a chance (however small) of making some super rare, super awesome gear. I just had a comment on your approach, OP. Instead of going for gold right off the bat with a single set of gloves with 5 materia, why don't you slowly increase the number of melds across all your armor/weapons? For example, start with 2 materia on everything, since that isn't too tough, then go for the same pieces but with 3 melds, then increasing to 4, etc. That approach seems much more reasonable because you'll slowly be increasing your stats (due to the higher meld success rates until you get close to the goal) rather than just loosing more gloves initially.

To answer Molly, all of my gear is already double melded with either 3+4 or 4+4 tiers. However, as I mostly play DD classes, there's really only 3 pieces of gear that are worth the extra effort, body, legs and gloves.

The body slot would be incredibly expensive to try to 3x meld, and the resulting benefit is only situational (Crit damage+). I'm happy with +86 crit for the time being. This can be pushed to over 100 fairly easily with 2+3+4 or something similar, but again, crit damage+ is situational.

Legs are worth trying to meld 3x T4 on them, but not really worth trying any other variations with 3 melds (2 high grade T4 can equal most other M3 melds). I am working on this, although slowly.

Hands are the most beneficial for the classes I play as they can raise both STR and ATT in one piece. This is why I chose to do these. Yea, ARC won't get any boost from the STR, but I really don't care much for ARC anyways lol.

Reading your post I see where you're coming from and thought I'd weigh in. Number one, I'd be surprised if the dev team ever imagined the Hardcore Player's Approach. So I think that is a crazy perversion of the way the system was intended to play out. I think the Hardcore Player's Approach stems from a desire to lessen the psychological trauma of massive, repeated failure, but ask yourself if you really need to be protected from that and if it's that smart to try to avoid it? It seems that from that simple thing you're making the whole scenario harder than it is. You cited the shortage of materia. Why don't you just use the Gambler's Approach? Unless I'm wrong that fixes your materia shortage problem? Also why invest all the time and materials for Tier 2 materia? If you're going through the same steps, same actions, with materia materials, why don't you just upgrade the quality and go for an all out tier IV piece? Is it too expensive for you?

Anyway I hope you take my advice but continue to post your progress and keep track of the Gambler's Approach.

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Originally Posted by Shikaree

We could have so many other interesting ideas, but SE just seems hellbent on enjoying failure systems.

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Indeed. It would be nice to know at least if the system is "working as intended" or if they aren't satisfied with it either.