Let's talk about materia

I'm sure this isn't the first time anyone has mentioned this...

I think this can be discussed for any gear type, but since the focus seems to be on weapons, let's discuss that.

Personally, I'd like to see materia drops that correlate to end game weapons, depending on the route taken to get these weapons.

For example, to tailor to end-game 'hardcore' raiders, first clear should be a guaranteed weapon drop for the clearing class (let's be honest, if the raid is that difficult, players are investing serious time to beat it). The weapon has two materia slots, or more depending on the level of difficulty. Your materia drops, however, maintain the same degree of RNG/difficulty to obtain, are unsellable, and change the way weapons are viewed.

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Much like FFVII, raid materia can grant you special bonuses, outside of the normal materia (STR/DEX/Etc. bonuses) such as:

- Double strike (1.25 auto attacks/sec instead of 1)
- Elemental damage,
- Procs for dropping a cooldown on a specified skill (maybe unrealistic),
- Bloodbath (~WAR lifesteal)
- Reraise (5% chance)
- Bonuses to future raids:

o You have a buff pool that exists in every raid, if a player has the materia that provides a variable for it, a buff from the pool is assigned to that variable and the player actually feels like he/she is benefiting from all that preparation from previous raids, and people will actually want to do it - but don't NEED to do it (e.g. it's not a god-buff, I'm talking like "10% chance to reduce damage from some boss tank-killer move).There is an inexhaustible list that could exist for this type of setup.

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Your artifact weapon can have the same iLvL, do the same amount of damage, but have a set-in-stone bonus, or a reduced amount of slots for materia. This allows casual players (by the way, not the in-between-hardcore-and-casual players I mean straight CASUAL) to have something similar, but attuned for a different lifestyle. Artifact weapons can hold no battle materia, but can hold materia that gives a variety of bonuses they may enjoy.

For example:
- Reduced iLvL + increased exp (lower level chars can hold this 5 levels earlier)
- Increased seal/gil/<insert currency type> obtain rate (doesn't everyone do this?)
- Faster movement speed
- Higher drop rate
- etc.

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These 'special' Materia could be removed (no chance of destroying it, please), but cannot be transferred between artifact and raid gear. Hardcore raiders enjoy recognition, but more than that, they enjoy being powerful. Give them something to min/max their gear with, and open up a more horizontal gameplay, you'll put some of the work on them to come up with strategies for defeating bosses that does not require a cookie-cutter strategy.

For artifact weapons, materia is put on a similar weekly timer, but involves difficult puzzles, riddle-based exploration, dungeon clears with difficult restraints (take away a skill from every player, based on class, but make it non-random so players cannot exit/reenter until they have it how they want it), mini games, etc.

Edit your first post, and copy and paste your later posts into it to get around the character limit.