Gear idea for 4.0 onwards

I have seen many people complain about gear customization and unique abilities on gear since the game launched, and it has become clear that these unique abilities are not coming to the game anytime soon.

What I would like to see to remedy this problem is an augment system. This system would have an additional slot(s) in your gear window and would allow you to slot augment crystals into your character. Instead of abilities being on gear, they would be a separate entity contained within these crystals.

Equipping these crystals will give you a unique buff like:

- increased movement speed (stackable with sprint and swiftsong etc.)
- increased mount speed
- visual effects
- discounted teleports
- transmutation

and more.

This could potentially be used for battle effects as well (as people have been screaming for), but that is extreamly unlikely to happen for balance reasons and hostile PF reasons (LFG - must have doublestrike augment)

What you're describing is just the current materia system expanded - and the reason the current system is limited and restricted you've already stated, thus kind of making this thread sadly redundant. Yes it would be great to have bonuses to personalize your equipment with, but you said so yourself, SE are trying to avoid situations where players are discriminated against for "not having a certain equipment setup" like what FFXI suffered from. Sadly I don't see SE changing this any time soon.

Not having these adjustments available makes me happy I don't have to deal with them. And you're right in that it would create an environment of "if you don't have this augment you can't play."

I could see augments for visual effects or non-combat bonuses like reduced teleportation fees, or a movement speed buff that is deactivated during battle, but anything that affects you in battle is going to be taken into consideration by efficiency-minded players, which will largely shut out new people from easily taking part in content, and SE seems to be firmly against anything that could potentially be a wall to new players, especially players who are new to MMOs in general.