New idea for Materia...

I love the whole materia idea, although I do think that possibly scaling down the materia to just 3 tiers instead of V is a system that could work better when it comes to U/U gear and rare gear drops from NM or dungeons, this way it still gives gear the ability to be almost on par with U/U and doesn’t take away the power of U/U gear. I also think some materia orbs could be rewards from chest found during guild leves, rewards from side quest or even rewards from behest, the orbs would be scaled according to level/rank of the quest or mission or leve.
Thoughts…

If I remember right, unique/untradeable gear was made so it is very good, but not the best. The best gear is crafted by players and has multiple materias in it. Why? Because it keeps the crafters crafting and is an expensive alternative to ridiculously low drops from raids/boss.
Everyone win with having unique/untradeable gear by slightly sub-perfection. Otherwise, everyone would simply try to grab that and game over for high level crafting.

Materias are really easy to create, the market is already swarmed with them. Adding materias to chest and rewards doesn't feel right, it would just further swarm the markets with them. Also, materias are a collection of memories, you don't simply give that away as reward or drop it in a chest. My suggestion if materia become reward or are found in chest: create a new type of materia exclusively found in rewards and chests.

Those are my thoughts. :)

I think the whole materia melding system is really bad. Im a person who likes to do things for myself without needing someone elses aid in the matters of crafting and such. i got both my mining and blacksmith up to level 18 to be able to do the quests for the materias. After completing them i found out in order to meld a materia you need a specific proffesion to meld it. This is just stupid, so thats just means i am forced to level up my proffesion and other proffesions aswell in order to make use of materia. This is not a way to atract new players for 2.0. I would say drop the whole materia system and add a enchanting proffesion for people to level up. the whole crafting sytem is Crap and its undesireble. just to got my Blacksmith to level 18 and for that i grinden lots of hours and on top of that i failed alot of systhesis making me lose a lot of mats. And the cystals that you need aswell for crafting just makes you GRIND even more to craft. Horrible horrible horrible horrible system. SE do something about it

I would like SE to keep the materia system, I think it just needs some balance to give everyone the best of both worlds.