Materia Melded Raid Equipment Thoughts.

So I'll try to build this field of though so I can be concise.

Problems that come from melded gear.
1) Forces players to have to deal with RNG to meld, failure rates even with alexandrite system comes to mind. It can work on one, or you could waste a dozen.

2) Balance of content will be done based on the fully materia'ed version of the fights. In already tight gear races where people are having trouble with progression they're going to nerf the introductory stats making it that much harder to clear content since you will now be considered to buy gear with tomes.

3) Forced to pick either to materia with tome/raid drop or buy tomestone gear. Forcing you to spend that much more time gearing out alternate classes if you play more then one. Under a six month plan with old system you could get 2 sets of 2 classes, this will not be possible under this system.

4) Here's the real kicker though. Gil prices and sales, you're rewarding the gil spammers. I don't know about others but most raids I know has 1-2 'dedicated' crafters who have gil, the rest of my raid depends on food/potions from those people and can barely afford that in 3.0, let alone have enough to buy materia also.

Staff/Development Team Reasoning:
1) We have too much materia market untapped in game, we need a system to use it.
2) We have too much gil in circulation this should help reduce some of the top end.
3) We want to slow progression by way of gear because groups are clearing too fast with the initial content and stat weight of main stats is superior to secondary stats.

Resolution Methods that are required to make this possible.
1) You need to make it so the affix rate of this system is 100% with no failure.

2) You need to introduce alternative gear drops in raid like Faust mini-bosses that drop 'aetherial' that can't be melded, but still represent a gear award so people are not wasting 4-8 weeks progressing on a turn with no rewards.

3) Gear unmelded should be used as the basis for progression clearing. Alexander 7 Savage should be performance tuned to full i240 (final stats being i250 as an example) before materia is added. It should not be conditional to materia gear it should just be something to keep people busy while farming content.

4) This is a big one, introduce a system which more easily allows us to gear up a second class(third? fourth?) that can't be melded. This is Final Fantasy 14, there are multiple jobs and you are forcing people to play only a single job per patch. Let us take advantage of the multiple job system and gear multiple characters if this was more possible, then people would spend more time in game and longer times subscribing.

5) Non upgraded (i240) gear if it allows melding should allow you to upgrade to i250 and maintain the melds. You shouldn't force players to reinvest twice.

To be fair, I am not really liking where Square Enix is going with the game design lately. Punitive actions against mid-level raiders does not help your population. Most of us are here to have a good time, and it makes sense to give us more outlets that allow us to enjoy the game and not to punish players financially because they're not hardcore or gillionares. I'd rather spend time helping people new to the game and being rewarded for that then forcing us to turn raiding into a full time job where we spend over 40 hours a week for 1-2 months and have little to show for progression. (Note. I don't mind the hours, just the lack of incentive/reward for time spent.)

One option also is Makes tanks use only vitality as their main stat. Sword oath/Deliverance swaps your vitality for strength like cleric stance. Problem solved. Alternatively you can make fending accessories give 66 or 75% of maximum strength/vitality. Where as slaying would still be 100% strength. That way at least tanks are still able to maintain threat.
Conclusion.

You're making an assumption with 2, they didn't state anywhere that you would have to meld gear to get through content, they are just offering another means to increase stats.

-From Patch 3.2, crafted equipment will become more powerful that what it has been up until now.

-Furthermore, accessories will be implemented at the same time as the high-tier equipment that can be created by crafters.

-Additionally, materia slots will be added to raid equipment and the equipment that can be purchased with the various tomestones, so you’ll be able to add materia to boost the sub-stats that you prefer.

What I get here is that they are giving the players the choice of what they want rather than seeing two pieces of gear and being like I want skill speed or crit hit rate. If anything it helps for players to tailor their gear than just is it x or y, it offers a bit more customization and sure it may be costly but you also are assuming what the materia socket limit will be as base. It's possible it could be 3 or 4, granted they might only be 2 but honestly isn't this what players have been asking for? A way to customize their gear more, and this is a way to do it.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post3389641

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Originally Posted by Airget

You're making an assumption...

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We can only make assumptions here because as usual, they have dropped HUGE news on us that is for a future patch we won't see for 4 months with very little information. The materia change news SHOULD have been accompanied by a detailed forum or lodestone post to give us specifics of what they are thinking.

SE should have spoken in specifics to questions like

1) "How many Guaranteed Sockets will there be on gear now?"
2) "Will Overmelding(Penta-Melding) be something we can do to tomestone/raid gear?"
Answered: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ussion/cwcc04d
3) "If we can Penta-Meld, will there be a dramatic increase in success chance?
4) "What level of melding will content be tuned for?"
5) "Will there be new ways of obtaining materia in order to keep costs affordable for all?"

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Originally Posted by Airget

What I get here is that they are giving the players the choice of what they want rather than seeing two pieces of gear and being like I want skill speed or crit hit rate. If anything it helps for players to tailor their gear than just is it x or y, it offers a bit more customization and sure it may be costly but you also are assuming what the materia socket limit will be as base. It's possible it could be 3 or 4, granted they might only be 2 but honestly isn't this what players have been asking for? A way to customize their gear more, and this is a way to do it.

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Players have not necessarily been begging for more ways to customize gear. We have been begging for more gear choices in general. These changes do not solve the issue that there are only 2 gear choices per slot. This doesn't fix the fact that we use two rings and have two ring choices (do NOT try and tell me we have 3 just because we can have 1 upgraded and 1 non upgraded ring.)

The bigger statement about gear customization comes down to the fact that Stats are neither interesting or fun in XIV in its current model.

Things basically boil down to a simple formula for what people want and while we all know there will be stat caps on items, we can safely predict what people will want on their gear.

SCH will put ACC into every slot they need to in order to hit stuff. DPS and Tanks will put their main stat (STR for tanks) into every slot they can then they will use their hierarchy of stats (Crit > Det > SS or SS to threshold > Crit > Det) depending on their job. Is this interesting? I sure as heck can tell you it wasn't all that interesting in other games, and most other game's have a much wider and more useful set of secondary stats to play around with.

This "customization" makes even less sense when you start answering some of the questions they haven't answered yet. If we can assume that the answer to my second question above is "Yes" and we will be forced to PentaMeld raid gear. And then we take the available options for Question 4 things get a whole lot clearer.

If raids are tuned for no Materia, then they are allowing the hard core rich players to push the new savage content faster and easier. The question becomes if tuned for no melds and the rich hardcore meld and clear it faster, then why have savage difficulty at all? Savage was meant to appease the vocal minority. By giving them content they can now pay gil to make easier how does that change things? So now the people who are already clearing content before everyone else can do it faster cause they are rich but the rest of us still are in the dust.

If the answer is "the content is tuned for only guaranteed melds in gear" then once again "why"? These guaranteed meld slots will be filled with main stats for everyone but healers. What does this change do? Sure it gives tanks the opportunity to put more STR in our gear, but then that begs the question, are things going to be tuned for all tanks to be melding VIT instead?

The midcore is already a patch behind on clearing current content and is getting bored. Toss in needing to farm/spiritbind just in order to be viable in a raid setting and then the wheels come off the bus really quickly.

Nah.

There is nothing wrong with RNG in the materia system. Materia is all over the place. Nobody is forcing you to buy it off the market board, you can spiritbond your own gear for it just fine. And let's not pretend airships don't bring back grade III and IV materia by the dozen. The only reason crafting and gathering materia are as expensive as they are is because people are trying to milk the market before someone inevitably crashes it.

The dev team reasoning is fine. The whole system is totally unused right now except for crafting and gathering, and that's terrible.

So no penta-melding on tomes/raid gear? I'm saved!

That isn't confirmed. Yet.

Pretty sure if the community was more into running dungeons with dungeon level appropriate SBable gear rather than throwing a fit for not using the highest level gear available, we wouldn't have an issue with materia costs. That, and if we didn't have elemental materia.

I personally don't really like the idea of my reward for getting better gear to be doing dungeons in worse gear to make my better gear even better to be honest. I'd rather just use my best gear.

From the way I read it, primary stats (Str, Vit, Dex, Int, Mnd) are all going to be capped, and it is going to be a choice of which secondary stats (crit, accy, det, etc) you want to meld onto it. It also looked like they are going to re-work how Str affects tank damage, so that a penta-melded Vit piece with Str will not be as attractive anymore.

I support the idea of penta meldable tomes and raidgears, finally something usefull to spend gil on

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Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

I support the idea of penta meldable tomes and raidgears, finally something usefull to spend gil on

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For people who have gil.

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Originally Posted by Fevelle

For people who have gil.

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everyone what he deserves

It's a mistake.

Even if you aren't going to have to penta-meld all your raid/tomestone gear, you're still going to have to fill all the materia slots for every upgrade if you take your progression at all seriously. That means every single gear upgrade comes with either a big price tag or potentially hours/days of spiritbonding to get the right materia.

Bosses will be balanced based on fully melded gear because if they aren't, then fully melded gear will make the bosses too easy. Therefore melding gear is mandatory.

There's a reason WoW moved away from having gem sockets all over the damn place, and that game has an entire crafting profession that does nothing but make things to put in sockets. Sockets are a bonus now, not factored in to the strength of the gear.

Also, for anyone concerned about elitism? Hoo boy... you ain't seen nothin yet.

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Originally Posted by Callinon

Also, for anyone concerned about elitism? Hoo boy... you ain't seen nothin yet.

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"You're missing 3 vitality on your accessories! /kick"

If strict attention is not paid to stat caps on gear, I can see the prices on grade 4-5 primary stat materia surging up into low orbit.

Meanwhile, grade 3 and below would join elemental materia in terms of practical use. Their prices? They fall low enough to kiss Titan's butt.

Sounds right. Grade 4 becomes poverty materia that's still likely to cost a couple hundred thousand gil per depending on spiritbond rates on exploratory missions. It's just an all around bad situation and it's a step backwards in gearing.

I must be on a different server because the only expensive materia on Ultros is crafting materia. Everything else is sub 50k, and if you need T5 materia didn't the live letter say you could trade in airship exploration points for materia and the gear they drop is T5 convertible? So when you're having fun running the explorations you will be able to either convert or buy the materia you need? I think they are making it so Gil won't be the driving force. ;)

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Originally Posted by MeridaQ

I must be on a different server because the only expensive materia on Ultros is crafting materia. Everything else is sub 50k, and if you need T5 materia didn't the live letter say you could trade in airship exploration points for materia and the gear they drop is T5 convertible? So when you're having fun running the explorations you will be able to either convert or buy the materia you need? I think they are making it so Gil won't be the driving force. ;)

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They're sub 50k... NOW

Unless something seriously changes about how materia conversion works, converting the materia you need is always going to be the exception rather than the rule.

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Originally Posted by Callinon

They're sub 50k... NOW

Unless something seriously changes about how materia conversion works, converting the materia you need is always going to be the exception rather than the rule.

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Yes, but if you can get materia from my previously mentioned post the prices won't be a real issue just a little time. :)

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Originally Posted by Callinon

Bosses will be balanced based on fully melded gear because if they aren't, then fully melded gear will make the bosses too easy. Therefore melding gear is mandatory.

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This is assumption and considering the reduced weight of secondary stats, and the fact that you have no idea how the raid meldable gear stat caps will be allocated or any idea how the process will be done it's fair to say that they won't "have" to do anything. Even as it sits currently if you were able to pentameld the current raid gear with even a 15 point secondary single stat cap it would make a negligible difference over all on the end performance due to the abysmal weight of secondary stats currently.

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Originally Posted by Dante_V

This is assumption and considering the reduced weight of secondary stats, and the fact that you have no idea how the raid meldable gear stat caps will be allocated or any idea how the process will be done it's fair to say that they won't "have" to do anything. Even as it sits currently if you were able to pentameld the current raid gear with even a 15 point secondary single stat cap it would make a negligible difference over all on the end performance due to the abysmal weight of secondary stats currently.

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An assumption yes, but not a baseless one. I've been playing MMOs a long time, this is how it works if player stats are being taken into account at all during encounter design.

Let's see 15 point secondary stat cap on every piece of gear... that'd be 180 points of a stat. Are you seriously going to tell me that's not significant? That's two or three extra pieces of gear's worth of that stat.

You would have to figure out at what point it becomes significant.

If the stat itself is worth next to nothing, you can gain tons of it and have a minimal impact. If the stat is weighted heavily, then gaining only a few points of it will have a much larger impact.

I think the point he was trying to make is that currently, secondary stats are towards the "worthless" end of that spectrum.

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Originally Posted by Callinon

An assumption yes, but not a baseless one. I've been playing MMOs a long time, this is how it works if player stats are being taken into account at all during encounter design.

Let's see 15 point secondary stat cap on every piece of gear... that'd be 180 points of a stat. Are you seriously going to tell me that's not significant? That's two or three extra pieces of gear's worth of that stat.

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If you took DRG stat weights and magically stacked 180 DET (highest weighted secondary stat for DRG), that's only an increase of 25.8 STR.

It's not going to break the game by any means with only that kind of change.

I actually welcome 3.2.
Gathering and Crafting got tomestones to slow progression down and they have to overmeld a ton for their endgame.
Now combat is in the same boat.

People seem to be looking at this solely from the raider standpoint. The problem is, they're not looking at it as a crafter. As a crafter, I've spent several *months* getting my skills and gear (for 11 classes) up to the point that I can craft all 2-star gear and gather all the materials for those gear. That is a LOT of work. Alexander Savage is too, but I doubt even the most dedicated raiders have put in the sheer amount of time grinding gear as I have.

For that investment of time and money (over 10 million gil), I get to sell three things to people: Glamour items, food, and potions. None of my end-game crafted armor matters... at all. It costs me a week or two worth of weekly-capped resources to make a single 2-star armor piece, and that armor piece has to be crafted at high quality just to be comparable to the LAW gear that raiders throw away as soon as they can.

The bottom line is... something had to be done to keep crafters like me in the game. Crafters like me that, quite honestly, straight-up pay more money to SE than raiders do, because I have (and need) 8 retainers. The current status quo of busting our butts to be able to craft things that no one wants just isn't going to fly anymore.

Now, the design team said that their reasoning for keeping crafted gear sub-par compared to raiding gear was melding. This makes sense... as it is now, if they were to come out with ilvl 210 crafted gear today, and you could meld primary stats to it, every tank and healer would *have* to buy a full set of crafted gear for the end-game, so that they could meld strength to it (for the tanks) or accuracy (for the healers), and other classes would feel strongly that they needed to do so as well to get that bit of extra DPS. Knowing this, the design team decided to change how materia melding works, so that raiding and dropped gear would still be desirable, but crafted gear wouldn't be irrelevant. And somehow... that's a problem.

Somehow... the raiding player base seems to think that crafters don't get to enjoy the game... that the entire game should revolve solely around them, and solely around how they want to have fun. Well, you know what? I pay a subscription fee too. I pay that subscription fee because Final Fantasy XIV has the best crafting system (mechanically) out of every MMO currently out. The only MMO I've ever played that had a better crafting system (and I've been playing them since Ultima Online) is Star Wars Galaxies... a game that hasn't existed for almost a decade now. So, realize that there are issues in the game beyond just the raiding scene, and that the raiding scene, for all the attention it gets is actually a very small part of the overall game and the overall gaming community. The rest of us deserve to enjoy the game too, and for some of us, that means having the ability to make things that you might want (or even need) to buy. We're putting the same level of effort into the game... we deserve the same considerations when it comes to rewarding that effort.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

Pretty sure if the community was more into running dungeons with dungeon level appropriate SBable gear rather than throwing a fit for not using the highest level gear available, we wouldn't have an issue with materia costs. That, and if we didn't have elemental materia.

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Or if elemental resistances had enough of an impact to warrant the inclusion of elemental materia. I think it would be cool to have different customized sets of gear with different elemental resistances for fighting different bosses (or... at least I think it'd be cool until I had to pay for it)... but it's not that elemental materia sucks, it's that elemental resistances do essentially nothing. I could penta-meld earth materia on a suit of armor and go fight Titan, and I'd need a parser to notice the damage difference. That's the problem, not the materia itself, but the effect of the values. It's a bit more pronounced with elemental materia than it is with secondary-stat materia, but that is still an issue with secondary stats... their effects are so low that even stacking them to high amounts makes no visible difference. And if I'm not wrong, that's something that they're wanting to fix.