Current State of Melee Gearing

Hey guys! Just wanted to gauge the community's opinion on the melee gearing issue. Since the release of this game, melee has had two separate gear sets (striking and maiming) and with the introduction of ninja, three separate gear sets. This makes utilizing one of the best features of this game (the ability to play multiple jobs) very difficult for melee players. Unlike Casters, Ranged dps, Tanks, or Healers, Melee players must purhcase 3 sets of left-side body pieces of armor, and two sets of right side accessories. In the past this made sense due to aesthetic reasons, for glamor, however with the introduction of glamor plates this no longer holds water. Any materia-related issue can be handled the same way as every other role handles it. So, personally, the biggest change I have always wanted to see was melee sharing gear and having the ability to atleast have the item level to play all jobs in your specific role in high end content to bring them in line with every other job in the game. Do you guys feel the same way? Is there any community support for this? Thank you for taking the time to read my novel!

100% agree. At least pre 50 It Is an armoury mess

Easy fix: add another job using ninja gear !

If you wanna go for BiS gear, you need to purchase different gear on tanks / healer / range dps too.

Otherwise i personally think that gear shouldn´t share over jobs. It just takes out more "content" out of the game and we don´t have that much already.

By the way, this makes me think.
What is the main difference between those gears ? Aside from scouting giving Dex instead of Strength. Do they really emphasize different stats ?

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

By the way, this makes me think.
What is the main difference between those gears ? Aside from scouting giving Dex instead of Strength. Do they really emphasize different stats ?

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When it comes to different roles, yes (only tank gear gives tenacity, only healer gear gives piety, and DPS only gives crit/DH/det) but there's no difference between melee, ranged and magical DPS gear besides the main stat (Str/Dex/Int).

Ok so it's not like scouting gear focused more on Skill Speed, Maiming on Determination and Striking on Direct Hits.

Well then we just need another scouting job and then it'll be fine! Spellblade come in ! (I know it doesn't really solves anything)

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Originally Posted by Marc-Vigar

When it comes to different roles, yes (only tank gear gives tenacity, only healer gear gives piety, and DPS only gives crit/DH/det) but there's no difference between melee, ranged and magical DPS gear besides the main stat (Str/Dex/Int).

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Melee DPS have higher Vitality than ranged, who have more than Caster DPS. This is balanced by more Magic Defence on caster gear to account for most raidwide damage being magical. Some of it is physical but in those instances they tend to be lower potency hits or effective oneshots on non-tanks.

Maiming gear should have been folded in with striking when they added ninja. One strength set and one dexterity set would have made this work. Then as more melee jobs were added they could have just picked "do we want this to be a strength or dexterity job?" and add it to the appropriate one.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Maiming gear should have been folded in with striking when they added ninja. One strength set and one dexterity set would have made this work. Then as more melee jobs were added they could have just picked "do we want this to be a strength or dexterity job?" and add it to the appropriate one.

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Yeah but glamour tho'...
Ideally you could use either striking or maiming on those jobs.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Yeah but glamour tho'...
Ideally you could use either striking or maiming on those jobs.

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Ideally your glamour plates would work independent of class selection, except for arguably artifact armor.

The current state of gearing is what makes me think that in the next expansion (7.0) we're going to have a new melee DPS with scouting gear on the left side and casting gear on the right side, possibly a hybrid melee with some ranged magical phases...a reverse RDM, if you will. It would be quite interesting in my opinion.

I meant that it gives more glamour variety x) But yeah it's not an important thing, I was just joking^^

And +10k on that reverse RDM thing. Having a dual blade/sword and spell Spellsword job would be awesome, their wide cloth armor aesthetic would fit the scouting gear too.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

The current state of gearing is what makes me think that in the next expansion (7.0) we're going to have a new melee DPS with scouting gear on the left side and casting gear on the right side, possibly a hybrid melee with some ranged magical phases...a reverse RDM, if you will. It would be quite interesting in my opinion.

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Doubt we will get any jobs that split main body and accessory stats. At most I suspect we will get another single full job in 7.0 wearing scouting/aiming for a 4 tank/4 healer/6 melee (2 maim/2 striking/2 scouting)/6 ranged (3 aiming/3 casting) spread with any further jobs added in later expansions being limited like BLU.

There is a limit to the number of weapons that can be modeled when developing each expansion and we were seeing those limits with GNB and DNC in ShB as compared to when SAM and RDM were introduced in StB.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

There is a limit to the number of weapons that can be modeled when developing each expansion and we were seeing those limits with GNB and DNC in ShB as compared to when SAM and RDM were introduced in StB.

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Every job introduced increases the work quadratically if you have to go back and do old expansion. Modelling work is some of the more labor-intensive work any dev team has, so there is a finite point where it becomes unsustainable.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

Every job introduced increases the work quadratically if you have to go back and do old expansion. Modelling work is some of the more labor-intensive work any dev team has, so there is a finite point where it becomes unsustainable.

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Which is why GNB and DNC had only 5 level 60 weapons each compared to SAM and RDM having 22 level 50 weapons each. They spent so much time modeling outdated SAM/RDM weapons that they only created 2 new leveling weapon models for every other job in StB. In ShB they managed to create 4 new leveling weapon models for each job because they limited the number of outdated models created for the new jobs to only those necessary.

If you also play ranged jobs, then the accessories on those overlap on Ninja.

DRG had to have different gear in the past because they wanted it to have higher physical defense because at one point in time it was supposed to be a more physically tanky sort of frontline DPS when they had ironed out some of the kinks of why that's a bad idea yet.

It let you do fun stuff like eat a Sephirot Ex tower on DRG instead of tank and save the party from a wipe with your 80% +parry cooldown on a 40 second timer.

If anything, I kind of wish they hadn't veered away from what they did with Ninja originally on its introduction. This was that all of the striking gear up to i110 was shared by Monk and Ninja, and it made a lot of sense to me, because they both had high attack speed due to intrinsic buffs (GL and Huton). They merely added DEX to the striking gear.

I guess they had Ninja splinter off, so that Monk wouldn't have to compete on raid drops, but with the way raid drops work now... almost nothing matters in that regard.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Easy fix: add another job using ninja gear !

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Staff-wielder, such as an Adept, perhaps? Or maybe a Fencer/Duelist? Corsair?

Though, tbh, I thought Dancer was going to be a hybrid-range Scouting class before its release.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

By the way, this makes me think.
What is the main difference between those gears ? Aside from scouting giving Dex instead of Strength. Do they really emphasize different stats?

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Nope, not since 1.x, where all physical classes could use Dex, albeit to varying degrees (gave Accuracy, a varying amount of effective Attack Power, Dodge/Parry/Block chance, and... Crit chance, iirc).

The only gear differences are split by Role (Tank, DPS, Healer), not Armor Class (Scouting, Striking, Maiming, Aiming, Casting).

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Easy fix: add another job using ninja gear !

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Staff-wielder, such as an Adept, perhaps? Or maybe a Fencer/Duelist? Corsair?

Though, tbh, I thought Dancer was going to be a hybrid-range Scouting class before its release.

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If I'd have to choose a Scouting class, than I would have chosen the Garlean Gunblade (maybe the longer variant that Gaius uses since I think he's the only one that has a unique stance when wielding his) but it would be admittedly difficult to categorize from the Gunbreaker's Gunblade. Good alternatives could be a quarter staff wielder or even a whip user (with some whip sword variants).

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Staff-wielder, such as an Adept, perhaps? Or maybe a Fencer/Duelist? Corsair?

Though, tbh, I thought Dancer was going to be a hybrid-range Scouting class before its release.


Nope, not since 1.x, where all physical classes could use Dex, albeit to varying degrees (gave Accuracy, a varying amount of effective Attack Power, Dodge/Parry/Block chance, and... Crit chance, iirc).

The only gear differences are split by Role (Tank, DPS, Healer), not Armor Class (Scouting, Striking, Maiming, Aiming, Casting).

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From 2.0 until whenever they changed it... either very late HW or Stormblood release, STR still affected Parry % mitigation and DEX affected Parry as a stat. Like every 9 DEX added 3 Parry or something weird like that. I remember on DRG being able to parry for -29% physical damage for a long time hehe. This affected every class, though the option to gear for it was only in accessories, and the returns were so poor that it got cut eventually like all other vestigial things.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

From 2.0 until whenever they changed it... either very late HW or Stormblood release, STR still affected Parry % mitigation and DEX affected Parry as a stat. Like every 9 DEX added 3 Parry or something weird like that. I remember on DRG being able to parry for -29% physical damage for a long time hehe. This affected every class, though the option to gear for it was only in accessories, and the returns were so poor that it got cut eventually like all other vestigial things.

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Sorry, you're correct; I misspoke. It was never worth enough to be worth taking DEX over Strength for any normally Strength-based class, but yes, they did have an effect, even if they didn't have any influence on gearing decisions outside of Piety on BLM.