When they said "materia", I was SOOOO excited. I could already see the "x2" and "MP / 2" and other great stuff, enhancing this or that spell (as found in FFXI for instance), with raids designed to give you specific materias that would be required to clear the lass boss, and so on. Really inventive and cunning stuff that we would have to take advantage of in order to win.

Well…

They're just glorified gems. Yes, "glorified" means: "you may fail quite often at slotting them on".

To be fair, though, no MMO has really interesting gear, besides shiny numbers. This is an area where MMORPG are clearly much, much worse than most single-player RPG where you can legitimately get off on gear.