Quote Originally Posted by Wobble View Post
I don't think it's the point they added more but they added even more right after that. Would have been nice to just let us upgrade our original relics in the first place but they made us mine, harvest, fish and craft for new gear and tools only to screw us that worked hard getting them and still working on some. This is SE's problem, they put little thought into what they do and end up messing everyone up.
That's honestly the worst way to be looking at 2.3 crafting/gathering content. There is literally nothing that you cannot make or gather without the new equips. 2.2 gear is all you need to make any 3 star recipe, even the augmented and primal goods. There's very little change involved even after acquiring the i75 weapons, as you'll still need to have at least some HQ mats to reliably HQ the result (just as it is without i75 weapons).

The way I look at it, the new equips and such help remove some of the reliance on materia to reach the required minimum to make 3 star goods. I mean just getting the Dodore HQ gives you 5 extra control by a base stat... that's 1+ less materia to have to worry about to reach minimum 3 star reqs. And that's just the belt.

Even if you are new to crafting, you have to have a decent strategy to survive. Not enough shards? There's a special way to quickly gain thousands without buying or gathering. Not enough gil but tons of shards/crystals/clusters? Why not sell some? For a new player, selling goods that you may not even realize you have is a part of surviving the market that they need to pick up for themselves. There are tons of goods that one can gather themselves in minutes that will lead to 30k+ profit. T1 materia selling for a decent profit? I can farm up 11+ of them in around 5min. That's no exaggeration neither. Given the price that craft/gathering materia costs, that 11+ materia is a minimum 50k profit on my server. There's seriously so many ways that people can work the economy, regardless of how outrageous some goods may be, to get what they want. Things won't just be handed to people (usually), if they really want something... think a little outside the box. Maybe apply some RL strategies.