I bet you think converting level 90 gear gives level IV materia 100% of the time.

[Gaddes]

I just wish they would phase out the elemental materia. I know it's a carryover from 1.0, but clearly elemental materia is totally worthless in ARR.

[Kenji1134]

I just wish they would phase out the elemental materia. I know it's a carryover from 1.0, but clearly elemental materia is totally worthless in ARR.

I think everyone here would agree with that sentiment.
Simply put, the sheer amount of elemental resist you would need to add onto your gear to have a noticeable effect is impractical... and its only for 1 of 6 elements.

Right now we have a roughly 50/50 split of "useful" and "useless" materia in terms of endgame gear.

Useful:
Str - extra dps for tanks using vit accessories.
Vit - extra health for undergeared people in progression.
Pie - extra mana, especially useful for WHM.
Crit / Det / Acc / Skill Speed / Speed Speed - All good.
8 useful materia.

Useless:
Dex / Int / Mind - All naturally capped on gear.
All 6 Elemental Materia - See beginning of post.
9 useless materia.

Can we at least get rid of the 6 useless elemental materia?
There is no longer a guarantee of getting a 4 from anything, and on top of that, there is a 9 in 17 chance of getting something completely useless... Why?

[givemeraptors]

Useless:
Dex / Int / Mind - All naturally capped on gear.

This bugs me the most... why can we get these kinds of materia when they're not even cross-class. I mean, I guess you could make Dex accessories to increase block rate on a tank but the game is programmed to make that super inefficient versus just stacking parry.

I don't get it...

[Felis]

This bugs me the most... why can we get these kinds of materia when they're not even cross-class. I mean, I guess you could make Dex accessories to increase block rate on a tank but the game is programmed to make that super inefficient versus just stacking parry.

I don't get it...

For gears where these stats are not capped (crafted NQ gear, like from quest rewards)

[Nutz]

This change just doesn't make much sense in my head. SBing is faster now if done in ideal places, sure, but for i70 stuff the cost of materials can be very high. They need to adjust the recipes to require fewer GC bought/ dungeon found materials and/or add acquisition methods (ie. put them on unspoiled nodes). The biggest concern I'd have with the i70 stuff is that I could easily lose money SBing it.

Moreover, i55 stuff has the same rate of tier IV conversion as before, is much cheaper to buy/ make, and SBs faster now against ideal targets.

The only way the change to tier IV conversion would make sense to me is if the recipes/ materials for i70 stuff were changed to make them much cheaper and i90 stuff was still either 100% conversion or at least a very high rate. At this point I think the i90 stuff is actually cheaper to make with better materia yields, though from what I've seen they're still pretty low.

[Coatl]

This change just doesn't make much sense in my head.

I'm just as confused! The SB limitations make sense to me. You can and SHOULD SB stuff whose ilevels correspond with the dungeon. But now that i70-i90 crafts don't guarantee IV materia, who in their right mind would buy those crafted armors? This might devalue the crafting armors even more than they already are.

No one is being vocal about it but thist change doesn't seem to help anyone at all. No one will SB i70-i90 stuff and if they do they will be gambling a large amount of gil. You are better off only SBing i55 stuff now as they are cheap and easiest to SB, and still give you a chance at an IV.

[Triston]

I just wish they would phase out the elemental materia. I know it's a carryover from 1.0, but clearly elemental materia is totally worthless in ARR.

It's a carryover from 1.0 but almost certainly has remained as a means of artificially inflating the value of desirable stat materia. This is actually important for keeping the cost of valued materia like DET IV high, as well as to maintain even the existence of a materia market. If every piece of converted gear turned into a secondary stat, (with say, VIT on tank pieces and PIE on healing) not only would prices of all of them plummet, but there's a modest possibility the market would vanish, as if you wanted a materia you could just go spiritbond your own gear and either use it or /shout "trading DET IV for CRIT IV." Certain materia might maintain a higher value, e.g. 3 PIE IV per DET IV, but the actual gil value of all of these would regardless be vastly reduced.
In turn this would strongly reduce the sale value of crafted goods while their material costs remain the same; things like i90 cashmere goods would only be made specifically for usage, as the vendor costs for materials like myth or GC seals become prohibitively expensive relative to the expected profit. We ALREADY are seeing this begin to occur for i70 crafted goods; desynth pulled so much coke/potash/etc out of the market that on some servers i70 and i90 goods are rapidly approaching each other in price, a pretty ridiculous circumstance and probably one of the reasons SE implemented the difference in T4 conversion rates on i70 vs i90 to begin with: to artificially inflate i90 prices. (IMO this is not the solution, we need a reduction on philo mat usage for i70 goods to alleviate the prohibitive price on those rather than pushing i90 up even further but w/e it's not my game)
Gatherers already have relatively tiny profits for their drastically over-supplied goods, such a shift would completely phase out their value as anything other than shard farmers.


So no, they should not take out elemental materia, it would obliterate the market and one of the primary valuations of DoH/DoL, just so the handful of DoW/DoM that have completed through Animus can get Novus sliiiightly faster.