3.0's Coming... What are the Craziest Game Changes you can Think of?

[Karen_Cerfrumos]

There are far too many situations where crafted gear is superior to the highest iLvl gear. From the mouths of the devs themselves, crafted gear is meant to be "catch up" gear. Use it as it comes and it's equivalent to last tier's raid gear. Put any materia in it and it's now better than last tier's raid gear. Any situation where the fully melded piece actually exceeds the highest iLvl is a mistake. Take a look around and witness all of the BiS builds which consist of crafted gear for over half of the pieces. Then, wonder how much more people would want to stuff in if VIT caps weren't an issue. It's undermining the value of raiding, and if it goes too far a lot of people will stop raiding altogether.

EoS spamming Embrace while under Cleric Stance should be roughly equal to Regen. They're quite equal here.
I'm not just talking about Two Tanking in FCOB; I'm talking about two tanking everywhere. If a fight was ever designed to have two tanks, it should be literally impossible to circumvent that design. The Tank population is low enough without people deliberately excluding a slot normally reserved for them.

People might enjoy trash if it was actually fun to fight. But, then it wouldn't be called trash, would it?

First of all, situations where even with full i130 you still want to use a crafted piece here or there come from the fact that stat assignment on premade gear is arbitrary and blind. So you end up with gear you can't use due to accuracy requirements or just gear that doesn't benefit your class (Summoners anyone?). Of course i110 melded is better than plain i110. That's the whole point of materia - to exceed the stats given. You might notice that meldable 110 was not in the game until level cap was raised so it's all fair game. I haven't heard of anyone who was proclaiming that "Oh no, this gear is too good, I don't wanna raid now because this gear helps me raiding too much!"

All we have on the devs stance regarding crafted gear is an uncertain account from a twitter user. Supposedly somebody asked Yoshida and he said that the gear was meant for catchup. But there's no video account of him saying that or an official interview so you'll excuse me if I'm hesitant to take that information as fact. And if developers really think that i110 crafted gear is meant for catchup, then they're hopelessly and completely out of touch with their own game, because the price and availability of this gear is utterly disproportional with its usefulness. With how many rare mats it requires, and how you need a well-equipped crafter to make it, it's hard to see i110 crafted gear as anything but customizable pieces that can give you an edge over regular 110. Not to mention that only crafted i90 with Vitality melded allowed players to tackle Savage SCOB back in 2.3 at all!

I honestly don't see how crafted gear in any way undermines the value of raiding any more than obligatory gear reset does. What you propose will destroy high-end crafting.