Quote Originally Posted by Welsper59 View Post
Well for starters, BiS has never ever been 100% needed to do endgame crafting. Mind you, BiS for crafting generally involves the overmelds, so that's primarily what I'm getting at. Pentamelding is generally NEVER needed unless you're lowballing the materia tier to save on costs of inevitable overmeld failures. I'm speaking from experience on that one, as I've always been able to reach minimum reqs for crafting endgame without going all out BiS melds for every single piece, until 2-star HW gear came out. Despite that, there's still no reason for it. Even when a new tier of minimum reqs comes out, BiS is not going to always be mandatory in every single way. Right now, for example, some melding of 3.0 60 gear + a couple pieces of non-crafted gear from red scrips already puts you at the requirements to do 2-star without food. Again, no point to hitting that level right now unless you actively want to. That right there gives the notion that it isn't mandatory to be in BiS everything unless you actively make it so for yourself.
BiS cannot be a requirement to create the tools and gear for crafting. The reason should be obvious (Catch-22 : how do you make the BiS gear if it requires BiS gear to create).

But what you are overlooking is .. that 3.0 gear you talk about .. that WAS BiS prior to the new 2 star stuff. And it DOES require massive melding if you want to use it to create the 2 star now BiS stuff.

The expansion giving us a level cap increase threw a monkey into the works. Prior to the level cap going up, if you wanted BiS gear, you pretty much had to have the precious patch's BiS gear to make it. There were a few shortcuts you could take, but that certainly held true as the general guideline.

So, like raiding for new gear (why get new gear from the hardest encounters? Its not going to help you beat the already-beaten encounters, you can do that already) getting BiS crafting/gathering gear is in preparation for the next level of stuff to come along. Always has been, always will be.

Is current BiS needed for anything? Not yet - but once the next set of recipes comes out, which may or may not include a new set of BiS, the current CiS is going to be required to make them.