Materia Melded Raid Equipment Thoughts.

[Callinon]

This is assumption and considering the reduced weight of secondary stats, and the fact that you have no idea how the raid meldable gear stat caps will be allocated or any idea how the process will be done it's fair to say that they won't "have" to do anything. Even as it sits currently if you were able to pentameld the current raid gear with even a 15 point secondary single stat cap it would make a negligible difference over all on the end performance due to the abysmal weight of secondary stats currently.

An assumption yes, but not a baseless one. I've been playing MMOs a long time, this is how it works if player stats are being taken into account at all during encounter design.

Let's see 15 point secondary stat cap on every piece of gear... that'd be 180 points of a stat. Are you seriously going to tell me that's not significant? That's two or three extra pieces of gear's worth of that stat.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

You would have to figure out at what point it becomes significant.

If the stat itself is worth next to nothing, you can gain tons of it and have a minimal impact. If the stat is weighted heavily, then gaining only a few points of it will have a much larger impact.

I think the point he was trying to make is that currently, secondary stats are towards the "worthless" end of that spectrum.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

An assumption yes, but not a baseless one. I've been playing MMOs a long time, this is how it works if player stats are being taken into account at all during encounter design.

Let's see 15 point secondary stat cap on every piece of gear... that'd be 180 points of a stat. Are you seriously going to tell me that's not significant? That's two or three extra pieces of gear's worth of that stat.

If you took DRG stat weights and magically stacked 180 DET (highest weighted secondary stat for DRG), that's only an increase of 25.8 STR.

It's not going to break the game by any means with only that kind of change.

[Jxnibbles]

I actually welcome 3.2.
Gathering and Crafting got tomestones to slow progression down and they have to overmeld a ton for their endgame.
Now combat is in the same boat.

[CatfishCassie]

People seem to be looking at this solely from the raider standpoint. The problem is, they're not looking at it as a crafter. As a crafter, I've spent several *months* getting my skills and gear (for 11 classes) up to the point that I can craft all 2-star gear and gather all the materials for those gear. That is a LOT of work. Alexander Savage is too, but I doubt even the most dedicated raiders have put in the sheer amount of time grinding gear as I have.

For that investment of time and money (over 10 million gil), I get to sell three things to people: Glamour items, food, and potions. None of my end-game crafted armor matters... at all. It costs me a week or two worth of weekly-capped resources to make a single 2-star armor piece, and that armor piece has to be crafted at high quality just to be comparable to the LAW gear that raiders throw away as soon as they can.

The bottom line is... something had to be done to keep crafters like me in the game. Crafters like me that, quite honestly, straight-up pay more money to SE than raiders do, because I have (and need) 8 retainers. The current status quo of busting our butts to be able to craft things that no one wants just isn't going to fly anymore.

Now, the design team said that their reasoning for keeping crafted gear sub-par compared to raiding gear was melding. This makes sense... as it is now, if they were to come out with ilvl 210 crafted gear today, and you could meld primary stats to it, every tank and healer would *have* to buy a full set of crafted gear for the end-game, so that they could meld strength to it (for the tanks) or accuracy (for the healers), and other classes would feel strongly that they needed to do so as well to get that bit of extra DPS. Knowing this, the design team decided to change how materia melding works, so that raiding and dropped gear would still be desirable, but crafted gear wouldn't be irrelevant. And somehow... that's a problem.

Somehow... the raiding player base seems to think that crafters don't get to enjoy the game... that the entire game should revolve solely around them, and solely around how they want to have fun. Well, you know what? I pay a subscription fee too. I pay that subscription fee because Final Fantasy XIV has the best crafting system (mechanically) out of every MMO currently out. The only MMO I've ever played that had a better crafting system (and I've been playing them since Ultima Online) is Star Wars Galaxies... a game that hasn't existed for almost a decade now. So, realize that there are issues in the game beyond just the raiding scene, and that the raiding scene, for all the attention it gets is actually a very small part of the overall game and the overall gaming community. The rest of us deserve to enjoy the game too, and for some of us, that means having the ability to make things that you might want (or even need) to buy. We're putting the same level of effort into the game... we deserve the same considerations when it comes to rewarding that effort.

[CatfishCassie]

Pretty sure if the community was more into running dungeons with dungeon level appropriate SBable gear rather than throwing a fit for not using the highest level gear available, we wouldn't have an issue with materia costs. That, and if we didn't have elemental materia.

Or if elemental resistances had enough of an impact to warrant the inclusion of elemental materia. I think it would be cool to have different customized sets of gear with different elemental resistances for fighting different bosses (or... at least I think it'd be cool until I had to pay for it)... but it's not that elemental materia sucks, it's that elemental resistances do essentially nothing. I could penta-meld earth materia on a suit of armor and go fight Titan, and I'd need a parser to notice the damage difference. That's the problem, not the materia itself, but the effect of the values. It's a bit more pronounced with elemental materia than it is with secondary-stat materia, but that is still an issue with secondary stats... their effects are so low that even stacking them to high amounts makes no visible difference. And if I'm not wrong, that's something that they're wanting to fix.