How would you feel about end-game gear only being useful for 3 months?

[Theonate]

Taking the 3 month content cycle that Yoshi-P stated he wanted to shoot for at face value WOULD make me pause and say to myself "Really? I'm gonna have to upgrade my gear that often!?" But the mistake everyone is making is looking at the statement alone, and not looking at the other changes already in/coming very soon.

First lets look at the dungeons we already have. Currently there is not a full matching set of gear in any of them. Yes there are 2-3 pieces that match each other that can be used by multiple classes. But there is no FULL sets. At this point in time it's safe to assume they will keep with that trend in future dungeons. It keeps players going and doing the various options available to them instead of everyone only going to one place because it has everything.

Next thing up is Jobs. At this point if you haven't seen the bad ass concept art for BLM and DRK armor, go hit google. Once SE has rolled out the jobs and we have started to learn them they will add this job specific gear in. More than likely these will require quite a few quests and some new dungeons per piece. Maybe they will be "relic" gear, maybe they won't. The point is the gear/looks are Iconic for FF and will be added in.

Now I know what the next line of thinking for most people is, "But if new content keeps coming out every 3 months that iconic gear will get outdated and replaced!"

That thought is most likely wrong, and here's why:

The Materia system. You have to wear gear to convert it into materia to be put into other gear. Because of the materia system I'm fairly confident the iconic job gear will be "relic" status. I doubt they will be as difficult to acquire as XI relic gear, but it will probably still be a pita. The point is the materia system + inevitable iconic job gear will give people a gear customization option potential that is insane.

Since there is a higher and higher chance for materia attachment to fail causing the player to have to re-acquire 5 materia per piece of armor as well as new armor the Hardcore will keep running the dungeons for more materia(and back up gear in case of materia failure). Remember better gear drops= better materia to put in your gear. While the casual/player who can't devote himself as much will be more likely to wear one of the new drops while working on whatever the requirements are for his chosen relic/iconic job armor.

This will also cause players to pause and decide if adding more than 2-3 materia is worth the risk compared to just wearing a new piece of gear that has similar stats(maybe slightly higher). The most hardcore/min-maxers will always look at what gear turns into what materia and determine best in slot based on base item stats+stats obtainable with 5 materia. This in turn will keep the average player appearance varied based on play style and personal risk/value assessment of adding more materia.

Now it is also known that not all gear can be converted into materia/enhanced with materia. So ultimately there will be more options for equal level gear and diversity. I'm willing to bet job specific gear will either no be enhanced by materi(if that's the case it will probably be really good to off set this). Ideally I'd like to see them let it be enhanced and if you fail the materia and need to re-acquire it just hand over some items and a pile of gil to specific npc to get the base version again. But it would have to be a large sum of gil and/or quest drops.

Overall the point is, with the materia system in place I don't see 3 month content cycles being a bad thing. They will add things to do and new options for the players gear choices instead of other MMO's extremely linear "everything from there gets upgraded in here now" content updates.