Diadem and Savage - I can't deal with it anymore

[Ossom]

The only problem with "Trait Materia/Gear" is that it turns the game into horizontal progression (I personally love horizontal progression, as imho it feels like it helps with immersion that this specific boss drops these super good gloves, and so you get your band of merry men and women together to go hunt it). But Horizontal Progression will not work well with the current set up Raid > Catch up > Raid > Catch up patches.

If I had boots that proc'd an auto attack or some other thing, then they would be far more useful than the 8Str or 10Str I would get from the boots of a higher iLv if they didn't have the same or better trait. So then we see that newer gear that comes into the game isn't as good as older gear. This means brand new gear is invalidated by old gear from ~2-3 patches ago. While this is common going from Raid > To Catchup patch because people who raided are geared until the next raid content. SE doesn't want use using the same boots from say Raid patch 3.0 until raid patch 3.4 when finally a better pair of boots are out.

Along with this it makes BISing a lot more important than being like 7~20 theorectical strength higher than non BIS gear of the same iLv

[Nominous]

If I had boots that proc'd an auto attack or some other thing, then they would be far more useful than the 8Str or 10Str I would get from the boots of a higher iLv if they didn't have the same or better trait.

Materia is universal, and can be melded to anything that has a slot. No worries about one piece of gear being too good for an extended period of time, since you could affix any Materia to any gear. It's a great idea to have more depth in the Materia system than, "+xx (insert stat)"; I'm all for it. It would certainly disrupt the great amount of balance we have in the game, but it's becoming stale with how simplistic it is.

I'd be all for set bonuses too. It's actually strange they haven't moved forward with it yet, considering there's already gear in game that utilizes this feature. Set effects would make mixing and matching for BiS far more interesting, especially when you add in a more interesting Materia system.