Job/Role specific Materia: Giving jobs more flavour!

[CarmenSandiego]

We've seen a lot of suggestions over the past few months on the OF/Reddit to bring more player choice to the jobs, such as the classic talent tree or tuning the cross class system better. But Materia providing ability enhancements is one of my favourites because the melding system is already in place and could use some real attention, especially with the emphasis of Materia on the next raid tier armour.

Why many of us want these changes:
Let's face it, the stats in this game are so bland they make vanilla ice cream seem like the talk of the neighbourhood. Accuracy? To annoy you by being either too high or too low. The others are to hit stuff harder or not get hit by stuff as hard. Furthermore the Cross Class system is rubbish because there really isn't any choice, it's a soulless system that feels out of place that asks us (and demands us to an extent depending on the content you do, Blood for Blood etc is necessary if you don't want to be a jerk in Savage by not putting 100% in) to level other classes. There aren't enough cross class abilities options that impact your gameplay heavily because you can have almost all of the available equipped. There goes a Scholar who may or may not have Stoneskin. Exciting stuff.

Many would like to see a system which provides significant adjustments based upon player choice to a job outside of our skill rotation. There are countless posts dedicated to these kinds of changes, I do hope SE responds to them as it's been a long time since Yoshi-P last mentioned it. The abilities they give can even benefit our bland secondary stats, i.e Parries reflect 5% of damage incurred, % chance for Critical pet damage to increase Determination by 10% (these are starting to look a little like traits!), Damage dealt restores X amount of mana to the party while the user is under the effect of Blood Weapon. Obviously these are just examples of what I'd like to see and thought of on the fly, though there are a lot better ideas of course.

A few answers to some expected responses:

Even if we have varied Materia there is always only ever going to be one best build!
True to some extent, but builds depends entirely on the encounter, and who's to say we won't have the option to swap Materia abilities like gearsets? I'd rather have a Materia which reduces the 50% AoE penalty to targets exceeding 4 in A2 as opposed to a single target focused Materia on A3. Maybe Ice Mage could actually become a feasible thing with enough thought put into materia abilities, in a way working like skill trees or in a Diablo III sense. Another point is that you are a part of a team when doing any kind of PvE/PvP content. Your build can depend heavily upon the makeup of that team, not everyone is going to have the exact same jobs in a static as the next.

It's going to be hard to get:
For one, we have no idea how difficult SE would make it to obtain, nothing is set in stone. This is all hypothetical. Secondly, denying a system from being put in place based upon what could go wrong rather than what could go right will not bring positive changes to the game. There's a tonne of things they could do to make it attainable, so spouting that it makes it difficult for players to get into a static because they don't have x Materia or "I don't wanna grind 40 hours for a materia only to fail a meld!" or "Materia is a one time consumable and you'll have to grind to get a replacement" is based upon a lot of short-sighted assumptions about how the system would be implemented.

Balance! *Rabble Rabble*
There's always someone who'll use balance as the reason not to have something. My answer is simple: If the developers spend more than five minutes thinking about the Materia choices then I'm sure they can make something work. They can even Hotfix it if it's such an issue, they have in the past.

But people are already bad, now you're letting them choose how to be bad!? ...So? The result is the same. At least we all get to have more control and independence. Taking the time to create a build you like is all the more rewarding.

[Malakym]

Throw away elemental materia, put these in. Win/win.

[Felis]

It would be nice, but there have to be a limit of how many of those materias a character can wear at the same time. Like only on the weapon/tool (because not shared with other classes/jobs) and only 1 class/job materia.

[BunnyHop]

I don't support this.

If this goes through, I don't only need to work my ass off to get the proper gear/ilvl but I also need to get the proper materia's in (each) weapon and or armor slot after getting my gear + weapon...

This doesn't only give more incentive for people to kick party members more often from DF/PF just because a person is not wearing the desired materia, but it's also an expensive joke.

[WellFooled]

I agree with this idea in general. FFXIV desperately needs more interesting stats and ways to customize our gameplay and I think building the material system around this would be the perfect way to accomplish that in a way I haven't seen in other MMO.

I would love to see interconnecting materia like from FFVII even. For example, say you slot a materia to your weapon that gives you back mana when you hit an enemy, by connecting an "all" materia to it, it would spread that mp regen effect to those around you. Or if you instead put that same combo on a piece of armor, it would do the same thing but when you take damage instead of give it.

[CarmenSandiego]

It would be nice, but there have to be a limit of how many of those materias a character can wear at the same time. Like only on the weapon/tool and only 1 class/job materia.

There's dozens of ways they could implement Materia for more than 1 piece. i.e there can be Materia which fills certain armour slots, like X Materia type can only be put in accessories/ Only have 1 ability Materia per piece of equipment. But I'm looking for the option to completely change playstyle, not just very slightly affect it by only being able to have 1. Let's not limit the possibilities just yet when there are methods to work around it.

[_slowpoke_]

Balance! *Rabble Rabble*
There's always someone who'll use balance as the reason not to have something. My answer is simple: If the developers spend more than five minutes thinking about the Materia choices then I'm sure they can make something work. They can even Hotfix it if it's such an issue, they have in the past.

So, I assume you are a veteran game designer who has worked in balancing MMOs for years to make such sweeping statements?

Seriously, you're making this out to be way easier than it is by any realistic standard. Balancing something with so many co- and interdependent variables as an MMORPG must be a complete nightmare and the people who do it have my respect. Adding even more such variables is just making it more nightmarish without any real gain whatsoever.

The truth of the matter is that FFXIV's whole basic design is not suited to extensive customization without breaking - or fundamentally changing - the entire game, and I'm of the opinion that this is not a bad thing at all. Other games have done near-infinite customization a lot better than FFXIV (often because they were designed from the ground up with that in mind), and I see no reason to shoehorn it in just for the sake of having it.

[Azazua_azura]

Devs already explained this.

They are not adding this stuff in due to the nature of duty finder. It is a tool meant to be all inclusive. Stuff like this only promote the design scheme Yoshida does NOT want. He understand people want this, but you need to think of all aspects of the game. Ff11 had this and people who didn't have the special gear was kicked outa leveling groups or not welcomed in endgame groups.

I personally don't want to go back to that I don't want to be forced to spend Millions of gil or 30+ game hours it takes to get the gear/ material I need, just to even do something as basic as level up.

[Mycow8me]

I'm all for this. People get kicked out for everything from experience to ilvl to playstyle already anyway. Are we actually gonna start kicking for a dragoon not having +5% jump damage? Seriously the community isn't gonna change anyway. Time to start putting some variety into the game.

[Brannigan]

With 3.2 adding materia slots to raid gear this is the perfect time to do this. Just make the special materia require slots (like main stat is going to - though you'll probably be unable to get any useful main stats in left side gear). Suddenly you can make special stats without worrying about a specific piece of gear becoming required because those special stats can be put in anything. As for problems with acquisition, maybe they could also use this as a chance to finally give max level players some actual incentive to run those low level roulettes. Just have some "materia shards" or whatever drop from the daily bonus and let you turn in like 3 of them for a piece.

Honestly stats in this game right now are so mind-numbingly boring that it's almost insulting. The only thing that matters is accuracy and for some classes a little bit of speed.