Quote Originally Posted by Ravnika View Post
They can't balance content with the idea that everyone will have melded gear, because of all the combinations of possible melds - even assuming you kept yourself restricted to the things beneficial to your class. Main Stat, Accuracy, Skill/Spell Speed, Determination, Critical Strike.

They cannot just assume everyone will meld for one/two specific stats, because then if they balance around that they will be forcing people to meld around that particular stat (counter productive.)

So I, do in fact, believe that they won't balance the content around having a few dozen points allocated in different areas. Because they can't - unlike in crafting/gathering where there are only two/three stats that ALL crafters and gatherers use. They can easily say "Ok to make/gather this, you need XXX craftsmanship/Gathering." They can't do that for battle jobs.

So if you don't want to meld your gear, don't.

Because the battle system cannot be balanced assuming that someone melded in a particular way. It cannot be, because they want the opposite of forcing everyone to meld the same. That's why determination took that nerf bat to the face in 2.x
It doesn't have to be balanced in the perfect BiS manner, just with any possible combination in mind. No one is going to have the worst melds possible, there's likely to be two sets which is BiS, and a "A little worse, but cheaper" melds like it was for the Novus. I could argue they wouldn't Savage with players having i200 gear due to players not having access to that for quite sometime, but... they did just that. Regardless of that, you've disregarding the important question in how this actually improves the experience of a player in anyway. A grind is a degradation in enjoyment, it's not even glamour as the Anima weapons are, nothing but a grind for points on your gear that won't change anything other than the points you push out.