Materia Melding Idea

[DBthaONE]

A flat increase to the chance to over-meld probably isn't going to happen, for the simple reason that it would be a really simple change to make so the reason why it's the way it is is almost certainly a deliberate game-balance decision.

Part of me agrees, but the other part says that balanced is already out of wack considering that fact that melds are actually important to crafting and gathering, while completely optional for battle classes. I do realize the melds for crafters and gatherers isn't as needed since you can always get Red & Blue Scrip gear, but that gear doesn't have much CP/GP.

What I'd love to see is the ability to put multiple materia into a single meld attempt and increase the odds that way. So for a 9% chance you could opt to jam 11 materia at the slot in one go to get a 99% chance of success. This would consume all of the materia regardless of what the RNG roll is, so you'd still be using up the same number of materia as you otherwise would on average, but it lets people opt out of the risk/reward aspect of trying them one at a time. (You can't get the first-try awesomeness that happens periodically but you also avoid the 37-failure streak.) If they wanted to encourage people to use the current method and take risks, they could make each extra materia have diminishing returns when adding to the success rate (to some minimum point, say 5%.)

Solid suggestion. I think this could be implemented easy as well. I would just wonder if it would be done for ALL materia melds or just the crafting/gathering ones.

Because I'm a pedantic nerd, here's some numbers for the "start at 10%, increase by 10% per failure":

- Hole in one: 10%
- Got it in two: 18% (=28%)
...
- Seven attempts: ~4% (=~98%)
So what started as a simple "1 in 10" has become "very likely within five, almost certain within seven, guaranteed by ten", which is insanely unbalanced.

Not gonna lie. You lost me on that math. I took Statistics in college, but I was by no means a stat wizard.

If it only stored the attempts for the type of materia that was attempted most recently (e.g. if you change up what you're trying to meld, you lose the bonus) then it wouldn't be that bad. Store a pointer to the type of materia and the number of consecutive failed attempts so far. It would be about the same as if each item had two more materia slots on it (or less, if you're willing to do tricks like bit-shifting the pointer so you can store both pieces as one value.) Not that this would be a trivial amount across all items, mind.

Alternately, it could be done as a buff of some sort to avoid having to store it to the gear. Fail a meld and you get a stack of "The RNG feels sorry for you" buff that lasts for 30 minutes. .

The "RNG Buff" would seem highly unbalanced, I recognize that. However, I think you might be onto some sort of idea though. The "pointer" you mentioned is actually in the game already in a sense. Currently there are mini-games in the Gold Saucer that use a pointer if you win, that ask if you would like to "double down." Thus, the idea of using a pointer in this reference shouldn't be unfeasible.