Please Remove the Materia Melding Crafter Restriction

[TheUltimateSeph]

All the salty crafters in this thread lol. Honestly a change like this would be more a quality of life improvement then anything else. It's not going to make crafting useless or take away from your achievement of getting a level 60 crafter to meld your own crap. Remember all the nerfs to BCoB? Same thing. The raiders whined and complained that it's unfair to nerf it so much because the noobs should have to put in the same work and it's a slap in the face blah blah blah. It's just making something minor more accessible to the average player. If most crafters meld for free anyway why does this bother y'all? Unless it's a secret ERP thing and you like random people asking you to stick balls in their stuff...

[Myon88]

I also take issue with how materia was introduced in 3.2 as a whole. If you've done nothing but battle content thus far in the game, you pretty much haven't had any exposure, nor had to learn about materia at all throughout the lifespan of this game. These are examples of things I've had to learn by trial and error or asking around this past week,

1. What is advanced melding and why can it only be done on the 220 crafted items?
2. Why can't I meld primary stats?
3. Why can't I meld secondary stats past the cap? (What is the cap and why is there one?)
4. Even where there is a cap it's sometimes inconsistent. If I have a helm with 43 Crit and 59 Det, OK I know Det is the higher stat and is at the cap so I can't meld any more - but why can I meld Crit to 62? I thought the cap was 59?

The inconvenience of having to pester crafters aside, it feels badly designed from an implementation standpoint. Where is the 'Hall of the Novice' for materia for people like me that know nothing about materia, and suddenly in 3.2 need to interact with it for endgame gear? If you're going to make me use it, at least do a good job teaching me how.

With the exception of advanced melding, there is practically nowhere in game where these rules are explained to you, even the out-of-game resources like the wiki don't lay these out, it's a completely opaque system.

[Felis]

All the salty crafters in this thread lol.

But it is the non-crafters who want to change things that worked since years

snip

Lv 19 mainstory quest show a player the existence of materia.
Advanced melding (overmelding) is not limited to ilevel 220 gear.
And patch note say why you can't overmeld primary stats

[Eidolon]

1. What is advanced melding and why can it only be done on the 220 crafted items?

This one's a bit questionable. It's hard to say, really. It's probably because the crafted gear caps out at 220, while the Raid gear caps out at 240. There's a good chance that some of the i220 gear could potentially be BiS for people - just like in 2.4 (Remember the Bard chest?)

However, it's hard to say.

2. Why can't I meld primary stats?

It would potentially become required for tanks, who were the only ones who were having to Pentameld double-stat gear. It was also a problem in 2.0/2.1 for healers, who had to take MND/VIT Gear to reach health requirements earlier (And some healers just felt safer with it.)

3. Why can't I meld secondary stats past the cap? (What is the cap and why is there one?)

I kinda like this one why DO we have arbitrary stat caps? I guess it's part of customization? I wouldn't really be able to explain this one, but sadly.... I think it's just that they don't want the gear to go over the caps for the ilevel - which doesn't explain why there is one to begin with (Outside of them just not wanting people to stack more CRIT on a max-CRIT piece, forced 'diversity')

[Khanscott]

I'm an endgame crafter and I think this is a good idea. On the other hand, if some random in Idle shouts for a meld or use of Careful Synthesis II on some craft and they have the stuff I personally don't care if I get tipped for the seconds of time it takes to bash my face against the keyboard. Its a pain in the butt to have to grind items for God knows how long only to have to hunt some player down so they can charge 5-6 digit gil sums for zero effort on their part.

[Felis]

I kinda like this one why DO we have arbitrary stat caps? I guess it's part of customization?

vertical gear progression
Get the next higher ilevel gear to increase the stat cap

[Zojha]

/shrug.
I simply don't bother melding as a result.

I try to avoid crafting/gathering and everything related as much as possible. The only purpose of the whole content branch seems to be to redistribute money from the people who dislike that content to the people who like it or at least can stand it (with extremely limited channels flowing the other way). From gut feeling, it doesn't seem like something I would like to support.

So yeah...I'm fine with melding being a crafter priviledge. Just don't expect me to show up in dungeons with melded gear >_>

[Warlyx]

i can list a numbers of games that have "melding" and NONE ask u to have a crafter as req. Why? because 1 u adquire the gear , then adquire the "materia" and then u need to track down a crafter (blacksmith , LW , alchemist) to put a item on another item ,is an annoyance,and waste the time of both...

if none of your FC crafters are online and none answers your shouts...

i like the solution of the NPC , freeze the prices so ppl cant abuse it.

The only reason this is being done is to put yet anther Band-Aid on there broken economy nothing more. You had the relic quest wish omg required gill to buy materia to stimulate the economy. Then you had anther relic quest wish omg required specialist crafted recepes in order to make your relic weapon. Now that have tomb gear wich uses materia melds wich you can purchase off the market. You guys don't notice a pattern here. They are attempting to inflate the economy. Had they put a stable marketing systems in this game to begin with none of these gimmics would be nessary. Don't take my word for it the review on this games economy speak for itself, is rated the worst economy system ever seen in a MMO. But this is what you guys wanted so you cant really complain now can you.

while something of u say is right , there are 2 different markets and while the market in JP servers is almost perfect , in EU/US is a !$!$!$ mess.

thats why anima items in JP cost 50k and here 500k+....they can try to inflate it all they want but put those things in JP servers only ...we dont need it nor want it.

the moment im back in time to "vanadiel" and force myself to farm 3 days to being able to play 2h is the moment i quit..."too old for that "·$!$" , and prices have skyrocket since 3.2 ,if u want to keep going that way .... in the end crafters will play alone and wonder why no1 buys their things anymore...

[Remus]

I suppose we should never get a glamour system that isn't completely garbage, something on par with DCUO then. That would be attacking crafters and their profits, and as such, not a feature of convenience. Give me a break, this isn't the slightest bit comparable to your overblown comparisons and you know it full well. Removing the need for a class? I'm sorry, I wasn't aware than I was suggestion the removal of crafting, or is materia melding the sole reason people craft? I wasn't critical of the price of the i220 gear either, hell I think they're priced decently on Tonberry (ranging from 700,000-1,000,000 gil per piece) but I'm sure on NA servers the prices are overblown as usual.

On my server for HQ they go for 9 million gil. I wish they were that price from Tonberry.

[StriderShinryu]

Well, right off of the top of my head I can think of two compromises SE could make to the system that won't completely destroy crafting (not that I think removing the requirement would impact crafting much in the first place, but I digress):

1) You only need to raise one crafter (excluding ALC and CUL) to an appropriate level in order to meld all equipment. I can understand needing to have a specific class to repair a specific type of gear, but the way the game talks about materia melding it doesn't sound like something that should be restricted by class in the first place.

2) You can pay an NPC to meld for you, but their success rate is less than 100% and they can't overmeld even on equipment that allows it.

Or like our new favorite NPC would say "Why not both?"

^^^ I'd be totally on board with this. Crafting is extremely boring to me, but if I was able to get by by just levelling one craft to max I'd be willing to do it.