Quote Originally Posted by Seyb View Post
So you already get the small amount of IVs that you need through those crafting quests. Control III can get expensive, but it's manageable.
Considering I got those materia six months ago at a time when the development directions stated we didn't need them, I didn't hold on to them. Again, you're asking me to have predicted the future.


Quote Originally Posted by Seyb View Post
Anyway, crafting has always been and will always be: put money in and get money back.
You're not telling me anything I don't know. Again, I had fully pentamelded sets in ARR (for more than my three main crafters, for that matter). But what changed in 3.0 is that the developers told us we would be able to invest time instead of money (in the form of overmelds) to reach the same result. Now, without indication, the state of the gear balance is that in order to be successful, you have to invest money instead of time again.

Again, my issue is that the direction changed without warning. Imagine how great the outcry over the tanking changes would have been if they hadn't given any warning that they were nerfing STR's contribution to attack power, leaving everyone who only had Slaying accessories at the beginning of 3.2 needing to do a bunch of work to get to a "proper" state again. Thankfully, they didn't do that. We had several weeks of tomes that we could dedicate toward Fending accessories as necessary since they informed us quite in advance that some form of change was coming (and they also made it pretty easy to catch up, far easier than it is for a 180 crafter to catch up at this point).

But I'm done with this. Folks honestly aren't trying to respond to my actual problem, only repeating themselves ad nauseum that since one can catch up it's fine. My issue is that we shouldn't need to be playing catch up for working within the design structure that was given to us and making what seemed like the best choice to us at the time given the information we had.