Craft grinding now impossible without self mutilation?

[MANTASTIC]

I know Iron Greaves are an old recipe. The reason people use them is because ingots require a massive capital investment due to the raw material prices and people simply don't make enough gear to drain the system of them fast enough (the large investment also makes it infeasible to vendor the ingots).

Besides, the basic recipes don't give much exp past L44+ or so and finished gear is what you'll have to make if you want decent exp from the new recipes. On my server the wards are pretty much flooded with cobalt gear and moving them is slow despite the constantly falling prices. Clearly we have yet to hit market equilibrium in materials and gear, so the situation may eventually improve unless materia conversion rate creates a bottleneck to gear demand.

I keep hoping they lower the spiritbind time and also remove the need to be a crafter to attach materia to fix this situation. It sound like a kick in the balls to crafters, but it might be the biggest boon the economy will ever see if they did it. materia everywhere, and DoW/Ms buying all our crap to either attach materia to or turn into more materia. DoW/Ms would also be breaking and buying more gear trying to attach multiple materia, making even more demand for gear. And really, that's whats missing the most in the current upper-tier economy: demand.

[Carpe]

I keep hoping they lower the spiritbind time and also remove the need to be a crafter to attach materia to fix this situation. It sound like a kick in the balls to crafters, but it might be the biggest boon the economy will ever see if they did it. materia everywhere, and DoW/Ms buying all our crap to either attach materia to or turn into more materia. DoW/Ms would also be breaking and buying more gear trying to attach multiple materia, making even more demand for gear. And really, that's whats missing the most in the current upper-tier economy: demand.

The spiritbind/materia system is definitely going to be the key to solving the upper-tier economy demand issue. Already, I think it's a big improvement over the situation we had before where everyone only had to buy their gear once and thus the market became saturated once that initial demand was met. I have to agree that lowering the spiritbind time will give players more incentive to risk attaching multiple materias to their gears and should be implemented.

One problem I have with materia is I feel like there is little incentive to use it at the lower levels and so the demand is so small at the lower tiers relative to the supply that they're all practically worthless. Why would I convert a tabard that I can maybe sell for 15-20k in the wards when the tier I materia that I get from it will only be worth 3k or less? You get the same problem where finished products are being reintroduced into the wards instead of being filtered out through materia conversion.

Maybe one solution could be to change the Materia system from instead of being a simple one materia to one slot system have materia applied to an item fill up a gauge. The size of the gauge could depend on the level/rarity of the item. So if I have a gauge that allows me to fill a maximum of +20 str, I could do this through a combination of lower or higher tier materia. Trying to apply materia to surpass this gauge would come with the risk of destroying the item.