Cracked CRYSTALS

[QT_Melon]

its a figure of speech but anyway...

I'm not saying that they are the same, but I am making the comparison of crafters / gatherers to battle classes because of how battle classes seem to be gifted free materia if they run certain dungeons and not to mention how much easier it is to obtain cracked clusters, even if it is biased towards tanks mostly and sometimes healers.

Goodness. I'll restate again since you didn't read it.

The main focus of this game is battle. You can't really craft end game until you get to 70 in a battle class.
It's "easier" because the main goal is to BATTLE, with other players. You fight to get clusters. Be this in a 4 man dungeon, partnering up with other people to do hunts to get a higher score on hunt seals. You work with others.

More people do BATTLE content, so the reward is BATTLE materia. And of course it is biased towards healers and tanks because there's more people playing as a DPS (though depending on the server sometimes DPS can get the bonus as well).

Your main goal as a crafter is to CRAFT. Your main goal as a GATHERER is to GATHER. You can do this without being in a party, or raid group. Your gear doesn't require high level matera, unlike a raid where some won't let you in unless you have tier 6 melds on your gear. Your reward for crafting and gathering is materia. That means you do red scrips turn ins, Zhloe to get more red scrips, or spiritbond.

Since melding spiritbonds items faster, and you can get Better Crowned Pie, and Spiritbonding potions these stack. You are guaranteed tier V from the 70 gear and 20% chance of it being tier 6. You do NOT need HQ gear to spiritbond. Keep your original set if you don't want to re-meld, and buy NQ gear from the vendors and put in 2 junk materia, it spiritbonds at the same rate as HQ with one materia. If you don't want to do the main goal of crafting/gathering to get materia which is rewarded when you do it. You can't complain that the system is unfair.

The same time it took to wait for a dungeon due to DPS queues, I spiritbonded the left side of my gear and got more materia than running a battle class dungeon :P
*you can also gamble the more "useless" materia with Mutamix.