No Offhand / Right Side

[TaleraRistain]

Its because SE is trying to figure out how to deal with the crafting problem. The percentage of people doing current crafting recipes is tiny. Especially on NA servers. So they are being very conservative about gear replacements while they assess how best to adjust recipes and design to make things more accessible/fun.

I think part of the problem is they don't actually increase the difficulty or make it something engaging. They just keep driving up the stats required, putting it further and further in the reach of only those with large pocketbooks who can eat the expense of losing on overmelding over and over until they get it. Which they make worse by their intentional scarcity of the materia required.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I think part of the problem is they don't actually increase the difficulty or make it something engaging. They just keep driving up the stats required, putting it further and further in the reach of only those with large pocketbooks who can eat the expense of losing on overmelding over and over until they get it. Which they make worse by their intentional scarcity of the materia required.

Actually ... planning ahead comes into its own here. How much time has there been since the end of 4.0? It was not hard to level crafters to 70 in SB. And once that’s done (a likely scenario if someone is into crafting, an unlikely one if someone isn’t) the time spent since then could easily have been spent using Retainers to get materials to craft some refined material en masse. Why? Because Spiritbinding for your own materia IS a thing.

Currently, you can get T1-3 crafting/gathering materia in almost any quantity desired from the Ixali. T4 and 5 materia can be bought with Red Scrip. T6 only has one repeatable source : spiritbinding.

At a casual level, using retainers (or gathering your own materials) to SB one set of crafting gear a week would net you a significant chunk of T6 materia by now. I’m just as guilty as most of not doing this, but this sort of planning ahead is exactly the response called for by the “scarcity of the materia required” to overmeld.