Quote Originally Posted by Akuun View Post
Look, when crafted gear dominates a game all it does is destroy the content with any drop items. That's usually the end game content.
No it doesn't. Accuracy rings from FFXI didn't kill end-game content, nor did Hauergeon's and Scorpion Harnesses and they were better than a lot of gear you could obtain from BCNMs and even sky in some instances (better WS gear). Crafted gear (more specifically, highly infused 3-4 slot gear) is what dominates dropped gear. Raid gear can't be overpowered for the simple sake of it being raid gear...you're supposed to balance your game, not purposefully unbalance it. You personally dislike Synthesis that's fine, but Materia was introduced to give people the ability to push their crafted gear further.

Yoshida also said he wants to phase out gear very systematically simply because other MMOs does it, so being able to apply Materia to raid gear already goes against that plan.

Also:

There is a place for crafting, and if you look at my posts regarding ifrit dropping horn that is crafted into weapon,
There's so much gil in this game that a new person has almost zero hopes for obtaining these weapons/armors if the system was that way. The Abjuration system was pretty nice as it could be supplementary items, i.e Ifrit Drops his weapons and Cursed Haubergeon, but sadly I know there's lots of FFXIV people who would be against a good system like that simply because FFXI used it..