Dropped Items and Materia

[Cho]

It's not even entirely about that. If future dropped gear is better than crafted+materia then what is the point of the materia system? .

XI relic weapons were better than the other weapons, but that didn't make every other weapon in the game useless, as it took a while to achieve them. Materia system could help people beat content and get to the point where they can achieve good drops, worth doing events for. Having future dropped gear be better than crafted+melded gear won't make the materia system worthless by any means, if that gear is difficult to obtain. The issue is that the materia system makes most CURRENT content worthless, because the U/U items are garbage and can't be enhanced.

Turning a zillion cheap linen 40+ armor pieces into materia every 20 minutes in a party of 8 getting 280k SP an hour AOE nuking wolves on THM and then putting those materia into a slot machine on crafted items to achieve the best gear in the game is not a fun endgame. It is however, the most efficient thing a hardcore LS can do to gear themselves. This is an issue. After a while, people are going to give up logging in every day, if all they have to look forward to is slaughtering wolves and crafting items. We need to be able to attach to U/U, so there's a reason to go get U/U, to increase the variety of worthwhile things to do in this game.

Idea of 1 meld on U/U is good. I don't hate the idea of multi-melding either, with a high risk of blowing up U/U items, as this would, as mentioned, add meaning to achieving multiples at least.