It would seem that most would agree that something needs to happen to the materia system. Yoshi has already said that the crafting/gathering classes are not going to be considered a "main" class. So the focus in this regard should shift towards the adventuring classes. As many of you have mentioned with the right amount of money or luck you can put together a set of crafted gear that puts together most U/U gear to shame. It only stands to reason that U/U gear should allow for attachment. I believe that to make them stand out from the crafted gear there are a number of things you could do.

1. Someone had mentioned this earlier and I'd just like to repeat it because I like the idea so much. Allow the items to have a certain number of slots that you can place materia in. Random benefit to this could be to have the removal of materia on these items cost a significant sum of money for those people who like to play around with a variety of setups. Also as was mentioned before you could assign a max tier to the slots so that an Ifrit's Harpoon has the ability to take 2 tier IV materia, whilst one of the darkhold weapons can only take a 2 Tier IIIs.

2. Another thing that might be interesting to do with these U/U weapons would be to allow them to have 1 100% successful materia slot that allows the slotted materia to grow at a certain rate (ala FFVII). The growth system could be similar to spiritbond but have to do with the number of NMs you kill. You could build a daily quest system around this where during the completion of certain leves you accrue points toward leveling up your items. An interesting aside (this might be too overpowered but I liked the idea.) to this could be the ability to take materia that you've "grown" pay a large sum to remove and then sell. So for instance it could just grow whatever stat you have attached or the item could imbue it with something new like haste or debuffs. etc.

3. You could do something where you simply do not lose the weapon when you try and attach multiple materia. All of the same percentages could still apply you'd probably promote the crafting market and spiritbonding even more by doing something like this. Higher tier of U/U items could provide bonuses to attaching a certain number of materia. etc.

I could probably go on for a while with a couple more ideas but I think you see where I'm going. I think that any of these ideas above (sorry if I didn't properly credit anyone who may have happened to already suggest these but I didn't read the entire 13 pages before I posted this) would be welcome additions to our current materia system. For sure the current implementation of the system is a good start that can do more for the game then just promote the crafting market.



3.