Dropped Items and Materia

[Chadwick]

The fact that the probability of getting a triple+ meld is low doesn't even matter, and in some ways simply adds to the problems with the materia system. My complaint is that the majority of the BEST items in the game (currently) come from easily obtained materia and mass produced, boring, common, crafted items.

The materia system rendered Darkhold gear obsolete. The vast majority of the newly added Stronghold gear is obsolete. The upcoming job gear will be surpassed by multiple materia melds in quality.

Ignoring achievements and first kills, how often do people do Darkhold? How often do players seriously attempt to kill or farm Stronghold bosses? Rarely. Why? Because in comparison to even a single materia meld, the items these events reward are worthless. If brand new content is instantly rendered obsolete by the materia system, why should we expect future content, about which we know next to nothing, to be any different?

The reason I am posting on these Lodestone forums is not to argue with people who range from argumentative to willfully ignorant; I post here to make my opinion known to the devs in the hopes that they take notice and factor it into their future game changes.

So here's my opinion, as simply as I can put it:

FFXIV would be more fun if we had cool, unique, u/u gear to work towards and endgame events that MATTER, rather than simply churning out materia'd items. If SE can find a balance between the two isolated systems (u/u and materia), great. If SE can, instead, have the two systems be interconnected, even better! Right now, there is neither a balance nor any interplay between the two systems. It is heavily weighted towards materia. I do not like this. I hope that in the future, u/u gear takes on more importance and thus gives players a REASON to do actual challenging events that require planning, strategy, and skill (perhaps even... other people!).

[Jynx]

I believe Brannigan's point is that while RNG is at play in both loot drops and melding, player skill is completely absent from the latter. They are both "slot machines", but materia is nothing but a slot machine, while a battle is so much more.

I was unaware that the time/effort it took others to gather materials is worthless I guess.

[Coglin]

The mage ones are a great example of weapons that are far from effective in slot.

I was using the bow as an example that melded crafted items can be all to comparable in usefull value in comparison to primal weapons, to close for what they should be from a primal weapon in my opinion. By no means did I say basic melded bows surpased the ifrit bow, nor did I mean to imply it.

Although, My initial point was not to focus the discussion on the bow itself. I continued to refer to the ifrit bow when I should have been saying ifrit weapons as a whole, which was my intent. I gave the wrong impression of my meaning as a whole, and thats my fault.

That being said, I still stand by me comments that I feel that all items in the game should be meldable. Perhaps I am bias because I simply enjoy the customability factor.

[Jinko]

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.

I would go for a mix of 2 and 3, multiple slots per gear and not lose the item if the meld is unsucessful.

I say slots but it should be more like a vessel which you can fill, so tier 1 materia would fill the slot by 10% and a Tier 4 would fill it by 40%, so you could meld 2 x Tier 4 + 1 x Tier 1 or 10 x Tier 1's for example.

Obviously you could still remove the specific piece of materia like it currently is.

Like you suggest failure rate would increase as the slot became more full and depend on the tier of materia being used, this way it would still be costly and timer consuming but not at the expense of losing the item.

As for U/U well they could have a reduced vessel, something like 50% or lower, (Ie 1 Tier 4 + 1 Tier 1)

[NoctisUmbra]

I was using the bow as an example that melded crafted items can be all to comparable in usefull value in comparison to primal weapons, to close for what they should be from a primal weapon in my opinion. By no means did I say basic melded bows surpased the ifrit bow, nor did I mean to imply it.

Although, My initial point was not to focus the discussion on the bow itself. I continued to refer to the ifrit bow when I should have been saying ifrit weapons as a whole, which was my intent. I gave the wrong impression of my meaning as a whole, and thats my fault.

That being said, I still stand by me comments that I feel that all items in the game should be meldable. Perhaps I am bias because I simply enjoy the customability factor.

Ah, there we go. I understood your point of saying crafted items are too comparable. The statement is rather vague since comparable is a relative term, and the magnitude of the difference can be given different value by different players. I was disagreeing with you because I notice the difference the Ifrit Weapons grant in terms of power rather well and I treasure it over any crafted choice. Again I'm speaking of the weapons for classes where physical damage is something desirable.

However, I can respect this post as a whole because instead of some random claim you present your opinion. Sounds cool to me.

The fact that the probability of getting a triple+ meld is low doesn't even matter, and in some ways simply adds to the problems with the materia system. My complaint is that the majority of the BEST items in the game (currently) come from easily obtained materia and mass produced, boring, common, crafted items.

The materia system rendered Darkhold gear obsolete. The vast majority of the newly added Stronghold gear is obsolete. The upcoming job gear will be surpassed by multiple materia melds in quality.

Ignoring achievements and first kills, how often do people do Darkhold? How often do players seriously attempt to kill or farm Stronghold bosses? Rarely. Why? Because in comparison to even a single materia meld, the items these events reward are worthless. If brand new content is instantly rendered obsolete by the materia system, why should we expect future content, about which we know next to nothing, to be any different?

The reason I am posting on these Lodestone forums is not to argue with people who range from argumentative to willfully ignorant; I post here to make my opinion known to the devs in the hopes that they take notice and factor it into their future game changes.

So here's my opinion, as simply as I can put it:

FFXIV would be more fun if we had cool, unique, u/u gear to work towards and endgame events that MATTER, rather than simply churning out materia'd items. If SE can find a balance between the two isolated systems (u/u and materia), great. If SE can, instead, have the two systems be interconnected, even better! Right now, there is neither a balance nor any interplay between the two systems. It is heavily weighted towards materia. I do not like this. I hope that in the future, u/u gear takes on more importance and thus gives players a REASON to do actual challenging events that require planning, strategy, and skill (perhaps even... other people!).

I see where you're coming from now... With so many aspects of U/U tiers and materia melding and such being discussed by a number of different people in this thread it's rather easy to get confused and give the answer to one question to someone asking something else.

Ok, so lets's break this down shall we? First off, I will agree that yes, the majority of gear at this time comes from crafted gear melded with materia. Is this a problem? Sure is. Not as sever as you make it out to be, but I feel like that comes from a misunderstanding of the tiers.

Let's take Dzamael Darkhold for example. That dungeon was implemented before 1.19 - a patch we know made the single most drastic change to the game so far: redid all of the stats. At the same time it implemented the tiers of gear with different colored names. Most importantly, it added the materia system, which in a single sweep gave tremendous value to crafted gear. The usual addition of a number of U/U gear came as well. With all of this coming at once, looted gear of all kinds were rendered obsolete simply due to them predating this monster of a patch. Indeed at the time one worried if this trend would continue and if materia would be overpowered and render dropped loot useless forever. Then people started getting their Ifrit weapons and realized "Wow! This weapon simply does more damage even compared to my epic double melded one!" Thus, we had our first example of dropped gear that simply could not be touched by materia crafted gear. At least not unless someone makes a 5 melded version and shows it doing more damage per hit.

Now, the problem with proposing drastic changes or making destructive arguments against newly implemented systems is that they haven't had a chance to grow and balance out. The devs simply couldn't add the materia system and U/U items with better stats for every slot and every class through different content all in one patch. There are two reasons for the imbalance right now as I see it:

• Coffer dropped Green gear are not all meldable - only Sentinel. (lolwtf)
• There aren't any Blue tier armor sets for classes to strike the balance that weapons have.

Furthermore, the last two main endgame content additions we've gotten have been far from obsolete. They give pretty much the only useful U/U gear now save for only a handful of coffer drops. I see no reason to expect the materia system to maintain their dominance in the coming patches.

1.21 is giving us dungeons, which based on trend will have U/U gear loot. Let's at least see how those look before me jump ship, eh?

[Brannigan]

If the u/u gear that comes from future dungeons is better than what you can reasonably get with materia then that's great for the game but it kind of sucks because it devalues the materia system for those slots. If all items were meldable then this would not be a problem.

[Brannigan]

I seriously doubt a dropped piece of gear would ever overpower 5 materia melded into an item.
Yoshi-P already said that crafted gear and materia will make the best gear ever. Dropped items and RARE/EX items are already very good. These items are useful for people who can't put materia into their gear or don't have the proper high tier materia they are looking for yet. Sometimes, the rare/ex items is better than a piece of equipment with a single materia in it. Nevertheless, materia is the way to have the most powerful items but comes with so much risk!

This is crappy. Items from real content just serving to tide you over until you can manage to convert enough mass-produced cloth armor into materia for multi-melds sucks.

[Stufoo]

If the u/u gear that comes from future dungeons is better than what you can reasonably get with materia then that's great for the game but it kind of sucks because it devalues the materia system for those slots. If all items were meldable then this would not be a problem.

Yeah, it's a circular problem, and allowing one meld on rare/ex items would fix it. No matter what they add to a new belt or a sword, it will never beat enmity materia. How boring would it be if every rare/ex belt from now on needed enmity on it just to function? Those two slots alone add so much utility to the tank, and as a result, freedom to the damage dealers, that they are mandatory. Anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. Instead, let us meld it. Don't let us forbidden it, and don't let us convert it into materia. With the need and greed system coming out, that would just make a whole new group of cunts in the game, breaking their rare/ex items before others get their chance for it.

Also, Noctis, I feel you are gravely overestimating their ability to properly implement a tiered system for items, and that's all you ever seem to talk about is the future of blues and greens as if it's some unbreakable law of logic just because names are tinted. They simply don't know how to do it, they just add colors to things. It's not unrealistic at all to expect bad, or worse colored items in the future.

[Jinko]

Thinking about it, it's too bad materia doesn't drop from monsters, it could solve some of the issues at least farming rare materia in Darkhold and such.

[Brannigan]

A Good System

this same person had a hat with +50 int on it lol