Anyone think materia is getting reworked in 6.0?

[RitsukoSonoda]

I feel like we need to go back to the roots.
Bring back enmity+ materia. Stun resist materia. Enmity- materia. Elemental resistance materia!
Of course we'd need to change the rest of the game to match up...

I'd like to see a lot of the core RPG mechanics brought back like elemental and damage type resistances/immunities, status effect resistances/immunities. And also maybe some gear bonuses that aren't just a static number bonus to a stat or substat such as improving certain skills, spells, or passives. Or things like the added effects we had on gear from FFXI. However at this point the likelyhood of it seems to be close to 0 as they appear to still be favoring the lazy minority of players and that implementing these things will require a few overhauls of systems and also at least a couple jobs.

[ADVSS]

I feel like we need to go back to the roots.
Bring back enmity+ materia. Stun resist materia. Enmity- materia. Elemental resistance materiaOf course we'd need to change the rest of the game to match up...

yeah i agree with this but i know its never coming back. For what id like to see is the addition of sks/sps becoming one haste stat. Kinda think role only stats are lame tbh but w/e theyre probably going further down that hole so might as well embrace it

[Absurdity]

The amount of people who have no clue how important these "useless" materia are for optimization or simply making a job playable in the first place is scary.

So you want them to remove materia and add those stats instead? Do you seriously want SE to determine your character stats? You do know that PLAYERS actually figure out how to play a job correctly, right? Players figure out the rotations and what SkS/SpS tiers you need for the rotations to loop correctly or which stats prodive the highest dps increase (little hint: it isn't always crit/ DH) and you want SE to pre-determine those stats for you? The people who needed to nerf ninja several times after release because players figured out a vastly superior rotation? Do you seriously want that?

I'm not even gonna go into the fact that you want them to remove more player agency...why? Because you think it's not exciting enough? Because you can't be bothered to figure out what you actually need to meld?

Tenacity isn't completely useless, it can still serve as an effective crutch in casual play. If you're melding for Savage then of course you shouldn't need or it, but if you never intend to tank savage, there's no harm in going for Tenacity. A full Tenacity meld is equivalent to an additional Rampart with 100% uptime, which can be useful if you don't trust your PUG healer.

It is mostly useless outside of the skillspeed example you mentioned and it certainly isn't a 100% uptime rampart.

To get to even 10% mitigation you need 3699 Tenacity, which is basically a full commitment to a subpar stat. I can't think of a single fight, even in casual content, where 10% passive mitigation make the difference between alive and dead unless you massively screwed up your defensives.
So yes, Tenacity could certainly use a boost or simply a rework away from extra mitigation. Unless they plan to change their fight designs you rarely ever have a need for more tank mitigation.

This does however not mean that they should just get rid of it. Make them actually come up with an interesting concept for the thing, don't give them an easy way out of actually doing the work.

There is very little to zero depth in the materia system. It’s all the same, all BLMs have the same build. All melee aim for the same two stats. The variations are very very small because all jobs have one single BiS each patch. Materia... is... pointless. It used to mean something because it was expensive and tougher to acquire, accuracy builds for healers for example. Now, who cares just put crit/DH and win

If you actually bothered to check this first you would know that several jobs have different BiS sets depending on your playstyle, the boss you're fighting, whether or not you play more than one job with the same gear, whether or not you're farming content, etc

Melding crit/DH is simply a general guideline but on pretty much every job there is a lot more nuance to it.

And materia is useless just because it doesn't bankrupt you anymore? What kind of logic is that? Gear is cheap, housing items are cheap, consumables are cheap, most glamour is cheap.
That is simply a result of crafting/gathering being so easy now and rampant botting driving prices into the ground. Should we just remove those as well because they aren't luxury goods for the "upper class" anymore?

[Vyrerus]

Honestly, it would suck if they didn't let Healer and Tanks do Direct Hits. Seeing the double exclamation points on Direct Crits is pretty fun. I think they should add in a DPS only function for Direct Hit, that function being increased potency on Direct Hits, just like Crits, but only for DPS. This way, everyone still gets to have it, but it's more effective for DPS.

As far as materia actually goes, I hope that they make it even more complex in the future. I miss being able to do attribute melds. I think it'd be cool if they introduced the old flavor mechanics from MMOs of yore, where stuff like DEX affected critical hit and AGI affected things like Evasion. Then let us meld that, give the attributes that are essentially doing nothing, something.

[Absurdity]

Honestly, it would suck if they didn't let Healer and Tanks do Direct Hits. Seeing the double exclamation points on Direct Crits is pretty fun. I think they should add in a DPS only function for Direct Hit, that function being increased potency on Direct Hits, just like Crits, but only for DPS. This way, everyone still gets to have it, but it's more effective for DPS.

The only issue I have with that is that unless tanks and healers get something to offset this difference then the gap between tank/healer dps contribution and actual DPS contribution is only going to get bigger...and the gameplay for the former certainly doesn't justify this gap. If they kept tank and healer gameplay as boring as it currently is while also reducing their damage contribution even more it would probably just make me quit tanking because at that point I'm basically just a target dummy.
The same goes for healers, you already spend 60+% of a fight spamming the same button over and over, if that now also amounts to even less dps than it already does you might as well not bother and just become a 0 dps curebot that watches Netflix during raids.

[Vyrerus]

The only issue I have with that is that unless tanks and healers get something to offset this difference then the gap between tank/healer dps contribution and actual DPS contribution is only going to get bigger...and the gameplay for the former certainly doesn't justify this gap. If they kept tank and healer gameplay as boring as it currently is while also reducing their damage contribution even more it would probably just make me quit tanking because at that point I'm basically just a target dummy.
The same goes for healers, you already spend 60+% of a fight spamming the same button over and over, if that now also amounts to even less dps than it already does you might as well not bother and just become a 0 dps curebot that watches Netflix during raids.

I'm surprised you still tank then. Tank DPS is far and away a shadow of its former self, in relation to DPS's output. They've found some way to nerf tank ATP every single expansion, and personally, I already feel like I'm swinging a butter knife or a pool noodle when I'm on tank, compared to pretty much any DPS.

As far as healers go, they already basically don't meld too much direct hit, still opting for majority crit, last I looked. Wouldn't make much difference for them, and their output is actually higher than it's ever been, in relation to DPS, DPS. Despite the button pruning.

[MartaDemireux]

I'd personally like materia to go the way of augmenting abilities. But, that would be a balancing nightmare unfortunately. Would be neat to be able to make less relevant abilities useful, though (like Physick and Repose), and give some sort of choice to others. Could even let us enhance the materia's grade by getting materials through spiritibonding now that it doesn't destroy the gear. Sort of like a relic weapon grind.

I liked when 1.2x added ability augmentation to the AF gear. However, I hated that it made those pieces of gear mandatory when other pieces had better stats. Those augments could have been easily swapped to a new piece of gear if they were treated like materia.

But it's all just a pipe dream.

[Absurdity]

I'm surprised you still tank then. Tank DPS is far and away a shadow of its former self, in relation to DPS's output. They've found some way to nerf tank ATP every single expansion, and personally, I already feel like I'm swinging a butter knife or a pool noodle when I'm on tank, compared to pretty much any DPS.

As far as healers go, they already basically don't meld too much direct hit, still opting for majority crit, last I looked. Wouldn't make much difference for them, and their output is actually higher than it's ever been, in relation to DPS, DPS. Despite the button pruning.

Oh I'm not denying that it's the worst it's ever been on tank, we have less things to keep an eye on, bosses auto position themselves all the time and the way you fill the time between the few mechanics, dps, has less of an impact than before, not exactly a concept for riveting gameplay.

In regards to healers, yes their DPS output is a lot higher than before but the way you reach that output and combined with the lackluster healing gameplay you still feel like you're having less of an impact than ever before, if those 160+ casts of Broil now also didn't do any damage on top of being mindnumbingly boring you might as well just not do it.

[Seraphor]

To get to even 10% mitigation you need 3699 Tenacity, which is basically a full commitment to a subpar stat. I can't think of a single fight, even in casual content, where 10% passive mitigation make the difference between alive and dead unless you massively screwed up your defensives.

Rampart with uptime of about 25% has a 5% total mitigation.
Reprisal, and things like Dark Missionary, Heart of Light, have a 10% active mitigation with a tiny uptime, total mitigation is <2%.
Are these skills useless?
A half Tenacity meld is therefore comparable to Rampart, it's ~5% mitigation, but up 100% of the time, and this is multiplicative with your other mitigating abilities.
In casual content, dungeons, it's the trash pulls that the healers typically fail to keep up with. That's constant, piecemeal damage, not tank busters. That's where the total uptime becomes relevant. Or newbie tanks, who still haven't got used to judging when to use their cooldowns, could waste them all on the first pull and have nothing for the next. Any help they can get is a bonus.

Even outside of that, in less casual content like EX's, I can guarantee you've survived a hit from some powerful attack that's left you at <5% HP. Your healer has recovered you, and that fight turned out to be a success.
That <5% HP margin you survived at was due to your mitigation. If your mitigation was 5% less than it was, you'd have been dead. As a tank, that fight would likely have been a wipe.
This happens all the time, and if it happens while you've melded Tenacity, which it will because it happens all the time, then that Tenacity was used to keep you alive.

These are all scenarios where the extra 2.5% difference in damage output between a tenacity and determination will make absolutely no difference because you are never at risk of dying to an enrage, and in the case of EX's where you might be, it's not going to be because of tank damage, it'll be terrible DPS performance or because of way too many deaths.

People overplay the contribution of determination as it is. For every 7.5% effective increase in damage from determination, tenacity provides 5% increase in damage and 5% mitigation. 2.5% difference.
2.5% difference in tank damage. That's less than a 0.3% contribution to damage for a full party, or given that less than half of your melds will be a choice between tenacity/determination, <0.15%. Meanwhile as a tank, the one taking all or at least half the hits, that 5% in mitigation is utilised to it's fullest.
In the same sense as "unless that mitigation saves a healer GCD it's useless", unless you're hitting enrage and at risk of wiping at <0.1% of remaining HP, that determination instead of tenacity was wasted.

Even in the case of healer GCD's saved, we always seem to talk in terms of single attacks, but autoattacks are constant and so is raidwide damage. If your damage is reduced by 5%, then every 20 autoattacks you're effectively nullifying one of them. these happen every 3 seconds or so, so that's 1 per minute. Over the course of a 20 minute fight, 20 nullified autoattacks. 20 autoattacks at once could very well kill you, so cumulatively that will require more healing than if they were nullified. Compound that with the raidwides and that very likely IS saving a few healer GCD's, you just can't pinpoint which ones because it's an increase to overall healing output over the course of the entire fight.

Or we can go back to the dungeon trash mob example, and look at "if you kill it quicker you take less damage." At 2.5% difference in damage for a full meld, half a meld in a party of four provides a damage contribution of about 0.3%. If it takes you FOUR MINUTES to defeat each mob, then you are saving ONE SECOND of time. As mobs attack roughly every 3 seconds, there's a 2/3 chance that one second saved does absolutely nothing, the remaining 1/3 saves you one single attacks worth of damage. You should be downing mobs far quicker than 4 minutes. As the only tank however, you are making full use of that 5% mitigation, 5% less healing required.

We always talk about Savage, about the highly scripted fights where every healer GCD is mapped out and we rely on everyone playing optimally, perfectly, but things are rarely perfectly executed.
Like I said, it's a crutch. If you are performing optimally, you'll never need it, but not everyone does. And I'd argue, unless you're progging savage as a tank, then your tank shouldn't ever need to worry about the miniscule difference in damage output between determination and tenacity. Go for tenacity for the bonus mitigation.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Are these skills useless?

They aren't useless, because their total uptime is irrelevant when the only thing that matters is what damage they're soaking. Using Rampart on C/D regardless of what's happening to get as much uptime value is pointless if the 20% while its active whiffs on the tankbuster that will 1-shot you without it, or using Dark Missionary on C/D only for it to whiff the Morn Afah and wipe the group. Just like how that 5% tenacity isn't going to let you drop a C/D from a tankbuster on the damage that'll actually matter that its soaking, considering there's very few instances of tankbusters in the game where you can't double, triple or quad down on mitigation for free due to fight timers making most of them back up for the next time you'll need them.

At best, TEN helps smooth auto damage. Which outside of 4th tier fights & ultimates, is basically already under control by lifesteals and regens/OGCDs by your healers anyway, meaning you ain't saving them any GCDs.

A half Tenacity meld is therefore comparable to Rampart, it's ~5% mitigation, but up 100% of the time, and this is multiplicative with your other mitigating abilities.
In casual content, dungeons, it's the trash pulls that the healers typically fail to keep up with. That's constant, piecemeal damage, not tank busters. Or newbie tanks, who still haven't got used to judging when to use their cooldowns, could waste them all on the first pull and have nothing for the next. Any help they can get is a bonus.

Sure, but I also highly doubt the majority of newbie tanks are taking the time to min-max their TEN melds, tbf, if they're melding anything at all. Teaching them how to properly cycle C/Ds will give them way more mileage then advising them to meld TEN. A WAR with proper Nascent usage can lifesteal back way more eHP than TEN is saving them, for example.

Even outside of that, in less casual content like EX's, I can guarantee you've survived a hit from some powerful attack that's left you at <5% HP. Your healer has recovered you, and that fight turned out to be a success.
That <5% HP margin you survived at was due to your mitigation. If your mitigation was 5% less than it was, you'd have been dead. As a tank, that fight would likely have been a wipe.

Considering EX's are just as scripted as Savage and you can often brunt their TB's with just a single CD + partner's fluff, if 5% is make or break, something else has gone horribly wrong. I physically can't recount anytime my HP has gone that low after a tankbuster where the healers weren't just plain dead. Also, there's an OT for a reason; MT dying is hardly an auto-wipe, especially since TB's often aren't being delivered at the same time as other mechanics in EX's and those fights tend to be far more lenient for recovering. And in dungeons, dps can tank quite easily if the healer is on-point. (Had to do it with a healer friend after our tank D/C'd in Grand Cosmos on SAM)

Even in the case of healer GCD's saved, we always seem to talk in terms of single attacks, but autoattacks are constant and so is raidwide damage. If your damage is reduced by 5%, then every 20 autoattacks you're effectively nullifying one of them. these happen every 3 seconds or so, so that's 1 per minute. Over the course of a 20 minute fight, 20 nullified autoattacks. 20 autoattacks at once could very well kill you, so cumulatively that will require more healing than if they were nullified. Compound that with the raidwides and that very likely IS saving a few healer GCD's, you just can't pinpoint which ones because it's an increase to overall healing output over the course of the entire fight.

Between the constant amounts of lifesteal by 3/4 of the tanks, passive regens and aoe heals that have to be done to the whole party, that 1 extra auto is already getting nullified. As I said above, auto damage is pitifully weak outside of 4th tier fights & ultimates and even then, your healers will almost never notice the difference between 1 extra auto's worth of damage or not.

Not to mention there's tons of extra RNG factors that influence tank damage way more than 5% TEN does. PLD's block rate/minute (and all 4 tank's parries/minute RNG), Whether the other tanks get crits during lifesteal attacks/windows, crits on regen ticks vs not, and the general +/- 5% damage variance built into the game on all damage.

Your healers already have to compensate for all the above when they plan their OGCD usages, you really think an extra 15k auto per minute is gonna affect anything?
EDIT: Also there's the fact that it's not even constant auto damage every minute. Every Savage/EX/Ultimate fight has plenty of downtime where the boss is channeling or not autoing, making TEN's worth at mitigating auto damage even less worth. (For example, during icelight dragonsong, E8s's boss does no autos for almost half a minute; and then again for Wrym's lament 2, the only damage the boss does is from ahk morn + morn afah for literally over a minute, in which the tanks will recieve all the healing they ever need from aoe heals, meaning TEN is literally useless for an entire minute of E8s.)

People overplay the contribution of determination as it is. For every 7.5% effective increase in damage from determination, tenacity provides 5% increase in damage and 5% mitigation. 2.5% difference.
2.5% difference in tank damage. That's less than a 0.3% contribution to damage for a full party, or given that less than half of your melds will be a choice between tenacity/determination, <0.15%. Meanwhile as a tank, the one taking all or at least half the hits, that 5% in mitigation is utilised to it's fullest.
In the same sense as "unless that mitigation saves a healer GCD it's useless", unless you're hitting enrage and at risk of wiping at <0.1% of remaining HP, that determination instead of tenacity was wasted.

Firstly; outside of WAR, no tank is melding DET over DH or CRT. CRT gives ridiculous amounts of investment per point compared to TEN, and given that Tanks cannot gain DH naturally, it gives them way more bang for buck than DET does.

Secondly, no damage is ever wasted. Every single point of damage matters; whether it lets you skip more mechanics that you would have otherwise seen which gives people more chances to wipe the group, getting past the enrage if the situation gets dicey, or just clearing faster when farming Dargons/Doggos/Birbs/etc, damage always has a use. Compared to 5% mitigation which is likely not saving your healer GCDs, and has niche uses where it may save you, but just as likely won't if the situation got bad enough that 5% is suddenly a make or break.

We always talk about Savage, about the highly scripted fights where every healer GCD is mapped out and we rely on everyone playing optimally, perfectly, but things are rarely perfectly executed.
Like I said, it's a crutch. If you are performing optimally, you'll never need it, but not everyone does.

We can also say that with that kind of mindset, healers should only meld piety 'just in case'. We could also discuss hypotheticals like how a group could wipe at 0.1% of a bosses's HP but uh-oh, that tank had fully melded TEN and they would have made it if he had damage melds instead. The niche cases where 5% is saving you from an attack are basically so rare for the sheer amount of actually good stats you have to give up in exchange for it, and thats why TEN is a bad stat. In planned environments, it isn't doing anything for you or your healers (and actively hurting the dps check), and in less than optimal situations, it has very niche scenarios where it may save you at best. It's like Parry in that regard.