Is there a conspiracy for lvl capped players to ignore materia?

[RitsukoSonoda]

I don't bother slotting materia until I have a gear set that will stick around for awhile. The boost you get from materia IMO is really small anyway as it just adds some points to specific sub stats but the gear pieces themselves cap what you can do in this regard. You'd probably see materia used almost always if instead of additional points to a specific sub stat they granted or improved traits or passive skills.

[Jojoya]

The expert roulettes give you free materias, extracting is easy, yet almost no players I see use materia. Am I taking crazy pills? Also your soulbind is faster when you have materia equipped do what's the deal? Someone please explain why so many choose to not have extra power?

Because that extra power doesn't increase throughput enough to make a noticeable difference outside of Savage/Ultimate and most players aren't doing Savage/Ultimate.

Extraction is a mostly dead source of materia for the majority of players who have reached level cap because they're overgeared for the content they do and so don't gain spiritbond. There are also much faster ways of getting materia than spiritbonding, like hunt trains. I

Don't worry about whether or not someone is using materia. Worry about whether the boss is dying. If it's not dying, it's far more likely to be a mechanics failure than a lack of materia.

[TheMightyMollusk]

In previous expansions, I didn't usually bother, since getting the materia could be a pain. But now, the game throws so much free materia around that I do it just because I can. (Doesn't hurt that I finally got around to leveling my crafting jobs to do it myself.) I have most of my gear sets fully slotted and I've still got 80-ish crystals to trade in. It's just silly.

[Bsrking5]

I mostly do sycned dungeons and don't care about first hour clears of new savage or ex content. So where or not i have any slotted matters little to me.

[StriderShinryu]

I don't bother slotting materia until I have a gear set that will stick around for awhile.

This is pretty much the same for me. If it's for my main job and it's a set that I will likely keep around for a while (or if it's just at a point in the patch cycle where I have a crapload of materia I can just burn without caring) then I'll slot up to as high as I can get without overmelding.

If it's just an alt job that I know I'll do nothing more than run the occasional dungeon on, I'll usually leave it unslotted unless I've decided I'm going to take it into something a little more taxing.

As for why a lot of players don't seem to slot at all? Basically, it's really the fault of the game. The impact of materia isn't felt enough in the vast majority of content in the game and the game itself does almost nothing to even tell (or remind) players that materia even exists. A lot of level capped players aren't really "choosing" to not use materia; they actually don't really even know what it is.

[Ryaz]

If it's just a basic alt I rarely play, I don't bother with materia most of the time. I always do it for my main job of each type, though (ie melee, tank, ranged, caster, etc). And all my crafter and gatherers of course.

[ItMe]

Imagine checking someone's gear in casual content.

Is that really so strange?
Even in dungeons as a tank I'll peek at the healer and as a healer I'll peek at the tank so I know if we'll be going full throttle or not.

[Ayuhra]

To increase access to the materia and make it more likely they will use it, but as I explained most people are overwhelmed or uninterested by anything beyond just playing and doing the story. A lot of people going through the story don't understand what all the things in their inventory are and whether they are important.

To be fair the inventory system is a nightmare and you get enough weird items that things will start to become unintuitive for a player still learning the ropes.

Materia, glamour prisms, crafting mats, cooking mats, dark matter, dyes...

[Rowde]

Is that really so strange?
Even in dungeons as a tank I'll peek at the healer and as a healer I'll peek at the tank so I know if we'll be going full throttle or not.

Nope. Pull first ask questions later.

Doesn't matter how good, or even adequate, someone's gear is if they still don't understand what their buttons do. For example, checking the tank's gear at the beginning doesn't let you know they aren't going to use any defensive cooldowns, or their invuln, or don't know that Reprisal and Arm's Length can be used as defensives on big pulls.

[Lanadra]

If that's the case why does SE give away top tier materia like candy in normal 80 dungeons ?

Well it's certainly not because you need them in those dungeons. Because anything below Extreme is designed to be clearable by pretty much everyone, no optimization required. So.. don't expect to see people care too much about 'that extra power' they don't need in a DF instance.