An end to the gear treadmill

[Koros]

I think the thing I miss most from other MMOs is the ability to have any degree of personalization when it comes to how a given job plays.

Even something simple like being able to "specialize" in specific non-offensive abilities to reduce cooldowns slightly or increase their effects would be nice.

I can't comment on every single thing posted here, but I can say that I did have a similar idea regarding materia, but it was much more limited in that you'd have only one slot on the weapon for it, and it provides a job specific, non-damage effect that affects your gameplay style slightly. Mostly your 'white materia' kind of effects, like Minne boost vs 'Peloton can be used in combat but now has a 3min CD' kind of thing, so that one's either a case of 'great minds think alike' or I'm actually a member of the Drakon extended family too

Feels horrible from a design perspective that most damage related 'choices' will be mathed down and made into 'this one is best, rest are trolling'. I guess the next best solution would be to have absolutely bonkers 'set effects' in the next Bozja/Eureka instead of +3 Haste. Stuff like 'Each time you use Fell Cleave, your next Fell Cleave within 30s has 10 increased potency. Stacks up to 99 times'

Oh yeh also, I'm gonna assume that, like my thoughts included, a similar kind of materia system from yourself would exist for 'customizing' crafter/gatherers, such that we'd be able to have things like 'Rapid Synth is guaranteed to succeed for the first use per craft' vs 'Delicate Synthesis is increased to 125% Progress/Quality', and idk Fisher could get things like 'Chum lasts for 3 casts' vs 'Mooch can now be used with any fish, but costs 200 GP when a NQ fish is used'

Overall, there's a lot of really cool ideas here. Just giving us more control over our actions and potencies with different variety of materia would be great. Of course it would lead to people just going "but the meta!!!" like always and get mad if you make a sub-optimal build. Really though, Koros is putting more thought into stuff than the devs seem to be at least.

At some point I think developers need to ignore that there will be a meta. We currently have different BiS sets for most jobs that people can choose based on their preferences for comfort, speed, and need to play multiple jobs. People will math out the degree of personalization, but if it's well-balanced then there will still be a choice players can make that will be competitive with the absolute best pick. Also, the meta pick might be fight-dependent if someone is chasing for top ranks (you might go for Blasting Zone for a fight that ends at 5:40, but Double Down if it ends at 6:25). But the real key is that player enjoyment and choice shouldn't be removed just because someone is going to math out the BiS. A lot of players don't actually get to the BiS anyways and most players probably won't ever look at what the Balance says. They might be interested in figuring out their own comfortable playstyle. The developers' job is to make sure that different playstyles are competitive with each other. In Bozja there are absolute best picks but most casual players would bring something like Regen or Shell even if it's mathematically actually extremely terrible because they like healing themselves or having the feeling of applying buffs on their party members (+ it's also the cheapest lol), and as long as no one shames them for it developers should keep that choice there. Giving players the freedom to play suboptimally is not always a bad thing.