Quote Originally Posted by Dragon_Lord View Post
*Sigh* There is no reason for all items to not have at least one slot. [...]
Yes, there is a very good reason not to give them a slot. If you compared the stats on the Aetherial and green items with the white equivalents, the non-tradeskilled items have stats comparable to if you had slightly overmelded some materia onto your white item. There's no reason not to expect them not to do something similar with the 50+ gear if they decided to put in a slot.

Which means if they added materia slots to looted items, you're going to see a stat reduction anyway for each potential slot, guaranteed, in the name of versatility. When you have a looted/bought piece of item versus a tradeskilled piece of item of the same tier, the tradeskilled one has always had the better potential. That and the crazy overmelded gear with 5+ main stat materia in 1.0 is probably why they capped the tradeskilled versions 20 ilvls below the highest available looted one and put in stat caps that also apply to materia.