Why is Crafting still in the game?

[Tetsaru]

my question playing for having played Final Fantasy 11 and World of Warcraft seems to be this having played both those games and 14 of course never that I saw never was crafted gear better than dungeon or tomestone gear. granted and 11 live in you could make your that was pretty much on par with the engineer but it was never better than in the dungeon hear from like Empyrean or Abby. good morning Warcraft I'd say about uninstall crafted gear was almost as good as dungeon gear but dungeon gear is always better than what could and can be crafted.

So I guess the question is why is everyone upset the craft gear not as good as we're even better than done that seems to be the gist of all the arguments?

Back in 1.0, the best gear in the game was relics (which actually took a long time and were difficult to get) and darklight gear, which if I recall, both required doing speed runs through dungeons (note that tomestones didn't exist back then). Under that was Militia gear, which came from hamlet defense and was not crafted, then AF, which was actually useful both stat-wise and due to effects that boosted the potency of your job's moves.

All that aside, crafted gear (such as HQ cobalt armor) could potentially compete or surpass that gear through the use of materia melding, which didn't have stat caps in 1.0. For a while, I remember having an HQ Lightning Brand with 2 or more INT/attack magic potency was preferred over some of the primal weapons for BLM. The thing was, if a forbidden meld failed, then the item you were trying to meld was also destroyed along with the materia and catalysts, and you'd have to start all over from scratch. It required a lot of money, but it could also potentially give you a lot of money if you ended up selling a nice piece with some unique melds on it. Also, crafted gear remained tradeable after spiritbonding with it (giving it to someone else just reset the spiritbond), so you could still sell something off if you didn't need it anymore.

Fast forward to ARR, and now all the gear has very cut-and-dry stats with stat caps on materia (many that can't be used at all because the gear already has that stat on it), and no special abilities. It really removed a lot of the customization and variety between character builds.