Quote Originally Posted by Illmaeran View Post
Making entry level or "gap filler" gear is nice and all, but it seem to me that there could be more to it. . .

That being said, having raid specific material drops that a player with a high enough DoH class could use to upgrade gear would be a nice acknowledgement of the effort it takes to be a highest-tier crafter.
Actually, a number of classes have crafted gear as part of their true BIS lists each patch (though we'll need new materia in 3.0 or I don't see the trend continuing). The only thing is each piece costs several million gil on most servers, so no one wants to pay it.

As for your actual idea, it's something I've kinda recommended before, but I would like to put a few caveats on there. First, the raid drops should be untradeable, I think. This is to prevent RMT concerns, primarily; that is, you don't want people buying gil to buy the item to craft stuff if you can avoid it. Plus, you want to make sure that the person getting the benefit was actually in the raid, right? Second, I don't think it should be the case for every slot of gear. More reasonable would be something like one or two pieces per job. Lastly, the "runner up" if you can't get the crafted item should be very, very close behind. Probably about on the order that current dropped gear is behind crafted: about 6 of your primary stat's worth of stats if you went all out.

Basically, I'd like to see a reason for crafting to be in endgame, but without ruining the fun of those who don't like crafting.