does elemental materia have a point?

[Kosmos992k]

Yes, there is a 'point' to it. Back when Titan HM was still considered very hard to beat, I remember reading a post by someone (Warrior) who'd melded a crap ton of Earth materia to their gear with the aim of mitigating Titan's elementally based attacks. According to that poster it worked (to a degree) and reduced the damage by something like 30%. But, personally I think you may be giving up a lot by having meldable gear, and melding only for elemental resistance. I can only think that if this works it is because even though the elemental effects of attacks and the resistance to them has been greatly de-tuned, the effects of elements appear to still be in the game.

I used to think that resistance in general was detuned to irrelevance, but then my retainer brought me the Gyshal ring which does help reduce the duration of heavy effects (or so it seems). Kinda makes me wonder whether we could look in more detail at status effects and how to mitigate them through gear more...

I'd like to think that at some point in the future, elements will become a bit more important to us again, not to the point of preferring one caster over another because of their elemental attacks, but at least to the point of making elemental resistance or elemental weapon enhancement have a point.

I wonder if one way to bring back elements would be to leave the magic based attacks of players as relatively unaspected damage, so that the lightning, ice, fire, wind, water aspects are more about the visual effect and what elements the caster is drawing power from for that attack, rather than the type of damage. But at the same time allow materia enhancements to weapons that add additional elementally aspected damage. That way a BLM would not be somehow the most preferred attacker against Shiva, because their fire based attacks offer no specific advantage. However if the player had melded fire materia to their weapon their damage would be enhanced with an amount of fire based damage based on the level of enhancement. This would mean that players would not be favored over one another because of their class, and it would definitely place an emphasis on crafted weapons that are meldable for elemental damage boost, allowing a player to perhaps carry specific weapons for specific fights.

[radioactive_lego]

Prognostication: Stockpile now while prices are low. 3.0 will change this.