Colored gear with specific classes.

[Oscillate_Wildly]

We honestly never needed the whole <Item A (Color A)> <Item A (Color B)> <Item A (Color C)> <Item B (Color A)> thing in the first place. With the dawn of universal dyes the color of the gear should no longer matter at all.

I was thinking about how much work it would be to undo all the redone recipes now and theres actually a very simple thing they can do. Dyed gear currently uses the undyed version + extra materias to make a required level version with extra stats, right? Well just drop the dye out of the recipe entirely and make those "extra stat" versions their own piece of gear.

For example:
Cobalt Cuirass (Red) should be renamed to "Advanced* Cobalt Cuirass". It can keep its restrictions, keep its extra stats, and all that because it would be its own separate piece of gear from the regular Cobalt Cuirass. Then all they need to do is add the ability for us to seek a dye job from an Alchemist to freely change the color of either the regular Cobalt Cuirass or the Advanced Cobalt Cuirass.

This would also allow for the future HQ system to work as intended. All HQ mats would make an HQ Cobalt Cuirass. An HQ Cobalt Cuirass + HQ mats would = HQ Advanced Cobalt Cuirass.

*"Advanced" could be replaced with any adjective that implies it is upgraded. "Upgraded" would work too.

I like this idea, however..... I would also have liked for the 'advanced' or 'upgraded' piece of armour to include the undyed. ): The wool gown undyed is beautiful, nice clean white. To make it useless like that is a bit weird. I don't see why they can't just broaden our variety of gear. I think it's absolutely ridiculous that conjurers can't wear gear like Kecks for the evasion.
Are all pieces of mage gear simply for boosting mage stats? What the hell? I mean that's fine and everything and I can always find some good materia to add to it for evasion and defence but still. And that's likely what I'd do.

A better thing to do in the future however would make all gear the same with the same base stat, and we'd be able to take it to an NPC to upgrade it like you said to one of the 3 choices for a boost, regardless of dyes. Such as for felt gowns, we take a felt gown (green), equip it as we would for the repair npc, and allow him to upgrade it for a fee. It leaves the dye system alone for aesthetics only and still allows for the unique bonus stats. That way we can have one of the lovely +stats, whatever we choose.

Gear then that has been treated like this will be available to trade, sold in bazaar, and equiped. You'd need to remove this buff from the same NPC before selling it back on the market.

[Estellios]

Or they could just give you an option of "builds" for gear before you start synthing, like how the menu comes up if you put in mats that can make multiple items. A system like this would probably have to wait until they revamped the wards so you could see an item's individual stats while searching (ie: variable stats on materia or materia-slotted gear).

Thinking about it now, maybe the dye=stats thing is a placeholder for such a system, and once its implemented we would have gear colored the way we want seperate from the stats.