Quote Originally Posted by Katlyna View Post
What they SHOULD do, is lower the overall materia requirements for maxing gear. Such that HQ gear is easily maxable and NQ gear is maxable but requires expensive materia (like they did for foragers/artisan gear). And this should be true for ALL PARTS including main and offhand gear. This would remove the severe punishment for NQing. But still cause a heavier cost to be incurred for NQing. Now as said above this may indeed be the true going forward, we'll just have to see.
I don't understand why they don't do this. Even with Tier Vs, DoW/DoM gear is mostly worthless because you can't even meld enough stats to the gear pieces to make up for the lost primary stats from the gear being 30 ilvls lower. Having a way to bring the gap between NQ and HQ would remove some of the frustrating RNG component of craft (hey bro, that's a nice 98% HQ you have there... it'd be a real shame if something happened to it). If HQ and NQ gear could both reach the same caps, with HQ requiring now overmelds (like Forager/Artisan gear) and NQ requiring overmelds then NQ gear would actually have some value to them. It's not a perfect design because I think the materia system in this game is complete shit and exists only due to nostalgia, but it's much better than the current system where NQ gear is only good for glamour and spiritbinding.

This game is filled with so much binary RNG design because it's the path of least resistance. RNG is RNG and when you fail to HQ a 2* craft because you failed 5-6 Hasty Touches you begin to realize how little flat the crafting system actually is.