Quote Originally Posted by Valesti_Peleiades View Post
I like to think that there's some sort of middle ground where crafted gear can be desirable for progression, but not overpowered.
There are really a number of ways they could have done it, but the simplest would be really to just make the current recipes easier to make. If the current gear had required roughly the same amount of effort as it had to reach the crafted DoW/M gear in ARR, it wouldn't have really affected much. i180 is low enough that it wouldn't have been particularly valuable for Savage, what with higher stat caps being unreachable sans Tier V materia and the flattening of secondary stat influence. It would, however, have been a decent alternative to Alex Normal gear if fully melded and a fair substitute for Law gear for those that don't enjoy the hunt grind.

On the other hand, with the current scarcity of materials, the gear won't be available in ready quantities until sometime in 3.2 most likely, long after it would have had any relevance. At that point, the gear being i190 probably wouldn't have been much of an issue, though this hypothetical is harder to gauge. i190 gear would have likely shifted people's priorities in the early weeks, and crafters in dedicated raiding FCs might have been greatly incentivized to make them prior to making AF and the like.