rip crafted accessories

[Reinha]

Pink gear from the airship exploration can be spiritbonded and assimilated to get free materia. Or you can just buy the materia, assuming it's cheap. If the Hard missions are actually challenging this change will solve 3 problems at once:

1. Crafters will be useful for end game because they can meld gear for more people than just tanks.
2. People won't run out of things to do because on top of running the raids there will also be raid preparation to do as a group.
3. More customization options.

Excellent! It worked well in WoW so I don't see why it wouldn't work here.

[Nadirah]

I was under the impression that they'd originally had lower ilvl accessories because they *didn't* like how pentamelds worked in Coil.

What they *should* have done was eliminate forbidden melds entirely. That'd have fixed that easy.

[Nadirah]

That's my best guess, yeah. Probably a 40/60 or 50/50 split between the two, something like that. I doubt they'd want the STR on the left side to go unused, so they'll leave it in the formula to some degree.

Or they'll just stop putting STR on left side, and it'll do nothing, like the DEX on low level left side does nothing for some of the DoW classes that use it.

Pink gear from the airship exploration can be spiritbonded and assimilated to get free materia. Or you can just buy the materia, assuming it's cheap. If the Hard missions are actually challenging this change will solve 3 problems at once:

1. Crafters will be useful for end game because they can meld gear for more people than just tanks.
2. People won't run out of things to do because on top of running the raids there will also be raid preparation to do as a group.
3. More customization options.

Excellent! It worked well in WoW so I don't see why it wouldn't work here.

I wouldn't say it worked well in WoW.

[Alahra]

Or they'll just stop putting STR on left side, and it'll do nothing, like the DEX on low level left side does nothing for some of the DoW classes that use it.

They might, but it's simpler not to have to change anything *except* the damage formula. They more than likely already gear made for 3.2 (and perhaps beyond), and having STR on the gear in the patch that they made STR no longer do anything for tanks would be a little weird. It depends on how long these changes have been in the pipeline, though--it's possible this has been planned for quite some time and we're only just now hearing about it, though I personally doubt that. I have a feeling they're doing this in response to how Savage worked out.

I think we're more likely to see adjustments that require the fewest amount of changes to things overall, both because changes disrupt things already in the development pipeline and because this seems to be a reactionary change rather than a planned one.

[Freyyy]

Deleting a stat from a whole gear category isn't really difficult and require very little work. Look at when NIN came out, they added DEX to every single piece of MNK gear.

[Alahra]

Deleting a stat from a whole gear category isn't really difficult and require very little work. Look at when NIN came out, they added DEX to every single piece of MNK gear.

They had been working on NIN for a lot longer than they were working on these changes, though, from what I understand--there were hints even during the Beta that it was in the pipeline and we still didn't get it until the game had been out over a year. If they've been working on these things for awhile, I would be less surprised by itemization changes, though. It's possible they thought the STR/VIT thing was issue before HW launched, but the expansion was too far along by 2.4/2.5 for them to make any major shifts (especially since they had already delayed it once) to 3.0/3.1, and if that's the case, then the scope of these changes might be a bit larger.

[Freyyy]

snip

It still doesn't require very much work. They don't have to delete the STR from old gear because it wouldn't do anything to tanks anymore anyway, they'd just have to make new gear from 3.2 without STR and if they already created all the items before taking this decision, they could just remove it and I'm pretty sure that it would only take a few minutes considering the low number of different sets we get each new patch.

[Dante_V]

Pink gear from the airship exploration can be spiritbonded and assimilated to get free materia. Or you can just buy the materia, assuming it's cheap. If the Hard missions are actually challenging this change will solve 3 problems at once:

1. Crafters will be useful for end game because they can meld gear for more people than just tanks.
2. People won't run out of things to do because on top of running the raids there will also be raid preparation to do as a group.
3. More customization options.

Excellent! It worked well in WoW so I don't see why it wouldn't work here.

A few things. First the aetherial gear will rapidly crush any demand for crafted gear and without being able to main meld stat tank accessories, the crafted gear market will be even less desirable. There is literally no reason for me to buy any crafted accessories if I can't meld main stat. If I can get aetherial drops from exploration, that's where my spiritbonding gear and accessories will come from.

A good thing is that this will greatly increase the supply of level 5 materias depending on the conversion ratings.

The abysmal weights of secondary stats means that there won't be very much "customization" going on. The bonus for meldable raid gear however is that you can meld accuracy to meet caps. Outside of that it will ultimately be kind of meh.

I hardly consider spirtbonding "something to do" in this game. It's PAINFULLY boring.

If hard missions are actually challenging, 80% of the community either won't be good enough to do them or will whine until it is nerfed.

[Alahra]

It still doesn't require very much work.

I don't think it's a huge undertaking, no but there's very little that can be gained from doing it when they can just keep doing things the way they have been and simply change the formula to factor in both. Changing the damage formula to a split between the two stats covers everything they need to do by itself, without needing to change future gear or adjust any gear that's already done but not implemented yet. Whereas if they go VIT, it's a little more complicated. Not hugely so, but it's still work that doesn't necessarily need to be done. Since what they've said so far mentions only altering the damage calculation, I'm working under the assumption that this is all they're going to do for now.

We'll probably learn more in the Live Letters we get between the launch of 3.1 and 3.2. I mean, I never expected them to go back and add DEX to all the MNK gear either for NIN, so they've surprised me before (I expected them to be STR and share Striking gear going forward). But there was a relatively strong "flavor" argument in favor of NIN being on the previous MNK sets (and not on BRD sets--could you see NIN running around in the BRD CT/ST gear? >.>), and a good itemization reason for them to be DEX (so that someone else wanted Aiming accessories). I just don't see a compelling need for VIT to be the sole tank stat in the future.

[StouterTaru]

snip

-You will be able to meld main stat for the first materia on accessories.
-The good aetherial gear will likely only be from the hard (FC ship only) voyages, it will likely several hours just to get a good piece, let alone one in the slot you want. Crafted gear can become the mythic "catch-up gear" until you get something better. Then you can turn it into materia.
-You don't have to spiritbond is an open world party. Just put a couple pieces of level appropriate spiritbond pieces when you do daily/weekly faceroll content.