As we all know, with the recent addition of the Materia system... raids and many NMs drop loot that people no longer feel is desirable because it is so much easier to get a crafted piece of gear and then toss some Materia into it and have it be better than the U/U gear anyway.

Now... clearly the folks at Square want crafters to stay relevant. It is a delicate balance because if raid gear is on par with Materia'd gear then there's little reason to pay the high prices for the relevant Materia when you can run a dungeon and not pay a dime. Of course, that'd only be the case if they weren't careful in their implementation of some method to keep the U/U items on par.

This is a thread where we can post ideas on how to resolve what some see as an issue.


Personally, I feel this could very easily be resolved by adding (repeatable) sub-quests to the raids based on completing certain objectives in the dungeon (killing a certain number of enemies, speed of completion, so on and so forth) and on completion of each of these quests you are able choose one item (items would vary by the quest) from the dungeon. With the implementation of these sub-quests they should also allow Materia to be inserted into U/U gear however starting from the very first Materia it should already be considered forbidden Materia craft and the item should then have a chance to break. Of course they'd have to add a new Method for crafters to add Materia to gear (or force players to level their own crafts to put anything into U/U gear) for this to work out completely but I feel that this would revitalize the raid content while still keeping crafted gear relevant for the vast majority of the playerbase and that seemed to be the direction the folks at Square want things to head in based on my understanding of the initial descriptions of the system.

Anyway, what are your ideas FFXIV forum?