AF armor (or whatever it may be called)

[Jennestia]

I hope it's worth getting, it looks nice. Just hope it's stats aren't terrible like Black-Mage have str+ on it.

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Go...ttire_%2B2_Set

Unless SE decides to completely ignore the fact they make proper armor sets for jobs in XI as well, I'm pretty sure there's absolutely zero reason to assume there would be +STR on any of their AF.

This dev team so far have been pretty crap at designing U/U gear.

Not really -- The problem is people are expecting UU gear to blow away materia this early in the game's life, if you know what a full 4-5 meld materia can do..you'll be negating the actual reason materia exists. 4-5 melds is near impossible, thus the materia in itself is already balanced around that fact but the game doesn't have enough raid content to balance it out.

Think about FFXI:

Zilart armor was pretty top gear (which included AF) for a very long time, especially considering the some of the best gear during Vanilla/early zilart days were crafted pieces -- CoP, ToAU, WoTG and Add-ons over the years introduced more gear that eventually balanced itself and actually killed off the non-consumables market because the drop gear was so much better than what you can craft except for a few pieces -- The same thing will happen to materia, but early on they made it VERY useful so down the line it'll be mostly balanced and not killed off.

People seem to forget that this game is being overhauled and a lot of things introduced are mostly foundation systems which they'll balance, not to mention Yoshida stating he's basically in favor of a "3 month system" other MMOs uses, i.e gear gets obsoleted very quickly, which is another reason Materia seems so overpowering currently, because they can't start throwing Relic weapons and ultimate armor at us 1 year into the game's life...what will they do later?

I think they look fine. They're transitioning from Tanaka's realistic vision of Final Fantasy to something that actually looks like a Final Fantasy game.

Hm? Pretty sure FFVIII, FFX/X-2, FFXII, FFXIII/XIII-2 and Tactics were real Final Fantasies.