I think one of the biggest mistakes this game has made was the addition of materia. In 1.18... when darkhold was king, the gear u got from there was the best gear you could get anywhere. Now with the materia system added hypothetically i could go and buy 1 billion gil and pay people to quadruple meld me the best gear in the game without stepping foot outside a city. As of now all the items you can get from killing Primals, farming chests (besides sentinel's) or doing darkhold cant compete with the double and triple melds some people have. On top of that the gear that you can get out of the events is really hard to get whether it be farming a chest for 3 hours to get maybe 2 pieces of mediocre gear or by spamming a primal run over and over getting nothing, or something you already have, or cant even use. If they are gonna make dropped items so hard to obtain AT LEAST make them better than a double melded crafted item. Right now all event type gear is a "look at me" piece not actually very useable in most cases.

I'm really excited about the new classes and the JSE and weapons they will have and they said the weapons will be very hard to obtain.... but if the stats on them are about as good as the current weapons and armor we can get from the current events why even bother.