New Job Concept: Riskbreaker

[Jandor]

Hmm... good point.
You may have just convinced me on this. Materia loadouts could be acheivable. Although melding materia is a gil sink and comes with a failure rate above a certain threshold. Would "Materia Plates" work if you had to pay gil to apply them and they could fail to apply?
I suppose you could just increase the costs of creating the plate in the first place. You'd probably have to make materia rarer too.

Still, I wouldnt really want them to merge all equipment types. Would be too much homogenisation.

I suppose the simplest solution might be to have 'Materia plates' as an actual item. Buy or make one, have it snapshot your equipped gear, then open it up and meld to it as if it was just normal gear.
When applying the plate, if the gear you're wearing and the snapshot on the plate are the same the materia will apply, if they're not it will fail.
If you want to update a slot on the plate you have to attempt to retrieve the materia, change the item in the slot, then re-meld it. Essentially the same as you do with actual gear.

At first glance that seems a pretty fair way of doing them to me.

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As for homogenisation, we'll have to agree to disagree I think.

The way I see it, in 5.0 we're likely get a tank and it's likely wearing fending, that means we'll have 4 tanks using 1 set of gear, and 4 melee DPS split over 3 sets of gear. For me as a mainly tank sort of guy wanting to dabble in all the tanks it's great, but if I was more a melee DPS sort of person having to get 3 gearsets while fighting tome caps and loot restrictions would annoy the hell out of me.