Quote Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe View Post
Alternatively, we could have something like High Materia, which you can only have ONE of per job, and you can only meld it on the weapon (they're unique to each job, unless you want to remeld your chest every time you want to omnitank). And these High Materia (make like 4 of them per job) have unique effects on your skills, ala traits. Nothing too crazy, just 'the heal from Sheltron is increased by 150 (total goes from 1000 to 1600)', or 'the Gauge cost of Cover is reduced to 0', or 'the base% mitigation of Intervention is increased from 10% to 15%', idk. I could probably come up with 3 or 4 of these for each job, and keep them to being 'not throughput focused' because if one of them is 'X move does more damage' then that one's the insta-locked one, no deviation allowed. With them all being small utility/defensive/etc stuff as above, then the choice becomes 'do you want these effects, or do you want 36 more crit', and some people probably would want the tiny crit boost, but a lot of people would go for a unique effect, because it might allow for better DPS gains than that crit boost. Like, maybe the ones for SGE can be 'Kardia heals are reduced from 170 to 100, but each Kardia proc triggered now applies a Haima layer for 100 potency (stacks up to 5)', 'Kardia's potency increased from 170 to 250', and 'Pneuma has 2 charges'.
Honestly, if they gave us variant build paths, that would be so much cooler and fun. It will also mean they have to put looser fight designs - which actually would not be so bad in terms of giving players unique ways to approach the fight with the way they want to play, but make a headache in design. ... Not that it's much of an issue at any rate with how stagnant job design has been as of late all having to fit into a 120 second mold and barely any variation to gameplay... Bozja and Eureka has actually shown stuff like deep essences can work, and materia can be a more simpler version of this.

I would not be against that if we can get some whacky combinations going and open up new possibilities. I figure if that's the route they want to take, effect materia slots can be more varied, but have to be weaker in comparison to not deviate too much from existing paths to make them all work. All materia will also be incompatible at lower levels, which can prove to be a bigger headache when doing lower level content synced down at some future expansion unless materia effects are also synced down as well.