Quote Originally Posted by Post View Post
Honestly, this game's never been about interesting gear decisions, but that's often been to its benefit. It's almost always been 'pick the thing with the most weapon damage/primary stat', and then 'the thing with the most crit.' They even got rid of Accuracy because it was too intrusive for their otherwise streamlined system. The main reason materia exists at all is because it was a holdover from 1.0, and since crafters and gatherers could make use of it they eventually decided to expand it to all gear (while also making sure they were easy to obtain) back in 3.2.
Given...
  • the havoc that SkS thresholds can play on XIV's ultra-rigid rotations (especially for melee),
  • the massive inventory bloat caused by the Materia system, and
  • the chores required for use in tracking Spiritbond, extracting Materia, adding materia, and overmelding...
...can we really even say it's "streamlined"?

Despite it offering the least customization of any additional system I've seen, it also has the highest cost in inventory space and routine player annoyance.

Gameplay-wise, they could do everything Materia does --which, honestly, is just the SkS/SpS thresholds' impact on optimal rotation-- by just, say, having different sub-classes of weapon and having that follow one's Glamour instead of their actual weapon, in order to give more choices at a time. Bigger sword, slower but harder swings, with (just like SkS now) no impact on ability damage not ultimately influenced by GCD speed (Ninki, Kenki, etc).

Ultimately, I always want them to make it easier to swap jobs. Anything they can do to support this is good imo, from merging more gearsets together, or streamlining materia further. I think more uniform rez availability to non-healers helps this as well, at least for someone that's swapping based on their group's composition.
Same.