Anyone think materia is getting reworked in 6.0?

[Bsrking5]

Probably a little but I doubt a major change. At this point i think they should just go super simple. Tenacity for tanks, giving them damage resist, HP and dealing more damage. Determination for dps giving more damage and haste. Piety for healers giving more healing, damage output and crit chance. While removing all other for melding. Let them focus on other stuff to make it more interesting.

[Tint]

Why even bother with materia melding anymore when you want to remove every but one type of them?

[Raikai]

Why even bother with materia melding anymore when you want to remove every but one type of them?

Agree, materia is meant in theory to customize the stats for your job. Just pigeonholing everyone into a single type of Materia defeats the purpose and just make melding a chore for the sake of it.

What it should be done is for the designers to tinker with job's skills, making different materia combinations relevant with different playstyles... such a thing already happens with BLM, but I barely see with others.

[Bsrking5]

Why even bother with materia melding anymore when you want to remove every but one type of them?

Why even bother when theres only one combo of materia thats the best and everyone can easily find out what it is, just give everybody those stats and remove materia completely...

[Ultimatecalibur]

Why even bother when theres only one combo of materia thats the best and everyone can easily find out what it is, just give everybody those stats and remove materia completely...

In theory, each job should have a preferred ratio of secondary stats to be most effective. If the game was designed for that Materia at level 80 would give each piece ~120 points of "floating" secondary that can be modified to get closer to that perfect ratio, but the secondary stats are all selfish right now so that doesn't work.

[Packetdancer]

It's worth remembering that until you have BiS, different melds may be more appropriate. Say your head piece in BiS would have skill speed melded in the end. But you don't have the chest piece you need yet, and the one you're using in the meantime has Skill Speed instead of Critical Hit as a substat. So it probably doesn't make sense to meld Skill Speed on that head piece yet; meld Crit instead to make up for the current chest piece, and when you get the correct chest piece, then change your headpiece's melds.

Materia is meant to be allow flexibility, and even when there's one "mathematical best" solution of gear, the melds can differ if you don't have all the correct pieces yet to get there.

Moreover. it's not that there's one that's the mathematical best. Yes, there are BiS calculations made, but usually places like the Balance have multiple BiS options; there are several for WHM depending on how comfortable you feel with dropping piety very low in exchange for damage, there are ones for GNB that target different GCDs, etc. BLM has the most dramatic spread of BiS options, but there is still space for variance in some. (I wish there was more, but...)

Still, I agree that if materia ever got simplified enough that there would only be one thing to meld for each... then yeah, do away with it; at that point, there's no useful purpose to the system.

[Magnedeus]

Unless the fix the scaling for tenacity it will always be a garbage stat. Hell, I feel bad for some tanks when I see them stack tenacity on their gear simply because their role is a tank with no knowledge of how useless it is right now.

[wereotter]

Why even bother when theres only one combo of materia thats the best and everyone can easily find out what it is, just give everybody those stats and remove materia completely...

"Best" makes such a minor difference that it's not worth removing it entirely or dumbing it down so much that you might as well remove it. It's better to keep the options open so different builds can exist. Also to your suggestions, not every DPS job even wants a haste buff. Summoner and Red Mage with all their instant cast skills would get nothing from your proposed haste buff, for example.

And to that point with the exception of piety and tenacity, every kind of materia right now has a place. So if anything, I can just see them revisiting how those two stats work. Also it's worth remembering that because of how the stats scale, melding direct hit or critical hit at level 60 just doesn't give you enough to be worth it (you simply can't get enough of that stat to make it worth using them over determination) so in order to let players working through older content, and for limited jobs that do still stop at lower level caps, having more options is important.

[Esmoire]

I honestly think there is a good range of choice for materia for a lot of the jobs, actually. For example WAR this expansion have often had a choice between 2.35-2.38~ GCD on skill speed, with 2.43 picking up interest as of the Storm's Eye patch. Just one example. I don't think they should, and I don't think they won't, make basically one materia for each role or whatever. At that point, they may as well not exist.

I imagine they will make more refinements. Tenacity this expansion was close... maybe they will divorce the damage from the DR so they scale at different speeds next expansion (like if this expansion we could have had 16 per DR, 32 per damage) or something. Piety IMO failed, but I think that's because MP as a resource has failed for healers and maybe they need to add MP costs to some of the oGCDs... Hard to say and the designers have a lot of ways about it. I can also see them making Direct Hit a DPS-only meld. So many ideas and it's hard to say what is the right or wrong way about it in isolation without knowing the bigger picture of secondary stats and large.

[RyuDragnier]

I could foresee another stat change, yes. Preferably with Direct Hit becoming the DPS only stat. Or making Determination DPS only, with its normal effects pushed into Tenacity and Piety so they're better stats for Tank/Healer.