Make tenacity great

[Gserpent]

Materia, much like teleportation fees, is there to help permanently remove gil out of the in-game economy. Players don't like it, but it's an essential function to keep gil values from endlessly inflating.

Stats and customization are only meaningless if they're designed that way. You're able to math out a universally optimal choice because the present stat design is incredibly safe. Nearly every stat does the same thing (increases damage), except that some do it better than others. The haste stats (skill speed/spell speed) are really the only ones that break this rule, which is why they're unsurprisingly the most fun to mess around with. I would love to max out haste.

You'll actually find a fair amount of variation in games with talent tree systems, Warcraft included. This isn't purely due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes the best build is fight specific. Sometimes the best build is a function of player skill and how much error you can allow yourself as a player. Black Ox Brew may be the mathematically best pick if you are able to use it on cooldown, but the Light Brewing passive is a safer/more forgiving pick if your cooldown usage isn't spot on. You can have a lot of nuance in these systems, but you'll need a little more than four game designers assigned to 19 jobs.

The problem with Tenacity is that it's really just an inferior damage stat with some other random stuff tacked on (+5 to Lalafell detection rate). If you want it to be a 'tank-exclusive stat', then it needs to be at least equivalently desirable as Direct Hit.

Those are all good points, that ultimately just loop back to the core design principle of "ultra safe."

It's not a coincidence that every tier has fights that are basically partial or even near-complete rehashes of previous Alexander or Omegascape fights. E11S ain't got a unique bone in its entire body. It's faster and easier to just copy-paste mechanics you've used time and time again, just like it's faster and easier to homogenize the absolute crap out of things so that you don't have to worry about people whining about gameplay balance. Between Gordias and Brute Justice being ball-bustingly difficult and people screaming bloody murder about certain classes being overpowered/underpowered, it's like the entire dev team has PTSD from Heavensward.

I would love to see materia made so it's less possible to just spreadsheet out the best possible combination, but that would require a way to save and swap between sets of materia. It would also require materia to be more than "do more damage, differently," but I'm not convinced the game engine can even handle the things they'd need to start doing in order to make defensive materia or "utility" materia a viable design possibility. Not being able to design for reactive gameplay due to the game's garbage servers seems like it limits the team more and more every year. Too bad they'd never be able to convince SE to spring for better server architecture.