Materia system should be streamlined and based on FFVII.

[Orca]

Id like to see something similar to FF7's materia, definitely. The materia system in XIV kinda alienates me and a lot of people i know, i generally get the feeling that i just dont want to involve myself with it.

Although im sure im in the minority here, what i would love to see is this;

1: Abolish the creation of tier 2,3 and 4 materia. Make all newly converted materia tier 1, with the stats dependant on the converted items level and quality. (and static, not randomly generated, so all lv 10 harness produce strength +1, all lv 50 harness produce strength +6/HQ +7) The rarest materia should come from items crafted with primal/HNM mats.

2: Make materia equippable/unequippable by anyone, at the cost of one catalyst to equip an orb, and no penalty or loss when unequipping one. Get rid of meld risks and allow materia to be equipped on any piece of equipment, but with less slots. ie, white/common: 3 slots, green/uncommon: 2 slots, blue/rare: 2 slots, gold/legendary: 1 slot. And probably only let tier 4's be equipped to rare and legendary equipment, so common/uncommon can only stack tier 3 at lv 50.

3: Allow materia to level up as you fight with it. Each level up adding a static amount to its base stat + bonus random amount (could be an amazingly high bonus, could be okay, could be 0.) Let it level up with the player at lv 10, 30 and 45 (tier 2,3,4) so a new player can get their first materia at lv 10 and it can grow with them through the game.

4: Instead of losing gear to melding with those low success rates, enable the fusing of materia via crafters. Id love it if we could fuse two tier 4's in to a new tier 1 with the originals combined stats, then level it up. (or if the best materia could only be made via fusion recipes.) The amount added to the materia from its static level ups would have to be reduced a bit but they could let you fuse it with another orb up to 3 times. They just need to use the current double, triple and quad meld success rates for this respectively, so people can still work hard to build godly materia, but every attempt has the chance to destroy both the orbs theyre trying to fuse. And if you fuse something amazing, you might get even luckier with a good random bonus to its level ups. =D