The materia system needs a better UI

[Raikai]

Even though it had improvements across the expansions, the current form feels a bit unintuitive to work with and dated as an UI feature, but most importantly, it's a slog when you're trying to overmeld and one of the reasons is the annoying animation.

I'd think it could use some neat panel like the one we manipulate the relic weapon stats, or maybe the slotting process working just like we see in FF7 Remake's menus, as well as reworking the melding animation to be more dynamic. Adding in the spiritbound status and extract funcion at the same place.

Another function that could be integrated as a tooltip complement is the actual materia capaicty of gear so we know what we can meld without having to actually buy the item.

One actual improvement that is not just UI would be the capacity to retrieve materia in any given order.

[Rongway]

Another function that could be integrated as a tooltip complement is the actual materia capaicty of gear so we know what we can meld without having to actually buy the item.

It would be a waste of space to show 0/184 for the three stats that you're not melding on a piece of gear. It's enough to know that for HQ gear, whichever substat is higher is at the cap for that piece of gear. For example,



The Ascension Turban of casting has substats Determination+129 and Spell Speed+184. The greater substat is Spell Speed, so the substat cap is +184. Knowing this, the max does not need to be displayed in the Item Help.

What could use improvement however is how the melded stats are displayed. As things stand, if you want to know how many points of a substat you're actually getting from a piece of gear, you have to perform arithmetic yourself. The bonuses from materia should just be displayed in the gear's Bonuses section as part of the stat totals. Then if people want to know the base value--the usually less useful/relevant value--they can perform arithmetic for that instead.

One actual improvement that is not just UI would be the capacity to retrieve materia in any given order.

The order of melding affects meld success probability, and the current design requires you to undo three overmelds if you want to change the tier-major materia overmeld (the one that "Cannot be melded onto a piece of equipment past the first advanced materia melding slot"), and then you'll have to blow up a bunch of materia to remeld the fourth and fifth slots, so there might be some economic considerations if this were to change.