Hello,

I just had this idea a while back and thought I'd post it maybe something would come from it..

While the materia system will somehow change in 2.0 as i hear and this idea would make some things a little worse, I think it has something to it if materia don't get a complete overhawl.
I'm sure most of us trying relic have enough of the tedious RNG double melds.
What I thought would make things fairer was letting us "refine" materia. For example: Take 2 Heaven's Eye IV and combine them into Heaven's Eye IV +1 (whatever the name would be) with the same stats as the unrefined version. However, trying to double meld this refined materia into a weapon, the chance of success would be greater than with the unrefined version. This process should be redoable multiple times until a chance of 95% - 100% for the most difficult meld is reached. So combine two +1, you get +2 etc.

This does a few things-
As another example we currently have a ~15% chance to double meld materia into a relic base weapon. Some get lucky and go 1/1 some are trolled by RNG and go 0/20.
Now let's say we can repeat this refining until +4 which gives us 100% chance (it probably should scale exponentially with higher +). That would be 16 materia to get if you want that 100% chance. Meaning the avarage of materia used for double melded weapons would increase, while each individual player can be sure that it will succeed.
That's obviously much fairer.

The problems I can think of~
- It's also a part of the fail that you have to recraft the piece of gear to meld, which is the main problem for any melds with low materia cost. Maybe that could be solved by making that "refining" use a crafting process (with the refining being 100% chance) which requires high difficulty crafted materials (such as the flawless ones)

- Many more players would probably try triple melds or even up to quintuple melds, which would render a lot of gear useless. Still the avarage effort done by the community would stay the same or go up so not sure about this. I think making a quintuple meld need a +6 materia i.e. 64 materia or more for 100% would scare most away though.

There are certainly bad sides to this but I'm liking it tbh. Let's see what 2.0 does but if melding stays the same I'd rather have this as an escape route than relying on tedious RNG. So here's hoping some devs might get an idea, though it'd require more work & balancing.