Calling All Tenacity Melders

[Carighan]

I am enjoying my Tenacity Crit tank set for Mentor Roulette, I am not here to tell you to meld Tenacity so please don't remove the options that some players actually can benefit from.

That's kinda my point, there is no benefit. You can keep the system, but make it one where there's a benefit for choosing materia to meld. You say consider more than optimise for reclear, the entire problem is that there is no situation where DPS-maximising isn't the optimal course for:

* Damage
* Survivability
* Efficiency
* Safety

It just doesn't exist. What you can so is go marginally worse, feel like you're doing Customisashun, and it won't screw anything up as the gain or loss is quite marginal anyways. But that's not having a choice now, is it? That's letting you pick the color of your Mass Effect 3 ending, but it's always the same ending.

Same with the skill speeds, that's not an option, that's a hidden gotcha because as a player you need to know the breakpoint and which is optimal, and the game does not provide you the means to see the underlying mechanisms to find out about that, so external sources are required.

Hence the point: As long as materia melding can affect DPS (in any way, up or down!), there is no point to it being user-selectable. Not while DPS is the singular point of optimization even for tanks and healers, and even for survivability or healing efficiency (the latter mostly because while it is never needed, Crit also happens to be the best heal-boosting and heal-mana-efficiency-boosting stat). Remove the ability to affect DPS at all, and player choice would at least be possible within the options that can be provided. Or provide a system where the DPS gain is always exactly the same, but the "flavor" changes basically (do you want less crits but bigger shiney numbers in turn, faster numbers, etc).

(edit)
So to illustrate better what I mean, less DPS-affective options might be:

* Runspeed
* Reduced sprint cooldown
* Reduced damage taken
* Increased healing taken
* Faster "filler" execution, but proportionally less damage done on it, same overall damage (this has to be slightly per-job as some generate resources that way which has to be factored into the damage reduction, while others do not)
* etc etc

And of course as said above, could also have damage options, so long as the net gain is always identical, you can basically pick size-vs-speed, etc.

Could even have both! Could split materia slots into secondary (damage-affecting) and tertiary (not-damage) slots, and then allow selection only with in each group. This would remove the fool's choice we currency have, it'd also remove the newbie trap of having not looking up a system the game neither exposes you to nor explains you, but also allows actual, genuine, choice within the constraints.