Quote Originally Posted by NoloeTazier View Post
Yeah people will still buy items and blow things up for melds, but not on the levels that we did in 1.0. Nowhere near it. The big multi-melds will still be good but mostly a bragging rights thing. They're nerfing materia gains and boosting Dungeon drops through less RNG and more totems. When people can go into Raids and get things for free, they're less likely to spend gil on multiple gear and multiple materia to "attempt" an improvement.
Not sure how true this statement is. To begin with, it's not specifically dungeon drops that they are buffing up - it is balancing character stats & gear stats so gear has less impact. The completionists will still go for "best in slot" which has a high chance of some slots being materia melded, they just won't have as big an impact as they did in 1.0 because character stats will mean a lot more then they did previously.

I daresay there will still be slots (such as INT head or STR melded gloves) that will be ideally better then dungeon gear, but we probably will see less melded body pieces etc.