Thinking About Starting Up

#1 To obtain materia you have to build up spiritbond on your gear. To add spiritbond to your gear you have to use said gear in either battles, gathering or crafting. Let's say you are a 50ARC and are looking for some +5 STR materia that drops from Ranger's Tunic (hypothetical).

#2 So you form an xp party and grind for x amount of time until your Ranger's Tunic has 100% spiritbond on it. Now when you turn a piece of gear into materia you lose the gear, forever. Also each piece of gear has it's own small loot table of specific material, and a random chance that it can be any of the materia in the loot table.

#3 Let's say the Ranger's Tunic has 5 different Materia associated with it. In the worst case scenario you could possibly not get the materia you want 4 times in a row (or even longer), having to make new mats to make a new Tunic or buy a new Tunic each time and spiritbonding them all until you get the correct one. Gil is now relevant and gil will be used heavily in 1.19. Now imagine having to do this with all gear slots: head, body, legs, feet, hands, waist, main weapon, sub weapon. Now imagine you already have every DoW/DoM to 50 and you have to do it for all that gear too. It's staggering.

#4 Now after you have all of your materia and are ready to mend it into a piece of gear you have to remember that the first mending is 100% success rate and each attempt after will have a lower % chance of success. If you fail to attach say the second or third materia to your piece of gear the item blows up and you lose everything.

Now imagine you have an HQ piece of gear with 2~3 materia already on it and you go for the forbidden materia attachment and you fail. All that hard work is immediately lost and you have to start the ENTIRE process over again.

Super high risk vs. Super high reward. The amount of time that will be put into Materia blows XI's vanilla Merit system out of the water. Also don't forget about other content as well. Bowl of Embers has the potential to last 3x as long as Dzemael Darkhold did because the failure lockout is 15 minutes instead of 5.

Just some things to chew on while you wait for 1.19 :D

That all seems terribly specific. It's definitely not speculation?

I kind of skimmed over the materia section, but if all of that is true it is rather disconcerting indeed.

With the size of this patch im just happy uldah wont be as much of a ghost town in some server as it is now. When i started in trabia ive only seen one shout for party my rank (20's) If new people start or return either way it works for us players not in lvl 30 or 40's :) TY SE.

not speculation it's common sense based on the content revealed.

Materia looks fun though. It appears that as long as it is just 1 piece of Materia on a piece of gear than it is ok and cannot be destroyed.

I have started btw. I am on Besaid. I am just trying to get the hang of the controls and combat system. I am a Felalala Conjurer right now.

Arent they getting rid of "physical levels"? Cause I honestly do not know what that is anyway.

Ya they're abolishing physical lvs i just got 50 on mine

So it's going to be more of a Job system now? With each Job/Class being independant of each other. Can you carry over skills/spells from class to class?

It doesn't seem like anything is really changing as far as that goes.

Points will be auto allotted. I guess that's the main thing.
It seems they're also making adjustments on stat increases by level or something.