Morning in Vana'diel: Augmenting Your Pants.

Morning in Vana'diel is your daily dose of FFXI and all things Vana'diel. Give us your thoughts on the interesting topics of the day! Today, Today, Ring looks at Augments in the July Update and can't stop giggling. I can't even say Titmouse without giggling.

God, Augments have to be the best thing ever created for blog post titles. "That's gold Jerry! Gold!" Alright, so we have the potential to Augment decent gear now. What does that mean for everyone? Well, my first thought is that this is finally the crafting solution SE has been promising for a while. Augmented items can't be resold. They are economic dead-ends if you don't get the Augment that you wanted. This means that there will be increased demand for just about any item that can be used for Augmenting. More demand means more profit for crafters, more profit for crafters means more gil spent on other things. Stagnation in demand is the worst thing for the FFXI economy and this is an artificial boost to demand.

Someone will always complain about improvements, and the complaints this time come in the form of randomness being the evil of all games. I agree with this complaint, at some point randomness becomes annoying when you have to do the same thing over and over just to get a small improvement in gear. I do have two responses that overwhelm this concern though. First, it's the nature of FFXI, all MMO's and even all modern RPG's to have RNGs determine your gear, your strength, your survival, everything. Second, even if it is annoying to have more randomness injected into the game, it is still better to improve the economy and deal with the randomness. I think the effect of this is going to be huge. It is going to effect a large number of crafts, especially smithing, clothcraft and leathercraft because they have viable synths for good end-game gear that can be purchased off of the AH. It will even benefit those items that are in mass supply because of BCNM drops, like Warwolf Belts for example.

Of course it is too early to tell the exact effects of these new Augments, especially the ones that come from the Pixies which are a completely different issue. If you can't look past the system itself to see the benefits to the economy, though, then I think it is more a case of general frustration instead of weighing the pros and the cons.

Do you think this is a boost to crafting? Do you think this is just going to turn into one more time sink? Are you looking to get a sweet augmented item? Or are you unwilling to risk the sweet gear you already have? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!