Alternative to Heavy Metal PlatesFollow

The Heavy Metal Plate requirement of the Empyrean weapon is still incredibly onerous and incredibly expensive. On Bismarck, a person upgrading from stage 90 can expect to drop 120 million gil on that stage alone, comparable to the entire cost of a level 95 relic. Scarcity and the number of players upgrading these items are holding the price steady. (Compare this to the Umbral Marrows, where the price has dropped quite a lot since the 99 relic requirements came out. It's down to about 55 million gil on Bismarck.)

I would like to propose an additional/alternative non-sellable, non-tradeable EX form of the HMP, that comes each time a person successfully clears any tier of voidwatch. Due to the limitations on stones, it would take a person nearly three years to complete without supplementing it with the regular form that comes the Riftworn Pyxis.

What would this do?

- Give people upgrading a reason to not hoard their stones for the umpteenth Uptala run and instead help their linkshell clear the cities, since a city run will give them the same EX plate as the Uptala run
- Relieve some of the pressure and reduce the obscene cost of the 95 Empyrean weapons
- Allow casual players the opportunity to eventually complete the weapon if they keep hammering at it for three years

Someone who wants to upgrade quickly can, of course, still buy 1500 plates, or do the Tier III Zilart runs and hope for pouches.

Let Shami store them like beastman seals so that a person can begin saving them on their first VW run.

(Even better: Let the damn Crystal Petrifacts also function in the capacity. Good lord I hate those things.)

Or just knock a @#%^ing 0 off the 1500 already. :/

really? I've seen the price of plates plummet on asura recently. It's gone from 120K each to 80K each and now I see people selling them regularly for 75K each.

As a scrublet without an empy, I personally really like that getting a single plate still is a worthwhile drop for me. It's a good source of cash for folks like me, and I think that removing one of the very few items that makes gil trickle down from the super-weapon "class" of players to the "mid-tier scrub" class of players would be sucky. Crikes, selling plates is one of the few ways I can possibly hope to afford an 85/90 super weapon of any sort... getting rid of that won't make the game more fair.

Now, if you want to talk about adding another source of colorless souls, I'm totally with you.