What is this? What can be made from it?

Additional options were honestly an amazing addition, that with the change that made drops more likely to be for your job made it so easy for new players/low-level/side characters to get a set of equipment that was good for you. And for higher level people, it's very easy to get the good Flames from crafting or from events to get your current equipment really good stats, you don't have to pay anything.

If for some reason the scissor count even affected you (why would someone need to trade a piece of equipment 5 times?), you could probably afford to just make another one...

From the people in YMCK they dont like the idea of having to make new gear to cap if they want to switch classes. Which is pretty funny given how much of an innate boost the higher level gears that drop with boosted stats get. I think I saw a clean faf wep from kms that had like 250 att?Not to mention the various other things like more all stat on items and such. And then to that en DA seems like it was based on the premise that the AO's would help it out. Not many armors innately have hp on them and even the scrolls we get for events don't add all that much.

It honestly would have made f2p and p2w way cheaper and it would ease the difficulty behind training because hey, 20k might be the average once you have a main and a way tu supply your other chars with gear? Get a few tradeable all stat things and just level up normally with AO and you can likely get the same or higher.

And then the variations that drop w/o AO would be that much cheaper so people could afford them and when and event rolls around add AO if they so choose or even just craft flames on their own.