As long as it doesn't stop people who don't like heavy grinding from having fun, I see nothing wrong with leaving an avenue to heavy grinding for those that do enjoy it.
On the playthrough that went through the aftergame, doing preparatory poaching -with- the help of savestates I spent nearly half an hour on acquiring...a Dragon Rod.
Well...with all due respect...why? Dragon Rod is the same MA boost as Wizard Rod. It's only noteworthy if you plan to physically attack with your Wizard, and even then the physical attack will suck regardless unless autocast Bahamut kicks in. Yes, it's technically better than the Wizard Rod, but if you don't like grinding I don't really see why you'd bother with it.
Incidentally, the most broken poaches before (perfumes) were common poaches rather than rare ones. This is rather contradictory to the idea that good but not nearly as broken items (rare weapons, etc.) were a pain in the ass to acquire multiple copies of, while the best accessories in the game... were not.
That's...not contradictory at all. In fact it's pretty much exactly what I'm arguing for.
Major upgrades from poaching: easy to get. You're not forced to grind for these.
Getting absolutely everything in the game, raising your final power-level by 5%-10%: hard to get.
The idea is as follows: we don't want to limit content based on how much you grind--stuff like Setiemson and Chantage allow you to play the game in completely different ways than you could before--I have fond memories of using Setiemson and Equip Changing to Chantage when I was close to death. Therefore we let all players get these items. On the other hand, something like Dragon Rod...doesn't change the experience. Yeah, it's a slight upgrade, but not something you need to have for certain strategies. Similarly, something like FS-Bag we don't want to be easily available because of the glitchy way in which it works.
My most recent playthrough in LFT was the second time I had used poaching ever. I hate poaching. What I hate most about it, though, is the annoying process of recruiting the monster and then fighting a pointless battle in which I bench one of my real PCs in favour of a monster so I can poach said monster. And if the 25% chance of getting the rare item (which I'm not looking for) comes up, teeth-gnashing occurs
But yeah, long story short: eliminating common/rare poaches = I can just kill the monster in a battle instead of recruiting it = much less annoying. So I am in favour of this strongly, bias or not.
This, however, is a very good argument that I'll agree with.
I will note, however, that a hybrid solution may be reasonable here. For instance, monsters that let you poach, say, Ice Brand early, you could very easily instead do, say, "common poach = Elixir, rare poach = Ice Brand" there is another non-painful way to get Ice Brands, so it's less important to simplify poaching in these cases.
