Recently I gave some advice about gearing up in the current state of the game. There is (still) a gear drop void between 30-50 it seems as I've asked a few new players who ended up grinding goblin dungeon and were close to 50 while still wearing 35 gear. This problem has been around since I started playing 2-3 years ago.

I was asked when is a good time to start crafting and modding gear. My answer was around 60 (in the current game), this is because leveling from 40-60 is still not that difficult and there isn't content in the game that really requires level 40s to build nicer gear.

So this makes me question the whole concept of level 40s gambling on weapons that can break because what I would tell these level 40s is to just get to level 50 and get a level 50 weapon instead, why waste the time trying to build their level 40-45 weapons (assuming they even have these, because most people still get 35ish gear) when they can just tough it out and wait for level 50-60 weapons instead?

I personally have no issue with risking a weapon that can break in order to make it more powerful, I think my only criticism would be that it requires too many crafts. I think it should just be simplified down. I'll use an example from Final Fantasy 1.0 (no the 2.0 trash right now)

in FF14 1.0, you can add "mods" to a piece of gear. The chance of adding goes like this:

1st: 100% chance
2nd: 35-50% chance (depends on the power of the mod)
3rd: 15% chance
4th: 5% chance
5th: 1-2% chance (I actually got one to go through)

The item can break any time along this path of improvment, you lose both the item and the mod(materia in this case)

I found this system kind of fun and I think it's simple enough to understand for most people. It was definitely not necessary to get beyond 3 mods to do endgame. 2 mods was probably expected.

So my advice would be to lower the amount of times you upgrade these weapons, but increase their chance of breaking as you gamble higher, but maybe the first 1-2 upgrades have a higher chance of happening.