Gear Melding Question

Hey all, so I have a question regarding gear melding. So far, I'm level 57. I've noticed that you're unable to come anywhere close to a stat cap for melding gear by putting materia into said item unless the piece of gear has a base stat that you're melding in.

So for example. A piece of gear of with an IL of 139 can only have materia melding with a max of +4 to any stat. With that being said, if you're trying to raise a stat from 0 the cap is 56, but the absolute most you can place is +8 and another +4 with an overmeld for a total of +12.

So does it ever become truly worth it to "create" a stat on a piece of gear?

If not, have the devs ever thought about adding reforging?

First off, don't meld gear that isn't capstone gear. In fact, don't meld gear below level 100.

Second of all, in this game gear progression involves picking the gear with the best substats (that is crit, determination and direct hit, order depends on your job) and then melding whatever is missing. So unless you're melding a healer, you shouldn't have this problem, and if you do, you should retry melding at lv100.

Melding gear is a waste of time until you are max level. The reason for that is you will keep upgrading your gear every few levels on your journey to 100, causing your newly-melded gear to be thrown away. The max level is 100.

You can't meld "main stats" anymore. It used to be possible to, but it no longer is. Everything you will meld now is a substat.

Substats on gear tend to work where one of them is capped, and the other is not. So you can meld any stat that is not capped. In some cases, melding multiple pieces of materia will cause the other stat to cap as well - if this will happen, it will show as RED when you hover over it in the meld window. You should normally avoid melding that stat if it shows as red.

Normally, melding the second substat on the gear doesn't overcap it, but sometimes it does. It depends. A lot of gear allows you to meld two pieces of materia.

There is one exception to this: crafted gear. Typically, when item levels increase, it's extended by 30 item levels:
740 - Crafted / Normal Raid gear
750 - Weekly Tomestone Gear
760 - Savage Raid Gear / Augmented Tomestone Gear (augmented via Savage)

So crafters can do something called "pentamelding" to the crafted gear, where they go beyond the materia limit (which is usually 1 or 2). They can go up to 5! The catch is it's a random chance, and if the chance fails, they lose the materia. Thus, it can be costly. Again, we don't worry about that sort of thing until max level and beating MSQ usually.

You do not have to meld the second substat on the gear. You can meld a stat completely not shown on any gear that you have. This is done on tanks, for example - they don't naturally have Direct Hit on their gear anymore, but they meld it regardless, because Direct Hit is really good.

By the way, you can also ask New Player questions in the New Player Forum where your thread won't get buried by other threads as much: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ew-Player-Help

You don't really need to worry about melding until the max level for each expansion, and even then for past content it's not exactly important.

And because of how the game is "balanced", the most important stat to put into every gear with materia is Critical Hit (from Savage Aim materia).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Codyjt92

Hey all, so I have a question regarding gear melding. So far, I'm level 57. I've noticed that you're unable to come anywhere close to a stat cap for melding gear by putting materia into said item unless the piece of gear has a base stat that you're melding in.

So for example. A piece of gear of with an IL of 139 can only have materia melding with a max of +4 to any stat. With that being said, if you're trying to raise a stat from 0 the cap is 56, but the absolute most you can place is +8 and another +4 with an overmeld for a total of +12.

So does it ever become truly worth it to "create" a stat on a piece of gear?

If not, have the devs ever thought about adding reforging?

---

Yes. The stat weight doesn't change per piece, its overall stat. If the gear piece you have on doesn't have your best stats on it its a gain over melding an existing substat on it thats suboptimal. Theres still randomized stat gear at 57 but the later gear has set stats assigned to pieces so theres no need for reforging at the later levels. Also feel free to throw whatever low lv materia you have into your gear as you level since it both increases your stats and gives you faster spirit bond per piece of materia in that item. While you won't always be able to extract materia from it sometimes you'll have a piece long enough to get a free materia out of it. Its not hyper important as you level though so don't break the bank trying to meld up all your gear. Just fill what you can. General rule of thumb for gear is your tomestone gear from each 10 lv increment is the best bang for your buck melding since it will last you to half way to the next xpac capstone gear. So you could save each xpacs materia and throw it in that.