Originally Posted by
Reika
You need to take in account the inability to equip a helm or boots with the heavy darklight legs and chest. They have higher defense based on that. if you were to wear a normal chest with double defense materia, and a helm, you would have more defense with those put together than the darklight chest.
Darklight gear is better because it has some stats that cant be materia'd onto crafted pieces of the same slot. It definantly should be overal better than stat stacking with materia, and I hope they make it so.
No relic should be beaten by a melded weapon either. There should be something situationally equal like weapons with elemental damage, or even slightly better, in Drop form (or U/U crafting that i brought up elsewhere) but no normal crafted item with any amount of materia should ever beat them. You may be able to get more overall mag att pot with an 80+ int lightning brand +1, but that thing will never have MP conserve or increased crit rate.