I am confused about Stat Caps.

I feel silly just asking, but I have been reading through a lot of guides to try and decide which materia to put in my HQ Van'ya Robes of Healing. The rest of my gear is a combo of Darklight/WP/AK armor, if that matters.

I am finding a lot of charts and things that say their are limits for stats for individual pieces of armor (ie. max +6 piety for X slot). I am more than a little confused. Is there a guide out there that explains how this works in greater detail? The materia system is tricky so I am afraid to ask for the wrong melds because playing a healer is very expensive, and I can't afford to waste materia.

What are the caps I need to be concerned about? Are they going to change in 2.1, and if so can I just meld the materia that is going to be best for that patch in advance?

I am leveling a WHM as well, so it would be nice if my Van'ya Healing Robes were itemized in a way that is not going to be totally inefficient to the other. I put all my AP in Mind.

Gear caps are based off of the item's slot and iLvl. There's more than likely a thread with research on it, but the one I have is deprecated, so I'd rather not send you false information. Stat caps will NOT be changing in 2.1, so you don't need to worry about that.

Now, if you're interested in slotting your materia efficiently, it's best to think of it from a "how can this be useful on multiple jobs" perspective. With that, here's an example of my friend Kira Hime's Vanya Robe:

Piety IV (+6)
Piety IV (+6)
Piety IV (+5, reached cap of 17 PIE, so doesn't give full value)
Savage Aim III (Crit Rate +6)
Savage Aim III (Crit Rate +6)

With these, you have:
VIT +20
MND +20
PIE +17
Determination +18
Spell Speed +19
Critical Hit Rate +12

Making it very useful for both SCH and WHM.

Basically, depending on item level and slot each piece of gear has a cap on how high each stat can go. This cap is individual to each cap (so hitting the cap on one doesn't stop you from raising other stats), but it also INCLUDES THE BASE STATS. For HQ battle items, the stats that are already on it will be at or near the cap. Hence why putting Mind on there is actually a bad idea.

You can tell if you've hit the cap, because when melding materia it will say how much the materia will increase the stat. If you hit the cap, that number will be lower than what's listed on the materia, and I believe it's also a different color.

Alright, so I will look for that list of materia, except the robes only have two slots for materia. Does that mean You can force a few extra melds on there, likely with just the issue of RNG possibly destroying the materia?

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Originally Posted by SleepingCetra

Alright, so I will look for that list of materia, except the robes only have two slots for materia. Does that mean You can force a few extra melds on there, likely with just the issue of RNG possibly destroying the materia?

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Yep. It's called "forbidden melding", and it allows you to meld up to 5 materia. Each one gets a lower chance after the guaranteed ones (guaranteed are whatever the slots are, so in this case, 2).

IIRC, when I was melding, it was like 20%, 10%, 5%?

usually its critical hit rate, determination, piety spell speed andvitality that are not capped. Pretty much whatever is hot on the market boards. I had my robe with +27 crit attached, and 8 spell speed, and just did my bracelet, for 8 vit, 8 determination and 8 piety.