Gear set list asterisk - what does it mean?

Before the flames, I looked everywhere for this but can't find an answer.

For a while there has been a notice that pops up that says gear was equipped, but materia and aetherial attributes could not be restored. It seems after update 2.28 if you update your gear set after getting this message you get an asterisk next to the avg. item lvl (i.e. MIN(*17)). Is this a bug? If it's not, why can't these attributes be restored? How are the attributes lost in the first place. If anyone can clarify this, I would appreciate it.

The game tries to give you the EXACT item you have in a gear set, and if you add a new materia the game will put the item in but let you know its "different" from what your set says it is. So its not really that something is lost, just changed in some way. This happens with the atma weapons as you do the books too.

As far as the * goes, I assumed it was to designate a gear set that has the new weapon sheathed and head gear displayed options on it, since those came about when it started showing up.

The asterisk is just 2.2's default way of labeling your gear sets. Prior to 2.2 it would just label it according to the ilvl of the gear set's weapon, but now it refers to the average ilvl of the set.

Before 2.1 or so, saved gear sets couldn't differentiate between identical armor that had different materia - e.g. you had 3 raptorskin rings, 2 socketed for miner/fisher, but the fisher one uses different materia. The gear set would just pick the two rings that appeared nearest to the beginning of the list rather than the correct materia. Now it picks the gear with the right materia, but you'll get that error every time you make any tiny change to the set without saving.

The "asterix" is actually not asterix but the icon of the "person" and it indicates that the set name is based on the iLVL rather than (as previously) on the level of the main weapon / tool/

Okay. Thanks All.

Pretty sure they just changed it from "[JOB] (iLv#)" to "[JOB] (*#)" merely for two cosmetic reasons:

1) Pre-patch, WHMs may have noticed that their default gearset name looked like this "WHM (iLv9..." because there was too much text to display (WHM uses wider characters than any other job). Changing iLv to an asterisk fixed this.
2) Now that we're reaching 3-digit iLevel numbers, even more jobs could run into the issue where their default gearset names contain an elipsis (mentioned above) because it's too long. Changing iLv to an asterisk fixed this.

So if you don't want to get that error message you should update your gear set immediately after applying materia, right?

Yes. This also happens for the Atma weapons while you are in the process of upgrading them.