New Grand Company Gear. Is there even a point?

I haven't thoughtfully compared the stats yet. But they aren't meldable. Sure, their base stats are higher than crafted gear, but any one piece of tier IV materia throws them out of the water. So IS there any point to Grand Company gear? Or more specifically, LL gear? I'm a level 50 CNJ, but discussion is open to all GC's and classes.

for people who dont have good materia

Materia/Money isn't all that hard to come by, though. And why is Sentinel's set the only Stronghold set to have Materia slots? If they're going to feature Materia, they need to balance gear around it. A set of armor you can get as soon as you hit 50 and have the best tanking set isn't right.

not meldable? man i was looking forward to having a high level shirt/pants on my pug instead of the S and M outfit... game really really needs more gear options per class. especially pug, even more so now that we are magical fist types and not sneaky thug types.

Some of the stats on certain pieces cannot be gotten by melding materia onto them. So for certain situations some pieces are good simply because you cannot get the stat through materia melding.

SE needs to allow some form of limited melding to rare gear though... too much is negated through stuff that can be crafted for 30k.

maybe its for ppl that have worked out you don't need the best gear complete content in this game. so they have gone for something that looks cooler than crafted gear :P

I was interested in the gloves from Gridania for my Arc. But not sure if I can make better ones with materia.

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Originally Posted by grandm

maybe its for ppl that have worked out you don't need the best gear complete content in this game. so they have gone for something that looks cooler than crafted gear :P

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i can see if the gear was like special, but the shirt from what ive seen is basically what we would probably have gotten from a level 45+ shirt (probably felt) which is curiously missing from the game, even though level 50 would be the level it would appear since the last one was a level 40 EQ.
Overall per job you tend to only have two viable options per slot. The game should have imo, a lot more style choices, and also some cooler style choices, almost all the styles we have now are fairly close visually to things we have used for 1.2 years. well we got jse coming, but truth is that is probably going to put the options down to 1 oh wells

If I had to guess, I would say its for people who, after level cap raises, do not want to waste time attaching materia to gear they will not use for very long.

Other than that, there is the possibility that these particular pieces have stats that you can not add to a crafted piece.

i.e. A Body Piece with Control because Control Materia only attaches to tools.

Flame sergeants sash is amazing to damn bad I picked Gridania so I can't have it. Unless they added a way to buy items from other companies but i'm sure they haven't yet.