Lower iLvl gear better than higher iLlv?

Ever since I was a sprout, whenever I searched for information about gear, any info I found always started with "item level is the primary factor in determining the item's stats" so higher number = better item, right?

Now that I'm in the endgame, I noticed the following:

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Augmented Cryptlurker's Mesail of Casting (iLVL 530):

+427 Vitality
+413 Intelligence
+211 Spell Speed
+301 Direct Hit Rate

2 materia slots, "Advanced Melding Forbidden"

Total: 1 352 points + 120 materia = 1 472

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Law's Order Helm of Casting (iLVL 510):

+375 Vitality
+372 Intelligence
+288 Spell Speed
+202 Determination

5 materia slots!

Total: 1 237 points + 300 materia = 1 537

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Although the base stats are indeed lower on the i510 gear, thanks to the 5 materia slots, you can get 65 more points on this peace of gear. Maybe not much, but it adds up if you do it with the whole set.

That said, am I missing something? Is the lower iLVL gear actually better stat-wise than the higher one and this whole "just look at the item level" advice I've heard all the time only applies to lower levels where it's a simple indicator of what's "better"?

Depends on the content you're running.
For example: if you're getting ilvl synced you don't get the bonus of materia.

Also, what has more stats isn't always what's important.
Do those 3 extra materia make up for the piece giving 202 Det vs 301 DH? Would these things change any of your classes stat break points?

Gearing can get surprisingly crunchy.
Though... unless you're doing Ultimate, early Savage content, or are doing some fancy speedruns/min iLVL runs... you're fine to just stick with the higher iLVL pieces.
The small stat differences are not worth fretting over in 99% of content.
That being said, I'm not trying to discourage people who are always trying to do their best.
But because pieces are contextually "better," there is no indicator for what piece is best. You've gotta do the math yourself.

In general though, get that iLVL up and you'll be great~

Your main stats are considerably lower on the 510 vs the 530, it’s a loss of 41 int. Weapon damage >>>> main stat >> substats unless you are certain jobs, and this mostly pertains to healers when it comes to piety. Healers have such strong mp recovery tools than unless you’re spamming aoe heals or raises you should not run out of mp, making piety entirely useless. Piety is a prog/comfort substat, I personally prefer melding it if I’m going to use it to replace once I get more comfortable with the content.

Also, crit is king for nearly every job except blm as far as substats go, blm only gets more benefit out of spell speed because of how long their cast times are on their nuke, allowing them to go through more cycles in a given time frame.

Generally you only want to min/max substats when you’re at max ilvl, and generally to hit certain stat breakpoints. So you’ll want a mix of 530 savage gear, 530 tome gear, some of the 525 zadnor gear is pretty competitive or can be used prior to getting a better 530 variant, or for certain jobs (like healer again) a 520 augmented crafted ring because the 530 tome has piety.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Do those 3 extra materia make up for the piece giving 202 Det vs 301 DH?

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Technically, I could meld those missing stats using materia if I want to. The way I see it is that with the i530 item, I have a pool of 1 472 points, but I can only make a decision on how to allocate 120 of them (2x materia), but with that i510 item, not only do I get a higher pool of 1 537 points, but I can decide how to spend 300 of those points (5x materia). That said, if someone really wants to min/max the stats, wouldn't the latter be "better" as in - allowing more choice and resulting in higher stats overall?

Now, I'm aware that those numbers don't make you good in general, that's a whole different story, but I was just wondering if based just on the raw numbers, everything else being equal, it's possible to get a higher stat gear which is lower iLvl and based on the answers so far it seems that it is true, right?

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Originally Posted by Eclipse12187

Generally you only want to min/max substats when you’re at max ilvl, and generally to hit certain stat breakpoints.

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Can you explain why? I mean, let's say I had two pieces of gear, both with the exact same base stat types, one starts with higher base stats, but gives me an option to add +120 points, the other starts with lower numbers, but allows me to allocate +300 points AND the total ends up 65 points higher... and let's say that allows me to hit some break points. Why would it still be better to generally go for higher iLvl and only min/max with a pool of 120 points to work with? That's what I'm trying to understand.

OP, you are adding together all possible stats on an item and treating them equally, whereas in actuality weapon damage, defense, magic defense, vitality, and intelligence are all stats that you cannot raise with materia and contribute more to your survivability and power than other stats. These are the item's "main stats". So, the way the game handles stats it is not correct to lump every stat on an item into a "pool", that is, 1,472 vs. 1,537 "stats". They are not equally contributing to your power level. Main stat increases are directly tied to ilevel, thus higher ilevel = more of this core power.

So, anything other than the above stats that might be present on an item or that can be raised with materia are "sub stats". Materia cannot raise the more powerful main stats. Materia and substats are generally for tweaking your stats when main stats are otherwise equal between two pieces of gear. Some posters above hinted at some edge cases where this might not hold true as much but generally speaking if your gear is not being synced down to something very specific the main stats are much more valuable.

Like eorzea wanderer above stated, are the extra 180 substat points worth more than the int/vit loss for lower ilvl, or in the case of weapons the weapon damage loss. In nearly all cases (barring piety) those extra substats do not outweigh the main stat gains.

Stats do not scale by 1 per x, you need to hit a certain breakpoint in order to achieve a gain. For example, it’s roughly 100 spell speed in order to reduce your gcd by .01 so this means if you have 99 spell speed the entirety of that is wasted. Direct hit is roughly 6 for .1% gain, each dhit 8 materia adds 1% total dhit chance, I’m not sure what the breakpoints for crit or det are offhand sadly (etro.gg has a gear simulator that you can check out for those numbers). Crit itself is weight the most heavily because it not only increases your chance to get a critical hit, but it increases the base multiplier of how much your crits do.

The main reason you go for highest ilvl is because you have high main stats (vit, int, str, etc) and higher substat caps. Say you wanted more crit on your 510 piece, even though it has 5 materia slots the upper limit for a substat on there is 288, so you could either meld 240 crit and 60 det or do 5 crit materia and lose 12 crit due to the cap. You look for highest ilvl gear that has the stats you want and meld around hitting specific spell speed tiers for your optimal gcd, then hitting other stat breakpoints to minimize having dead stats like in my spell speed example above.

Overall you can’t look at a piece by piece basis, you have to look at the total of all of your pieces combined.

I see. I guess that's the main thing I've been missing - the main stats vs. sub-stats distinction. Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying :)