Materia masters, please help me, I'm about to have a melt down.

So from day one, I've been dead set on doing my very own armor and weapons, materia and potions, every single thing, I've wanted to be self-sufficient in.

It started with Heavy Iron Armor, I made it, tried to put Vitality 1 into it. It told me the item level was too high and would not be effective. So I said, okay, next time, I'll make the armor closer to the materia and it'll work better.

Second attempt, this time level 32 Steel Scale Armor, and naturally, level 30 Vitality 2 materia. Again, I get a message, this time item is too low, and it is +0. What am I doing wrong? Why can't I put materia in my armor? Why does armor other than the same level as materia even have slots in it, if you can't put anything into it?

Please help me, I'm so irritated right now.

Also like to add that I am level 32 armorer so it should be fine to meld.

There's a cap on how much equipment of a given level can boost a stat. Steel Scale Mail and Heavy Iron Armor both already boost your Vitality by six, and you can't make it do more with Materia. There's a whole system about how much a level and slot can boost a given stat with Materia + the item's native ability. I don't understand all the ends and outs of it myself. For example, I was trying to boost my craftmanship on some level 29 jewelry, but even though the jewelry didn't have any pluses to craftmanship itself, I still couldn't get more than +2 craftsmanship out of a level 1 craftmanship Materia (which gives +3). Sometimes you just have to try the meld to see if you get capped. If you're looking to improve your defense, you might try Battledance to improve your parry, or Dexterity to the same end. Trying Strength to improve your parry is likely to run into the same problem as Vitality, as the armor is natively already giving you a lot.

That sounds like the current Materia system is broken. ALL armor gives + to vitality for tanks. So disallowing them to put more vitality on it should they choose to is quite possibly the largest mess up I've ever seen. It's outrageous, and highlights the point as to why people are farming for Darklight armor instead of crafted. You simply cannot make it better because the materia system caps you already making DarkLight a 2% decrease in benefits overall.

This is dumb :(

They're not getting Darklight just because it's better. People are getting Darklight because most people are not crafters and in this game after questing you have no way to make money outside crafting/gathering, so you see your funds first halved or completely wiped out by the relic quest costs (Quicktongue materia III for healers is just ridiculous at 70-80k a piece) and what little you have you need to conserve for 800-1k repair every other hour from speed running and the 400 gil costs per teleport.

People simply can't afford to buy crafted gear at the prices they would be offered.

probably why there so many people getting hacked cause theres just no real way to get any gil and they have trash mobs dropping 1 gil seriously I really wonder if this game was really ready for launch but I guess you could just lvl another class cause seems the only way to make any gil other than farming are quests /sigh so sick of lvling shit