Yellow script augmentation an alternative to overmelding

If you can't afford to buy/overmeld the 320 gear, is the augmented 330 yellow scrip gear (aside from the yuckiness that it is class specific), a good goal to aim for?

Token/scrip gear for crafting has never been so bad that you can't craft with it, so I'd say so, if you don't want to invest in overmelds. Just bear in mind it's a long long grind and your costs incurred in collecting the sets could very well outweigh your cost in materia and the ala mhigan gear itself (dependent, of course, on your server's market).

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Originally Posted by Elamys

Token/scrip gear for crafting has never been so bad that you can't craft with it, so I'd say so, if you don't want to invest in overmelds. Just bear in mind it's a long long grind and your costs incurred in collecting the sets could very well outweigh your cost in materia and the ala mhigan gear itself (dependent, of course, on your server's market).

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I agree don't bother with it, it is not worth the grind imho! the DOTL tools are okay though. Use the yellow scripts for the materials you need to craft with. You can still make the requirements with Grade V's materia, you can compensate the control with HQ items which you should be doing anyway with the new 3*** recipes

In general the pattern seems to go scrip gear < crafted gear < augmented scrip gear < pentamelded crafted gear in terms of highest stats. Regular scrip gear will let you craft any of the one star stuff, crafted should let you craft the 2 star (maybe with a few cheap melds or food), augmented scrip and pentamelded should let you do 3 star at this point. Your ability to HQ the items will suffer a bit with lower stats but its still possible to HQ a lot of non end game stuff even with just scrip gear.

But if you want to HQ the 3star stuff reliably, your best bet is pentamelded crafted gear.

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Originally Posted by Alien_Gamer

In general the pattern seems to go scrip gear < crafted gear < augmented scrip gear < pentamelded crafted gear in terms of highest stats. Regular scrip gear will let you craft any of the one star stuff, crafted should let you craft the 2 star (maybe with a few cheap melds or food), augmented scrip and pentamelded should let you do 3 star at this point. Your ability to HQ the items will suffer a bit with lower stats but its still possible to HQ a lot of non end game stuff even with just scrip gear.

But if you want to HQ the 3star stuff reliably, your best bet is pentamelded crafted gear.

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Yes, but if you look at the time to get yellow scripts for a single piece and augment it, I personally don't think it is worth the time to gil ratio. But that is my two cents. For the topic on hand, the choice is yours to make.

I kinda looked into this matter a little bit. What I found is:
(1) After pentamelding, an i320 has much better stats than the augmented i330. This includes better control, better craftsmanship and most importantly better CP. This came to me as a bit of a shock, since I was expecting the i330 to have at least 1 better stats (e.g. control) than the i320 despite having less CP and less of the 3rd stats.
(2) They did reduce the amount of yellow scrips required to get i300. But when you are upgrading it to i330, the amt of yellow scrip is still pretty substantial. (e.g. i300 tools used to cost 1300 yellow scrips. Now just 500-ish in patch 4.2. But still, need another 700-ish to upgrade to i330.)

So I agree with all of you (Elamys, Alien_Gamer, Faeon). I don't think it's worth the time to grind yellow scrips for i330 (especially because they're class-specific). If you already HAVE the yellow scrips to spare, and you don't have enough stats to craft your own i320, then sure, why not boost your stats a bit and grab a piece of i330. But still, it's just a stepping stone, so don't overdo it.

I admit that overmelding can be expensive, but since we now have the flexibility of removing materia. One can now meld whatever he/she can afford on Tier VI first, and then just cheaply overmeld some Tier 4 CP materia. Later, remove those CP materia at 100% rate, and re-meld again with Tier VI or Tier V.

OK thanks.

I see what you all mean about the progression between script gear < crafted < augmented scrip < overmelded crafted.

The thing is as I am just reaching endgame now, I simply don't have a lot of gil. I am up around 3 million and that is the most I've ever had. When I read about the expected prices for either buying the 320 HQ gear or overmelding, I just can't imagine my 3 million getting me very far. I've only ever seen 1 of each of the DOH VI materia and that was from M'Naago's custom delivery rank ups which are done.

So it seems to me that crafting and overmelding the 320 would involve :

a) making the 290 HQ gear and hopefully being able to gather mats for the 320 gear or else needing to buy them (or buy the 320 gear if it is cheaper)
including grind yellow scripts to get the alchemics

b) overmelding the 320 gear itself would require:

- needing to spirit bond a ton of stuff to get more VIs or buy it
- grind red scrips to buy more Vs or IVs or buy them
- use however many materia it takes

I anticipate that this will be more than I can afford to do with 3 million gil and since I can't really make anything that will sell, I'd be needing to grind the living daylights out of DoL mats anyway to be able to afford any of this.

So I thought grinding scrip gear might be a viable alternative.

If you only had 3 million gil at the this point in the expansion and were just hitting 70, what would you do?

I gathered and made all of my gear myself, which significantly cut down on costs. Gathering materials yourself will always save the most costs. I also had a lot of grade V materias left from stockpiling at the end of Heavensward, which isn't so much an option for you now, but can still be purchased with red scrips. Like Caimie said, you can do cheaper melds and replace them later. Also, if you have a lot of combat materia, Mutamix's roulette is a much better option now for getting good materia. I turned all my unused combat materia and by the end of it had pretty much all gathering and crafting materia.

I think it's also important to consider what your goals in crafting are. Is it merely to be able to make some leveling gear, do your own repairs, etc? Heck, a twinsilk set is enough to get you past, and that's inexpensive to make. Is it to make endgame gear and do hard crafts? You'll want to eventually get a pentamelded Ala Mhigan set. Is it to make furnishings? An unmelded or partially melded Ala Mhigan set might be good, or basic scrip items. It's up to you to decide how deep you wanna get into crafting.

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Originally Posted by XenabelleS

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If you only had 3 million gil at the this point in the expansion and were just hitting 70, what would you do?

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To start, wonder what I had done wrong.

Buy the NQ set in Ala Mhigo, meld open slots with IVs, use a squadron spiritbonding manual, get my FC to use the SB buff, eat NQ warrior's stew from the vendor in Reunion, and rapid synth materials like twinthread and durium nuggets. I would grind red scrip for the books. (I always seem to hit 70s gathering before crafting so I pay nothing for the raw materials.)

Selling the materials will give you an income and you will be stockpiling materia.

You might consider, in that spiritbinding, crafting the accesories from that set, HQ. Stick one materia onto them and they’ll SB at the same rate that the NQ left side stuff with 2 materia does.

More materia for the crafting time spent is always a good thing. Oh, if your Ixali beast tribe is leveled up, burning a few BT Allowances on them can get you a bunch of low grade Materia for slotting into the SB’d gear.

They are viable, albeit not as efficient as the HQ/Melded option. If you're a casual crafter, you can't go wrong with an augmented set, but if you're a perfectionist/purist who wants the utmost top-results, you have to be prepared to do the grunt/gil work. Assuming you have no interest in special recipes or max-tier crafting, even just HQ 290's (o-meld) will suffice for everything and anything outside of mega-recipes, though by all means, use the weekly Custom Delivery income to grab yourself the main-hands and augment them at will.

Beside chest pants weapon I wouldn't go for the upgrade if u can't overmeld. The gain is marginal and that's a Lot of yellow scripts. Weapon is arguably the best since you always need 1per job.

I've always considered upgrade to be something for casual crafter always crafting with the same 1 or 2 crafter.

A friend of mine has all 70 but 95% of her craft are potions food and 0star stuff. Therefor I told her going for upgraded alchemy cooking wouldn't be such a bad idea if she doesn't want to overmeld her 325 gear.

Basically, go for what's optimal for your need

Depending on what classes you have pentamelded HQ gear can be either ruinously expensive or almost free.

If you can gather all your mats, you really don't have to worry about cost at all; the mats are really easy to get even in NQ without melds. Those that can't be gathered are bought with scrips and the highest turn in for that is lv 68 gear which you don't need anywhere close to best gear to be able to turn those in. It is very much a slower process to gather and craft all your mats, but it is free.


As for melds. I can do the 3 star crafts without any tier 6 materia. Tier 6 means you'll need fewer melds to reach the same stats and leave you in a better position to overmeld for the next tier of gear but it is far from required for the current set. Tier 4/5 materia are both bought with red scrips. Again, much slower than buying from the MB but also free if you do it right.

You'll also notice as your stats get higher you can craft house furniture to sell on the MB, this will net you lots and lots and lots of gil to help pay for things if you're tired of doing it the long way.

And when I say it takes a long time, for me it took months but I was also dividing my time between making crafts for gil, leveling other classes, helping friends and gearing up my crafters. How you chose to play and how much time you want to devote to it can shorten that timeframe considerably.

I would also caution you against going overboard with some melds and gear right now. The reason being is 4.3 will be in 3 months and the next tier of gear will be released and that gear should be viable into 4.5. You may be better served by going for lower stats that will let you earn some better gil and saving that to buy a few better pieces in 4.3 and start your end game crafting there. Personally I always feel bad when I finish a set only to see it overwritten in 2 weeks by better gear. At that point I don't feel like I got my moneys worth out of it; its a subjective point but something to consider.

I'm using the i330 augmented gear and I can reliably macro 100% HQ 3 star recipes (70 durability) as long as I start with 7000 quality (most of the times 5000 quality is enough but 7000 is 100% guaranteed). I use Tempura Platter NQ and my final stats with it are 1500 craftmanship, 1402 control and 493CP.
No way in hell I'd go through overmelding V and VI, if you buy them and have bad luck, you can easily blow up dozens of millions of gil with the last overmelds. Granted, I only craft food so this works for me. Omnicrafters have no choice but to get the ala mhigan set and meld it.

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Originally Posted by XenabelleS

The thing is as I am just reaching endgame now, I simply don't have a lot of gil. I am up around 3 million and that is the most I've ever had. When I read about the expected prices for either buying the 320 HQ gear or overmelding, I just can't imagine my 3 million getting me very far. I've only ever seen 1 of each of the DOH VI materia and that was from M'Naago's custom delivery rank ups which are done.

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Just to note for anyone stingy like me short on gil, you don't need expensive overmelds to craft anything current

This was my initial set, which enabled me to Makers Mark craft Special 2 stars, such as Snail Oil and the 320 craft gear.
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/15ID1

My finished set is:
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/15IDE

As you can see, no V overmelds. No VI's at all. Even has very few III's to save on Ixali Oaknots. You can macro craft special-2 star, 3 star-35 and 70 Dura reliably with only a few HQ materials with those stats.

I, II and III materia can be obtained from Ixali dailies. IV's can be obtained from Squadron missions, Red Scrips and Ixal. V's are obtained from doing the lv70 class quest on all 8 crafters for a total of 32 Crafting V materia, more than enough. So you can basically do everything for free.

Hope that helps.
Scrip gear is overpriced tbh. The amount of scrips you'd need is worth a small fortune in Alchemics by itself for inferior gear.

OK thank you all for the advice.

Finally hit all 70 last night and have crafted my zelkova right side HQ. Can finally start using custom deliveries for yellow scrips instead of levelling. The last post encourages me. My browser doesn't let me see the materia you used but I'll try again from home. It's nice to hear that there is a way to do it without VIs though.

Some of you asked about goals ... I think broadly I'd like to be able to make anything but I don't have much/any confidence about ever being able to make gil from crafting. I'm on a legacy server so don't believe there are any markets that aren't completely saturated by people with far deeper pockets than myself.

So my short term plan is to upgrade my DOL tools and gear to 290 HQ, finish crafting the left side 290 HQ and looking into yellow scrip tools with the goal of augmenting them. Then I'll look into what will be needed for the 320 left side set and see if I can gather/buy the mats to have an FC mate craft it.

I remember using scrip tools in Heavensward just because I found it too difficult to craft 2/3 star gear with 1 star tools and I couldn't make better tools without better crafting gear. From my experience the difference between augmented scrip tools and overmelded crafted ones is minimal (mostly lacking a few CP from a meld) as the rest stats are pretty close. If like me in HW you struggle to craft better crafting/gathering gear then you could always just get the scrip tools needed (alchemist, weaver, leatherworker) to craft the gear and then make the rest of the tools :)

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Originally Posted by XenabelleS

... I think broadly I'd like to be able to make anything but I don't have much/any confidence about ever being able to make gil from crafting. I'm on a legacy server so don't believe there are any markets that aren't completely saturated by people with far deeper pockets than myself....

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I am on Sarganatas as well and probably have deeper pockets than you. But a lack of gil does not mean you cannot make bank synthing. ESPECIALLY if you gather.

I make most of my gil gathering but a LOT crafting. I like making armor, weapons, and jewelry. I tend to ignore potions and food although I make both for my FC's raiding team. The stuff I like to make is high profit and low sale rate. Potions and food are high sales rate, low profit.

Find things you can make from what you can gather, search for low competition if low turnover items, or if high turnover items stuff you can gather everything to make it. Time is the antidote against those with deep pockets.

Feel free to look me up on Sarganatas.

Edit: I hardly ever do housing items but there are many who make bank exclusively off them.