Can someone please explain melds and stat weights to me?

Yes, this is a serious thread. Hear me out for a second. I'm not inexperienced, but I am having a bit of a hard time wrapping this around my head. Now, I know that with each job, certain melds take priority. Like how NIN prioritizes Crit>DH>DET in one of the builds I found...I can look up stat priorities. That part I get.

But stat weights, while I suspect are similar, go completely over my head when I use a site like Ariyala and I have to plug in the stat weights. So many numbers, through my various google searches, and I cannot understand it. When putting on melds through the materia melder, the questions that run through my head go in this order:

- Should I do my accessories first?
- Should I do my left side first?
- That stat is maxed out, should I put this meld on another piece that may mess up the build that I am aiming for according to various guides?
- If two of these stats are maxed out, should I put the 3rd priority materia?

Picking up Anemos relic armor really threw me for a complete loop, so I'm honestly just totally, completely, undeniably lost. Plus I'm nowhere near my laptop, so going to the Balance this time is not much of an option. So I ask the ones who actually do have a working knowledge of how this works, can you explain this to me like I'm five?

You are not overmelding, right?
Because in most cases you shouldnt be - with a few eexceptions in the way to BiS, a DPS-class wont use crafted gear as "endgame-gear" but tomestone/raidgear that cant be overmelded.

That kinda answers your first two questions:
Materia is pretty cheap and/or easy to get by now. I have more grade VI materia than I know what to do with and on my server if the most intresting ones (crit and DH) sell for only 80k.
That means it shouldnt be a real question of "left side or right side" first, but simply: Put materia in all open slots that you have.

The way you want to do that is the same for every piece:
Look at the piece - is the first stat you want to meld (crit) maxed out?
No: out crit into it til it is (or til your slots are full)
Yes: Move on to DH.

Same game here - max out DH as best as you can, so either until capped or all slots are filled.

Then move on to Det.

Given how cheap materia is, there is no reason not to fill a slot - so dont go "Oh, I did my accessories, I can wait with the right side!"
Still, its only worth melding things that you know you'll keep longer than a few days. You can retrive materia - 40% chance for grade VI, 80% chance for grade V, everything else is 100%.
So if you get a new piece of gear, you can try and get the materia back out of the old one!

Yeah, I have a lot of cracked clusters and have plenty of grade materia. I usually do meld, especially when I'm about to raid, I just never really understood things like that Stat weight, if there was a certain order of melding (starting right side vs left side), and if there was a certain limit that I couldn't go over.

Stat weight: (weapon damage)> main-stat > sub-stats
Except for very specific exceptions you should just go for the piece of gear with the highste main-stat first. The expections are usually regarding bard and tanks, so they shouldnt bother you.

Order of melding: You got that right! As I explained: Meld all the crit, that you can; then meld all the DH that you can; then meld all the DET that you can. Right side/left side doesnt matter much for DoW/DoM. With the cheap materia right now you shouldnt consider a priority anyways, because you can easly meld everything within 15 minutes. So it doesnt matter where you start.

Limit: Each piece of gear has certain stat-caps. When you try to meld a piece of materia, the game will tell you if you're going over those stat-caps, aswell as the stat-caps in general. All pieces of gear at a certain ilvl share the same stat-caps, aka all ilvl360 rings have a crit cap of 128, for example.
Crit, DH and DET are also stats that you cant have to much off, really. You'll always benefit from them, even if its just a tiny bit.
At the same time a stat like skillspeed for example is only good up to a certain point, when it grants you one more action while having a buff active - warriors used to push for a certain amount of skillspeed. Anything over that would be considered "wasted".
But, again, not the case with your three stats - meld them to the caps that your gear has and you're good!

So for gearing up and melding: Pick the piece that fits your prefered sub-stats best and then throw as much of your prefered sub-stat materia at it as you can.

From my understanding, stat weights values the effect of a stat on your overall DPS, using your main stat as the reference.

For example, let's say you have a build A that deals x DPS. From this set, you increase your main stat by 10, and that it increases your average DPS by 10% (Made up number for simple explanation). Now, instead of increasing your main stat by 10, you keep your previous main stat and increase your Crit by 10, and it increases your average DPS by 5%.

From this you can say that your main stat increases your average DPS by twice of what Crit does. So if we decide that main stat has a weight of 1, Crit should have a weight of 0.5.

At least, that's how it feels to me. And from that, you can infer that there's no difference between left and right side since a stats always have the same impact on your DPS, wherever its melded.

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Originally Posted by KaivaC

Yeah, I have a lot of cracked clusters and have plenty of grade materia. I usually do meld, especially when I'm about to raid, I just never really understood things like that Stat weight, if there was a certain order of melding (starting right side vs left side), and if there was a certain limit that I couldn't go over.

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Ignore Stat weights. They confuse more than they help, and don't really matter anyway.

For each piece of gear there is a maximum for each stat, but no overall maximums.

Just look at each piece of gear separately and meld it according to your stat priority. That's it.
Doesn't matter in which order you meld your gear.

Alrighty. So it looks like from the comments, I had a basic understanding of the concept, I just was overcomplicating it in my head. Excellent. Thank you guys for clearing up my confusion with those areas. The Anemos gear had thrown me off because two of my stats were usually already maxed on individual relic armor pieces when I spoke with the melder, so it left me a bit confused about how I should've melded.

A note on Crit - it scales differently from other stats.

Most stats are addetive - the first point you have of Determination is worth the same as the two-thousandth point of it.

Crit is multiplicative, the more you have the better it functions. More Crit means both more chances for a Critical Hit and also more damage from your Critical Hits where as DH only changes the chance of you getting a Direct Hit.

It's because of this that Crit is generally so prized as we start to be able to stack more of it.

Are there any jobs that don't get as much benefit from crit? DPS-wise?

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Originally Posted by KaivaC

Are there any jobs that don't get as much benefit from crit? DPS-wise?

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As Paladin I take DH over crit, because of how it scales (as Moro explained) and not having any attacks that benefit greatly from crit - its nices when stuff crits, but DH is better (at least it was when I pentamelded my last accessories, I havent checked since). The other two tanks prefer crit or a mix of crit and det though.

I'm not super familiar with the theorycrafting behind BLM, but my boyfriend prefers spellspeed over any other substat - given that a BLM has infinte ressources they probably profit more from casting faster and more than from an increased crit-rate.

I dont know enough about samurai, dragoon, ninja and maschinst to speak to their crit needs. But I would imagine all of them being crit first.
Same goes for RDM and SMN.

Monk and bard benefit extremly from it.

Since crit also effect your healing-spells, its specially scholar that wants a lot of it; with WHM not so much - DPS-wise they both probably enjoy it though. I dont think that my static-whm favours crit, though.

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Originally Posted by Vidu

Since crit also effect your healing-spells, its specially scholar that wants a lot of it; with WHM not so much - DPS-wise they both probably enjoy it though. I dont think that my static-whm favours crit, though.

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Not that I'm a first-rate WHM by any stretch but I stack crit on WHM. There is no specific benefit or crit mechanic to WHM but a nice Assize Crit during Trick Attack is love.

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

Not that I'm a first-rate WHM by any stretch but I stack crit on WHM. There is no specific benefit or crit mechanic to WHM but a nice Assize Crit during Trick Attack is love.

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Yeah, I didnt mean to say that WHMs shouldnt meld crit - theres no real downside to it (except the occassional crit-overheal, maybe) but also no extreme upside.
So for both WHM and to a degree AST its probably "do whatever you like best".