Spirit Bonding High Level Crafting

[dragonflie]

I wouldn't recommend on bonding Aetheryte rings, those things can give about just any materia. I got a ligntning lvl 4 and a piety lvl 3 from mine.

[Raldo]

I've already got a Gambler's Crown, Meteor Survivor Ring & Patriot Choker/Wristband.

These actually help so so so very little that you're better off just spiritbonding another pieces of gear instead.

+1 spiritbond must be +1% spiritbond rate, because it's really really tiny.

[Matsume]

Meteor survivor ring gives +3, if you have the remaining pieces you can get +6 total but in my opinion you are better off just using the meteor ring and then filling other slots with gear

[peaches]

After mining around 10k ore to go towards my Luminary Pick, I did a lot of experimenting with materia.

So first off, iLvl 55 gear - Aetheryte Rings, all level 50 greens, 1 star items, crafter/gatherer 50 gear set all has a CHANCE to convert into a rank IV. I converted about 8 pieces before I got one. The Aetheryte Rings have a chance to be any materia rank III or IV, so it is never worth it. In general, I wouldn't suggest trying to spiritbond iLvl55 gear for materia, it takes way too long and has such an unlikely chance. The best way to do it is to try to pick up a NQ set of your crafter/gatherer level 50 armor and spiritbond with it if you're crafting/gathering a LOT below level 50, and don't need the extra stats.

Some things I've been told, and seems accurate so far - a HQ item spiritbonds 20% faster. Melding a piece of materia to the item you're trying to spiritbond adds another 20%, regardless of the materia type or rank. I believe it stacks with additional materia.

And some things I've noticed - spiritbonding lower level gear, like Mythril jewelery on high level (around lvl 50) mining nodes seems to go extremely slowly compared to higher level gear, yet faster when mining level 30-40 nodes.

[Raldo]

Melding a piece of materia to the item you're trying to spiritbond adds another 20%, regardless of the materia type or rank. I believe it stacks with additional materia.

This is the first I've heard of this... Maybe those garbage elemental materia aren't so worthless after all. I will have to test this...

[Nenin]

Ok, I would keep all this info to myself for longer if I thought i could really make a killing by spiritbonding but it's just too much work for too little.

For starters, the +spiritbond gain gear like aetheryte rings are worthless. I haven't done the theorycrafting with the meteor ring but that's the only item that is even POSSIBLY worth wearing.

So i've got 50 goldsmithing, alchemy, and leatherworking along with all the other 15 abilities barring armorer and blacksmithing. I decided to make a serious effort to learn everything I could about spiritbonding and after blowing through thousands and thousands of shards, hundreds of thousands of gil, and way too much time there are a few things I can say with 100% certainty:




HQ gear spiritbonds 20% faster than NQ gear

Melded gear bonds faster than non-melded gear

The more melds the gear has the faster it bonds

Higher materia ranks produce faster bonding than lower rank ones

The rate of spiritbonding does not differ between item types or slots, it only depends on the item level

Ilvl 55 gear has a chance to convert into rank IV but is always rank III at the minimum



And the one I still find hard to believe,

The spiritbond gain does NOT depend on how much xp you get from the craft AT ALL!!!! The only thing that seems to matter is the recipe level. You don't even need to successfully finish the craft. This means that you get the exact same spiritbond gain from a craft where you spend 50 steps getting 100% HQ as one that you quick synth, and fail on.


Now obviously this is great news for lazy people like myself. Hey I thought! I can just quick synth tons of cheap stuff and get tons of rank 4 materia!!! Wrong. I don't know the cutoff for ilvl 55 gear but level 30 synths give nothing and 41-49 is optimal. Now if you look at your recipes in this range you will quickly notice that everything requires 5-6 shards of TWO different types. Even a synth whose raw ingredients are dirt cheap ends up costing hundreds from the shards alone.

Well, almost all of the recipes in that range take two types. Fortunately the core synths like ore-ingots or hide/skin-leather only take one. Why does the shard number matter you ask? Because you have to synth that item 200-500 times to fully spiritbond an ilvl 55 item. On my server all the shards run anywhere from 25-50 gil a piece with the exception of earth which stays around 15.

Raptor leather seems perfect at a first glance because it only needs earth shards and one single skin. Here the skins vary between 250-350 each bringing the total synth cost to around 400 (can't forget market taxes...). This is only a lvl 41 synth though so it takes roughly 300-500 to spiritbond some 55 gear. The large variance is because it depends on NQ or HQ, how much materia it has and what ranks. Setting aside the fact that there are rarely more than 1-200 skins up for a reasonable price at any given time, you can expect to spend upwards of 150k to bond a full set of AF gear.

This would totally be worth it if you were guaranteed at least one rank 4 materia each time but the reality is they are very rare. I've converted close to 50 pieces of ilvl 55 gear and gotten only 4 rank IV materia, one of which was a crappy wind one from an aetheryte ring. The amount and kind of materia melded into the item seems to have no large effect on your converting results. Aetheryte rings will give you ANY kind of materia for some reason meaning most of the time it will be a horrible rank III materia which sells for under 10k. Considering I can HQ the rings with all NQ mats and I still lose money on them, just wear some other rings like electrum crafting ones.



I tried wearing random battle gear like imperial operative necks to up my odds of getting rank IV from SOMETHING. I have tried double, triple, and even quad melding the gear I spiritbond with both expensive materia and useless rank I II and III wind/lightning/water etc. I've tried more random combinations of lvl 40-55 gear than I care to admit any while it's funny getting tells from people asking what the hell I did to my gear the whole quick synth to bond idea is just too expensive and more importantly time consuming. You can absolutely make money doing this but it's NOT WORTH IT.

I've got a real life friend who I play with so between us we can make all the gear slots for extremely cheap. Even with all normal quality ingredients it still costs in the ballpark of 50k to make new gear for every slot and meld them. Honestly I make better, faster, and more consistent gil just selling the gear itself. The only time I'd recommend this would be when you can make/meld all your own gear for next to nothing, when you can find a very cheap high level synth with abundant ingredients, and when all your other items have been flooded on the AH.

[Manila]

This is the first I've heard of this... Maybe those garbage elemental materia aren't so worthless after all. I will have to test this...

I ran a test on this. Crafted 2 fresh rings and melded 1. Equipped both at the same time. No +spiritbinding gear equipped. At the time the hq+materia ring hit 100%, the other was at 85%.

fire I-iii materia now has a use.

[NefGP]

The answer then, seems rather simple & obvious.

Buff the +Spirit Bond gear to add to the % gained for each action/kill.


So for example, if a synth would only give you 1% spirit bond, with a Meteor Survivor Ring equipped you should get 4% instead. Naturally it should also work the same way as HQ'ing raw materials when gathering, i.e. if what you're doing normally wouldn't give any SB at all, the +SB items won't change that.


The GC Spirit Bond buff is equally a joke as well. I get why they wanted to slow down the process, which is OK by default, but IMO it's too extreme that even with a bunch of items stacked for +5~7 SB rate and still barely get 1% on a successful action.


When I was mining electrum ore the other day that's about what I was getting after 4 strikes on each node, a crappy 1% - and this was with a total of +5 SB, 6 with the GC buff at 45 MIN wearing level-appropriate gear.


It's no wonder T4 materia is all 170k+ gil, it's entirely too rare. You combine the high risks of forbidden melding along with losing any materia you remove from an item, the absurd costs in making gear and then the time spent to SB it (nevermind even getting the right kind of materia in the 1st place) and it amounts to more work than getting a Relic weapon!

[Astral_Moonflower]

HQ gear spiritbonds 20% faster than NQ gear

Melded gear bonds faster than non-melded gear

The more melds the gear has the faster it bonds

Higher materia ranks produce faster bonding than lower rank ones

The rate of spiritbonding does not differ between item types or slots, it only depends on the item level

Ilvl 55 gear has a chance to convert into rank IV but is always rank III at the minimum

Thanks so much. this is some great advice.

[Nenin]

Thanks so much. this is some great advice.

You're welcome. A few other bits:



Ilvl 55 gear takes twice as long to bond as ilvl 50 gear.

Ilvl 45+ guarantees a rank III materia for crafting/gathering gear (or at least 95%, haven't gotten below III with any)

Ilvl 44 and below seems to only give rank I/II. I'm sure there's a similar cutoff to the 45 II-III one but I haven't played around enough to find it.

While melded gear spiritbonds much faster it doesn't seem to affect the conversion results at all.

If I had to guess I'd say the % probability of getting a rank IV materia from 55 gear is somewhere between 5-10%, it's not very good.