Maximizing your gear! Is it worth it? ilvl 70 sets > DL!

[Adamar]

And those are horribly overpriced and no one with a brain ever buys those. I've leveled up a few crafting classes to 50, wanna know how much it costs me to make those pieces? Almost nothing in terms of gil. Literally. What it cost me is TIME. Time to have leveled up the crafting classes and time to get Philosophy stones from speed runs to make the pieces. But as far as in game gil costs? Usually the items aside from the Philo items needed are cheap throwaway items, maybe a couple thousand gil at most. And even if you don't have any crafting classes leveled, there's an abundance of crafters in towns that are willing to make it for you for a small tipping price which you can haggle if you need to save money. So it's totally possible to have 300k in the bank and start melding your crafted items.

Time is money, though. On my server 18 tome items are about 540k, although it's obviously it's going to vary from server to server.

That said, the profit margin on 2 star crafts is TINY compared to pretty much every other item in the game. Disregarding everything else selling an 18 tome item for 1 mil is less than 200% of the material cost, most everything else goes for 500-1000% if you HQ it.

The time required to level multiple crafts to 50, money required to meld the gear up, food, and time to HQ the side mats (if you're not confident to 100% HQ from NQ for two stars, which is reasonable) all add up. Unless you're making two stars regularly, the cost to fully meld up crafting gear to hit the tiers without food is not a negligible expensive in the slightest - we're talking hundreds of thousands of gil.