Gathering melds

[Lazeil]

Hmm I tried looking, but it is possible I did not try looking hard enough and I hope you all can forgive me

I can't seem to locate any info on gathering melds, can anyone point me to a template?

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Use Ariyala's site and decide what to aim for. You want 650 GP (though someone was saying a while back that 700 GP is great) then put the rest into Gathering and Perception.

[PirateCat]

Couple of possible strats to consider. These all have 650 GP and enough gathering/perception to be able to gather HQ items out of the new 3-star nodes.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/SYPD - This one focuses on minimizing the amount of crafted gear you have to acquire and the amount of melding you have to do. Some overmelding is necessary but nothing uses materia higher than grade 2 on overmelds or does more than 2 overmelds on a given piece of gear. However, it will take a lot of red scrips to get all of the pieces so this is a fairly slow method as the tradeoff to being relatively inexpensive gil-wise.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/SYQE - This is the setup I'm personally working towards. It has roughly the highest stats you can go for without using tier V materia, balanced around not trying to get much higher than 650 GP and maximizing Perception where there's a choice. (The offhand is unmelded because it isn't shared across classes, but you can stick whatever on there since this is a bit above the minimum requirements everywhere else.)

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/SYRA - This one focuses on minimizing the amount of scrip gear or crafted i170 gear you need, but requires somewhat heavy melding and food to get to the requisite stats. There's really no practical way to get there without the improved tools, so those are in there.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/SYQP - This is the "best stats money can buy" approach. Every piece of gear can be bought on the MB. There are some pretty heavy melds needed, but if gil and access to materia aren't an issue you can suit up like this without touching a single red scrip. I wouldn't recommend going this far since you're unlikely to get your investment back effectively on a set like this (and the red scrip gear has better stats as a whole) but it shows what the melds might look like on the serpentskin set as you make progress on the scrip stuff. Just be advised that the accessory melds are completely different from the scrip gear version because this strat is able to spread more GP melds across the left side gear.

Edit:

You want 650 GP (though someone was saying a while back that 700 GP is great)

The main benefit I can see to having 700 GP is that it lets you use the yield+2, gather chance +15%, and HQ +10% abilities on the same node. I'm not personally sold on the value of this since it isn't currently possible to get to 700 GP without food, and you can do the first two skills on 600 GP (or skip the gather chance buff if you're feeling gutsy.) So basically you're consuming stuffed chysahls to give yourself about one extra HQ hit for every two nodes. But for completeness' sake, here is a build that would get you there while still having the requisite 720/740 without food.

[Silverbane]

If you have CUL 60, Haddock Dip can be cheap and easy to HQ, so I rely on that to hit the stats I want for the new 3-star nodes. I figure I can burn through a lot of Haddock Dip for the cost of a single failed overmeld.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I am not sold on the 700 GP thing either. I have 637 GP, and I use a cheap storebought food to exceed 650.

I was just mentioning it for the sake of completeness.

[Solebound]

yesterday i melded 664 gathering/ 675 perception into my initial 150 white gear. my gp is 633 w/o food ( i got the main hand red scrip tool for miner) which gear should i be working towards to get miner over the 700 stat threshold? Im looking at the options presented above by pirate cap and want to go with the second example, the mix of crafted and red scrip gear but want to be sure that's the best route for me to take. I don't want to feel like i just wasted all my gil for nothing.

Should i get the 170 crafted gear first and the red scrip feet, im totally confused on how i can access the new 3.2 nodes

[PirateCat]

It'll depend a little bit on what your melds look like now. Based on your description, it sounds like you've got something like this going on.

I would definitely recommend going for scrip gear as you're able (assuming you're not prioritizing favors for crafted gear) since a number of the slots are just straight better than anything you can do with melds. What I've been doing for my gear is to check out the stats of the new piece and focus on a priority system. If you want to get to the threshold on gathering, then the body, pants, gloves, and offhand will give you the biggest effect there. You will generally want to upgrade gear that you've put fewer melds onto first since that'll mean it's a bigger gap in stats.

The i180 offhands are legit gear if you can spare the scrips for them. They're equivalent to a IV-IV-IV-III-III pentameld on the crafted version. But if time is more of an issue than gil (or if you can craft it yourself) then the crafted offhand is also a very nice upgrade.

Depending, again, on how exactly you've done your melds, you may lose some GP going to the scrip gear. As long as you don't go below 600, this is okay for now. 650 is a nice amount to have but the main benefit is that you can add a +5% gather chance to scrip gathering rotations so you don't have to worry about the RNG being a butt on the 95% shots.

[Shadygrove]

My stats with red scrip mainhand and everything else HQ and pentamelded: 683 GPs, Gathering 747, Perception 739.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...acter/1353531/

IMHO of the red script gear only the chests are better than crafted. And for me, overkill.

[PirateCat]

My stats with red scrip mainhand and everything else HQ and pentamelded
...
IMHO of the red script gear only the chests are better than crafted. And for me, overkill.

If you already have pentamelds on everything, sure. The head/arms/legs/feet slots put together give you roughly 12 more gathering and 15 more perception than melded whites at the cost of about 16 GP (approximations based on trying to get as many stat points as possible with melds, since a lot of the pieces can't be 100% maxed out.) These pieces are a marginal improvement provided that GP isn't your priority stat, but a couple of them will drop one stat or another individually so you kind of need the set. I'd still say they're better overall, but not precisely a requirement if you're using most of your scrips for favors.

If you're not starting out with fully melded gear, though, the scrip stuff is a huge improvement.