Why No Melds?

[SaitoHajime]

I only put Vs in the upgraded/savage gear. Everything that's not those are getting IVs.

[TheCurls]

From my experience people I see without melds in DF are usually rarely above average.

Painting with a really broad brush there.

[mp-please]

Wouldn't just using IVs make you look pathetic to endgamers because they won't be "good enough with those terribad melds?" Then you call them lazy for not having any Vs. Your overall logic cancels your suggestion out.

You're supposed to meld IVs on pieces you plan to upgrade and you can see lots of players do this as IVs spiked in price with 3.4. IVs are also understandable on upgraded gear if you aren't raiding as materia really doesn't add much to the game other than accuracy on healers.
Beast tribes give out materia IVs in large quantities so you have access to them easily even as a DOW/DOM only player.
PotD gives out materia IV from hoards and a guaranteed combat V for clearing 50F.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Upgrading gear or replacing it takes away your Materia, so I'll leave Melding V-Rank materia for the hardcore raiders...

Imma just stick with putting IV-rank ones on my gear because I won't miss that when it's gone.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

Have to agree it is a huge waste of gil, although I always put t5 on highest tome gear and t4 on lore,alex etc. I would rather they slowed down on gear upgrades and making new armour and actually just gave us new content, dungeons etc. Also nothing stopping the other dungeons dropping same gear as another dungeon/raid etc.

[aesteval]

Just use IVs people! They're super cheap and can even get em for free from the ARR beast tribes. All that nonsense about "wasting gil" is just laziness and being bad.

Funny thing. I'm partial to running beast tribes. I have them all maxed. I like getting IV materia from them. It's still soul crushing to do each and every day to meet the potential materia needs. :-p Well, maybe not soul crushing - but sometimes you need a break.

*potential materia needs usually involves me blowing up materia I shouldn't be blowing up

[aesteval]

The excuses from the non-melders in this thread just keep coming.

Excuses? Pfft. :-p I've melded plenty of gear but I will not fault someone who thinks that melding materia into gear that is soon to be obsolete is futile. :-p It's even worse that augmenting tome gear destroys existing materia so that it's more like you're getting an entirely new piece of gear vs doing what the name implies, augmenting.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

This early in the patch, we cycle through gear too fast. I'm not going to waste 400k on materia I could sell when I can still clear content without much of a hurdle.

[Neophyte]

Because I'm gaining more utility from the money I can make selling the materia than I can make slotting it.

Game economy is set up to shift money from battle-jobs to crafters and from there to gatherers. As someone who hates both crafting and gathering and can't sell Creator Savage runs or something, even as little as 50k would be worth more to me than 12 crit on an item. The only materia I'm even willing to slot is the free T4 materia from beast tribes, because those don't even sell high. And even there...I don't really do that content anymore, so I'd have to go out of my way to get them, which I often don't feel like.

Lol, what?

You have hunt seals and gc seals with battle classes. If you can't desynthesize stuff you can trade allied/centurio seals for gc seals. Idk the price now, but arachne web (2250 seals) should be worth several ten-thousend gil. There should be several things, like Borax, Raziqsab, Dubbing, Scheelit, Emery, etc. etc. etc...., which are worth a lot.

If you're not doing relic and don't craft you have also lore tombs. 10 Lores are worth 10-20k gil minimum.

Let's just say you do one expert run and get one item out of it.

That's 1200 gc seals for the item plus 140 Lores. That's several 100'000 gil....

Or you get the ones from the beast tribes which are selling high (accuracy on my server yesterday @ 70k) and buy the cheaper ones (Skill/Spell Speed were around 20k) if you need them.

You can make 200k+ as a battle class per day (without the slightest effort). What other "utility" do you buy from all that money?

[Zojha]

[...] but arachne web (2250 seals) should be worth several ten-thousend gil.

19k gil as of now to be precise. Last I checked a couple months ago, those were around 2k - suppose the price shot up now that they are needed for star velveteen, so that's nice - shame you also need the seals for squads. Depending on what content you do, you get around 1-3k seals a day due to turning in dungeon drops, provided you greed on anything. So make that 10k a day.

As for the lore (and esoteric before that) - yes, that is, so far, the best way to get gil as battle class, because (refer to the distribution system) it allows DoW/DoM to get money back from crafters, our resident gil sponges. Incidentally, that's also where the money for the arachne web comes from - crafters. But make that closer to 5k for the 10 lore tomes - the new 20 lore mats were down to 9k yesterday, Eikon going for around 5k. You gotta play broker to make the most out of your lores there, but doing expert every day can net you around 75k daily (seals and roulette bonus included). Until you'll need the tomes for the Anima again anyway, then you'll be down to 14k a day. That buys you, uh...a partition, a haircut and some teleports?

At that point, you're better off tapping into the AiN bonus for the roulettes. That's 5k for every roulette, plus whatever you get in there (9k for trial alone).

And now to see what you need when you want to have one of the crafting exclusive glamours, say, some Allagan gloves of striking. We're only buying the mats we can't get ourselves and don't tip our crafter because we're cheapskates.
- One Wootz Ingot for 30k
- 2 Kirimu Leather for 35k
- 1 platinum ingot for 40k
- 3 Battlecraft Demimateria 3 for 40k
Makes 260k. May I mention that they go for 600k+ on the MB? Suddenly the 75k a day seem a lot less impressive - crafters can gain a multiple of that with one rotation. And that is why crafters are gil sponges and why getting decent money as DoW/DoM goes over crafting mats.