Lackluster yellow strip gear

[Maku]

"But crafted gear is chea-"

Factor in materia.

Even factoring in materia, the amount of yellow scripts that are needed is crazy. Unless you gather all your own mats, and take a life time to get all of the needed yellow scripts that way, you are probably looking at nearly the same cost as fully melding a craftable set ya?

[Kabooa]

Even factoring in materia, the amount of yellow scripts that are needed is crazy. Unless you gather all your own mats, and take a life time to get all of the needed yellow scripts that way, you are probably looking at nearly the same cost as fully melding a craftable set ya?

TLDR: Get the weapon, pentameld the crafted set.

Varies by server, I imagine. I'll use Gilgamesh's market as an example then, with Goldsmith.
Left side cost: Approximately 1.2 million
Main Hand: 50k. (This is so negligible that you can argue to use this over the scrip just on cost alone, so you're right on this one)
Rightside: (We can skip this as it's fairly comparable to Ironworks and no scrip accessories are available yet)

Right now I have a starred craft (Imperial Jade Necklace) for 67 scrips. I need 3700. I will need to craft 56 of these. If I ignore the weapon, I only need 2400 (35)
Imperial Jade necklace is : 2 Imperial Jade, 1 twinthread, 1 Almandine, 1 Resil (attribute)

For the sake of the argument, I will use completed components only instead of the much more efficient baseline material / crafting.

Gilgamesh's current prices on these are
Imperial Jade: 13,000 (Need 112 or 70)
Twinthread: 9000 (Need 56 or 35
Almandine: 3,800 (Need 56 or 35)
Resil: 3000 for the most expensive. (Need 56 or 35)

Price with weapon: 1,456,000 (jade) + 504,000 (Twinthread) + 212,800(Almandine) + 178,000 (resil) or about 2.4 Million.
Price without weapon: 1,500,000

It's not looking good for the scrip set, certainly, but it's worth noting that Weapons have much higher stat caps than the armor, so even if you go 2.4 million in for a full set including the weapon from scrips, materia prices to get the crafted weapon (50k) up to snuff is going to be steep.

*runs back and forth between Rhalgr and marketboard*
Scrip weapon: 433 / 232
Crafted weapon: 405 /217

To match the stats of the scrip weapon you need 28 craft, 15 control

Scrip chest: 371/116/4
crafted chest: 348/109/4

For the chest, you need 23 / 7 (Much less steep, certainly)

Forgive me for not doing all of them, but I don't have that kind of patience

So, weapon has one guaranteed slot. Depending how deep you want to go into the rabbit hole here, but for the sake of cost efficiency, we'll only use 5's.

Craft 5s (+11): 70k
Command 5s (+7): 90k

To match the scrip weapon, pentamelding with these sill be 3 Craft 5s, 2 Command 5s. On average, that's going to be 1 Command (90k) for green slot, 4 Command (360k) for the second slot, 7 Craft (490k) for the 3rd slot, 9 Craft (630k) for the fourth slot, and 12 Craft4 (48k) for the last.

Let's not even get into using rank 6 to make them 'better' instead of on par.

So that sucks, let's look at the chestpiece (Two green slots at least on this one!)

You can easily catch up with the chest with two Craft 5s and a command 5. So 1 COmmand 5 (90k), 1 Craft 5( 70k) and on average 3 Craft 5s (210k). 370k on top of the money you already spent to buy this.

Every other piece is a little cheaper, but you're still using a minimum of 1 Command 5 and 1 Craft 5 on each piece (160k) on top of the craft.

So 2.4million for a full left side for one craft vs ^^^^ that time, and then the weapon for every craft.

Short story: Get the weapon, pentameld the white set.
Edit: I amended the weapon melding to include Craft 4s at the end since it technically hits '28' to break even.