How are you melding the new crafting gear?

[Caimie_Tsukino]

I found this in another thread.
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/13HS5

This build is all control and no craftsmanship. I do not recommend it.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/13M9S

This is a build using the best possible melds you can do with the Ala Mhigan gear. (minus the rings, could use VI instead of V for CP and MH/OH which you can go nuts on to your fancy.) You can swap any of the VIs for Vs and lower tiers if you like. My suggestion would be put the VI's in guaranteed slots and overmeld with IVs. Unless it is the accessories there you should put more gil towards.

This is for the ultimate rich people... The person who melded it also used Craft VI before Control VI in a number of items. This is usually not optimal as most of the times Control VI is usually more expensive. (But I could be wrong. Maybe when the person did her/his melds, Craft VI was more expensive.) A melding strategy like this will cost at least 20 million gil on my server. I do not recommend.

Ended up melding like this: https://imgur.com/a/53VXt

This is still a pretty expensive build, but a bit more affordable than the above. It is a control-heavy build. It is streamlined for macro-ing special 2 star recipes... which makes sense, because Tayler developed a very nice rotation that requires this high control to get the job done. So Tayler's melds are optimal for her/himself.

The build I showed in my crafting guide is more towards craftsmanship (also still pretty expensive, but a tad bit cheaper). But I had cheaper, weaker melds on accessories than Tayler.

Thanks! This seems more like something I can afford. Have any difficulty HQing the items with this set up?

To be frank, you don't need expensive melds to HQ everything in the game. With a good MaMa rotation, you can have as low as 1330/1220/475 (but preferably 1441/1318/510) and still be able to HQ special 2 star recipes from pure NQ mats. So if you don't have the money to fully meld the i320, then just put temporary CP materia in them for now. And pull out the materia later when you want to do the proper melds. You can still craft ALL recipes and HQ them ALL in the game.

The maxed stats shown by Tayler and me in my crafting guides are not exactly needed to HQ items. They're specifically for "macro-ing special 2 star recipes". If your goal is just to HQ things, you DO NOT need max melds like ours.

This current patch is the "gearing up" patch. There's a good reason for us to do M'naago custom delivery and Zhloe's delivery these days. It helps us to get a lot of yellow and red scrips. Red scrips is our primary source of free Tier V materia at the moment. So you can slowly collect a huge amount of Tier V materia gradually during the current patch, and have them melded before the next patch arrives. No need to rush and break your bank. In the meanwhile, just use MaMa rotation for any special 2 star recipes, and you should still be able to HQ things fine.