Cost to Penta-Meld 5 2-star HQ Jewelery Pieces

[Koltik]

I just finished penta-melding my final 2-star HQ Jewelry piece. Given the high cost-investment of penta-melding 2-star HQ Jewelry, I wanted to share my experience thus far.

After getting full DL, and then quickly realizing that it was going to be months before getting full Allagan / Myth, I decided to take upgrades into my own hands and farm Philos to make 2-star jewelry, then penta-meld each slot. Little did I know that after all was said and done, the total cost for this came out to the equivalent of 7.1 Million Gil.

The above number is including all the materia that was required to successfully penta-meld, as well as the cost of the phil items (which I farmed, for the most part). If you take out the Phil item cost, and only look at materia cost, it comes out to 4.6 Million Gil.

Now that I'm done, and down to 650k, I am looking back and wondering if I would have gone down this road if I had known the ultimate cost to make these items as they are.

In the end I compare these 5 items to Coils/Myth jewelry, I am gaining 45 Str, 45 Dex, and losing 25 Vit. I am also losing some parry, but gaining a good amount of crit, determination, and accuracy. These numbers make it seem like it is a clear upgrade, but at the end of the day the question is this: how much does Vitality matter? Are the other stat-gains better than the HP I would have gained from 25 Vitality?

To be honest, I don't know. I probably won't know until I can get a full set of iLvl 90 Vit jewelry, which I haven't even come close to at this time. I'm just glad I got my 2-star HQ penta-meld set finished! If nothing else, it gave me something to do for two weeks!

What I do know is that I love healing for 1.3k - 1.4k (non-crit) with IB on a regular basis.