Spiritbonding/acquiring materia

[artfulscruff]

I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

So I'm doing the Relic Reborn quest to get the Bravura axe, which requires me to get hold of two battledance materia III. I could buy them in the market, but as I'm sure you all know, market costs are through the roof and this particular materia sells for 40,000g a pop. I decided instead to get my cobalt plate armour set fully bonded and see if I got lucky, and I thought I'd be able to do it easily by just slaying many low level enemies, but after half an afternoon of that and running Tam Tara, the gear is only 1% bonded, and that's with the ring the Grand Companies sell that increases bond rate (incidentally, the ring became 5% bonded in the same time).

What's the quickest way to bond gear? Am I doing something wrong? Does the level of enemies/dungeons/FATEs matter? Am I just better off dropping 80,000 gil on a pair from the marketplace?

[Raldo]

Monsters must be within 10 levels of the iLvl of the gear in order to gain spiritbond. If you're bonding Militia Gear, you need to kill stuff lv45 and up.

[artfulscruff]

Thank you. I'm probably going to have to splash some cash though, if it doesn't work out :P

[Astarica]

I was able to spiritbond militia gear by killing level 39 sheep, but not level 38 sheep

[Estellios]

One thing that should be noted is that High Quality gear spiritbonds incredibly fast compared to regular gear. I'd wholly recommend grabbing some if you have the means of making it. If you can find it cheap you could buy it, I guess.

Just in case you didn't know, the Materia you get is based on the gear you convert, so if you want Battledance (Tank-class) Materia you will probably want to spiritbond Tank-oriented gear/accessories. Make sure they are level 45+, otherwise you won't get Tier III materia.