Crafted Gear for leveling other classes is actually quite...amazing

[cearka]

I'm still in the camp with everyone else that crafting needs to become more relevant. I did spend months crafting with my toes while I played another video game leveling up to 50 on everything afterall, crafters spend alot of time crafting and want it to be...meaningful.


Anyways, now that all my doh/dol is 50 and my OCD is partially sated, I'ved been spending time leveling up my battle classes and I've discovered that...self crafted gear is actually really good and it's a pity its overlooked for leveling sub classes (especially now that dungeons and not FATES are the best way to level and gear is more relevant in dungeons then fates). Here are my observations (feel free to correct me on some of these if their wrong).

1. HQ crafted gear have equivalent stats to the aethereal piece with the same name, although aetherial gets one or two random tiny stats sometimes.
2. HQ crafted gear, like dungeon gear, is usable across many classes so useful for leveling multiple classes at the same time.
3. HQ crafted gear is cheap as hell to make yourself if you have the crafting classes leveled up. You can fully gear yourself in one go, rather then run enough dungeons for a full set only to not need it anymore.
4. you can make one set for archer, lancer, pugilist, one for mages, and one for tanks. An appropriate spread would be a set at level 20, 30, 35, and 40 (45 you get you AF, 50 you go to darklight or twostar pentameld). pre-20 whatever you get is irrelevant as the first dungeon starts at level 16. That means 12 sets of gear, 8~9 sets of jewelry, and your set to level every class to 50.
5. Here's the killer part, you can pentameld all of that gear cheap is hell. Like you pretty much can only use grade I and II materias, which generally cost very, very little (on average I spend about 4k to pentameld one piece with cheap but useful materia). And this makes this gear really awesome.
6. Since your gear is preplanned, you save alot of armoury space.
7. you can dye it all.
8. the only dropped gear I've been using is the weapon drops at end of dungeosn appropriate to my level.
9. puts your way closer to that carrier of the caudron achievement. I've got like 200 melds to go >.>

Unfortunately since most people only care about end game gear, This is greatly overlooked. No one even stops to consider pentamelding a lvl 30 piece of gear even though it doesn't really cost that much (unless your the unluckiest SOB in the world an you fail like 100 times on a overmeld).

on a side note I've even gone crafted for my jewel slots on my lvl 50 tanks now.
From what I can see, Hero jewels of fending or striking/aiming give either 15 vit or 13 str each. not both.
so, you can have a combo of
75 vit
60 vit 13 str (73 stat points)
45 vit 26 str (71 stat points)
30 vit 39 str (69 stat points)
15 vit 52 str (67 stat points)
65 str
and a few other stats of parry, det, etc.

on the other hand,fully pentamelded rose gold (note, STAT materia is relatively cheap compared to other materia. I've seen grade IVs go for as low as 1k on our server)
gives
50 VIT 45 STR (95 stat points).
and comparable stats, plus you can meld more of what you want on. Is there any reason to upgrade to HERO over pentamelded rosegold?