Some questions regarding gear syncing and materia.

[Rollergator]

Hey!

1) Does melding materia onto i90 PvP gear do anything, or is it unusable because of level sync?

2) Does all your gear need to be below i80 for materia to even have effect? (ie, can I have all i90 gear and one i70 piece melded?)

3) Is all i70 PvP gear now best in slot for Frontlines?

Thanks!

[Vandril]

1) Wherever a item level sync is active, all materia, no matter what item level gear it's attached to, is disabled entirely.

2) Read 1. Whether the gear is above, below, or the same as the item level sync threshold doesn't effect materia. Materia is disabled regardless.

3) Not quite. It's a great set for PvP, but it's not Best In Slot in most cases. There's a little more min-maxing to be had by mixing up some PvE and PvP gear of "true item level" (meaning, for PvP gear, including Morale's ilvl boost) 80 or above. Really, it all boils down to what stats you want the most and finding the gear that has them. If you want Determination and Crit, and all your gear has Determination and Crit and is over ilvl 80, then you're more or less best in slot (the exception being if, say, DET was more important to you than CRIT, and, even though your current piece has both, there's another piece with more DET and less CRIT). Remember that Physical and Magical defenses do not function in Frontlines, so you don't even need to consider them when comparing two pieces of gear.

[Hyunckel]

Does that mean that having gear of item lv above 80 of the same kind of stats (say: STR with DET and CRIT) is in no way more useful than having the same kind of gear but of item lv 80 ? An item above that level will have the SAME exact values when sync'd as an item natively iLv 80?

Cause when doing FATEs or some low level dungeons I noticed people lv50 with some high level gear when sync'd have much better stats than my own. I guess it's the quality of the gear in that case.

[Vandril]

Does that mean that having gear of item lv above 80 of the same kind of stats (say: STR with DET and CRIT) is in no way more useful than having the same kind of gear but of item lv 80 ? An item above that level will have the SAME exact values when sync'd as an item natively iLv 80?

Cause when doing FATEs or some low level dungeons I noticed people lv50 with some high level gear when sync'd have much better stats than my own. I guess it's the quality of the gear in that case.

First off, know that the stats you see on gear after they're synced are actually the gear's NORMAL stats from before the sync. You don't get to see the actual stats the gear is currently giving the person, only its normal stats. So the stats you're seeing will look much larger than they actually are.

Moving on, there's a difference between Item Level Sync and normal Level Sync. I described Item Level Sync, such as the one used in Frontlines and some level 50 Dungeons. The normal Level Sync used by lower level dungeons works entirely differently: from what I remember reading, it lowers Weapon Damage (if a weapon) and main Attributes (STR, DEX, INT etc.) to the highest amount the equipment's item level can have (as though it were perfectly melded with Attribute materia), but only has THE FIRST of any number of secondary stats (Accuracy, Crit, Determination, etc.) active, with the rest of the secondary stats entirely disabled. I'm not sure how materia is handled in normal Level sync.

Item Level Sync, on the other hand, simple lowers all the stats an item has to what an item of the synced item level would have.

Say you have two pieces of gear. One of them is ilvl 90 and has 40 Crit and 20 Determination. The other is ilvl 80 and has 20 Crit and 10 Determination. As far as I understand the item level sync and how it works, both pieces of gear would have the exact same Crit and Determination values.

As an aside: note that the two pieces in the example both have Crit : Determination at a ratio of 2 : 1. A piece of gear's stat ratio will stay the same before and after its item level is synced. So, for example, let's say you have a THIRD piece of gear that was ilvl 90 and has 10 Crit and 50 Determination. Even after the item level for that piece is synced, it will still grant you the same ratio of Crit : Determination (1 : 5).

This fact is what makes some gear better than others, despite the fact that they might both have the same types of stats, just at different amounts. If you're a class that needs Crit and Determination, but needs Determination more than Crit, then you'll want gear with a Crit : Determination ratio weighted in the favor of Determination. In other words, in that case, between a piece of gear that is ilvl 90 and has 40 Crit and 20 Determination (4 : 2, Crit : Determination) and a piece of ilvl 90 that has 20 Crit and 40 Determination (2 : 4, Crit : Determination), the second piece will be better for you both before and after the item level sync, as it will give you the most determination.

The basis of finding the Best In Slot gear for an item synced instance is finding the gear with the best stat ratios, favoring whichever stat your class needs most.

[Ultimatecalibur]

To expand on Vandril's explanation.

i80 Bodies have a max of 21 for Determination and 30 for all other secondary stats.

A Monk wearing following body pieces would get the following secondary stat bonuses in Frontlines and i80 sync:

• Warwolf Corslet of Striking (i70+10 Morale): Det +15, Crit +30
• Fuma Koromo (i80): Det +21, Crit +21
• Shirt of The Divine Hero (i80): Det +15, Acc +30
• (Augmented) Shirt of Striking HQ (i90): Det +21, Crit +24
• Weathered Gloam Tabard (i100): Det +19, Crit +30
• The Guardian's Breastplate of Striking (i100): Det +19, Acc +30
• Gloam Tabard (i110): Det +20, Crit +30
• Hawkliege Cyclas (i110): Det +21, SkSp +29
• (Augmented) Ironworks Cuirass (i120 or i130): Det +21, Crit +30

[Rollergator]

Thanks for the answers! So what I'm gleaning from this is that PvP gear and materia is useful only for Wolves' Den, and has no noticeable effect upon Frontlines at all?

[Vandril]

Thanks for the answers! So what I'm gleaning from this is that PvP gear and materia is useful only for Wolves' Den, and has no noticeable effect upon Frontlines at all?

Correct. Unless they remove the item level sync in Frontlines, materia is 100% useless there.

At the moment, materia in PvP is only useful in the level 50 non-item level synced Wolves' Den and the level 40 and 30 Wolves' Dens.

@Ultimatecalibur - Do you happen to remember how materia is handled in normal level sync environments? I can't recall if they remain active or not, and if whether the materia-slotted piece in question is over or below your class level after the sync effects materia or not.