Unless it's actually SE's expectation that we keep our 340 raid gear, if you were to go into Ultimate with any gear above 345, you would be at a massive disadvantage due to materia not being taken into account.

I personally think that it's ridiculous we have to keep our old raid gear for a single piece of content. And we will be forced to keep one set from each raid tier for each Ultimate fight that is made. I know that including materia in normal level syncing would make you much more powerful as you can't meld before level 60. But in dungeons like Ala Mhigo, with Materia VI giving a massive amount of substats, jobs like BLM that rely on high SpS get a significant disadvantage due to melds.

A player who have gear on the exact item level for a level 70 dungeon with Materia VI melds have a very noticeable advantage over players with gear above the sync.

Please SE, fix this issue. You can avoid people abusing crafted gear by ignoring overmelds while item level synced. But the potential 720 substats from regular melding should be included in forced item level syncing.

For selecting minimum ilevel in the Duty Finder, you can make it so that ignores all materia, but for level 70 content like Ala Mhigo and Ultimate that force a sync, please include materia.