Quote Originally Posted by MontyChamberlain View Post
On a sidenote, it saddens me that gear tends to be figured out by expert players early on in patches. As such, this always drives materia prices a certain way and influences a lack of experimentation with materia melds. This brings up the question of whether there is really a choice with how you meld your gear - are you just doing things a different way or a worse way?
At the end of the day, there's always going to be one 'best' way and every other way will be sub-optimal. It's simply the nature of number games. That gear gets solved by people doing all the experimenting possible and delivering a clean sheet that lays it all out for you.

But unless you're doing Ultimates/Early week savage tiers, perfect melding isn't really needed, since the rest of the content is easy enough that they're not needed, only a bonus to help speed things along. As far as shaming people, I just ignore people's gear unless its close friends, since there's a good chance I won't be seeing this same SAM once I leave this expert roulette for a long while, if ever. If they have extremely odd meld choices (Like skillspeed on BLM) I'll make a tease about it and leave it at that. "Looks like you really want to swing that staff faster based on those sks melds ;P", for example.