Do you shame people for their choice of materia melds?

[Nora_of_Mira]

Materia power level is not easily quantifiable, and honestly, I think most people just ask other people who have asked other people (etc) what the best melds for so-and-so are and choose their melds based on that.

Edge cases aside (such as not even having materia on your gear at all or melding stats that just simply have no effect on a certain class, like Piety on Black Mage), does the choice of someone's materia melds draw ire from you if they are not to your liking? If so, why?

Personally, I feel like materia choice is subjective in some cases, but they are an illusion in others. I won't call out someone for melding skill speed on all their gear on Ninja, for example, because I know that they at least put effort into their gear/build than someone who melded nothing and came into content in default i430 AF gear and leveling accessories.

if you or anyone isn't doing Savage content while its current, your melds are nothing but a preference and make little to no difference to your play.

If you're trying to clear Savage content while its current, you better be melding correctly.

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?

you can experiment all you want, but people doing the math will always find what will contribute the most damage to each job based on the gear present. "experimenting" is nothing more than "seeing what does more damage overall" and 1-2 set ups will always come out on top and the rest of the experiments will be lower in comparison.

[Dogempire]

if you or anyone isn't doing Savage content while its current, your melds are nothing but a preference and make little to no difference to your play.

While technically true, materia adds a LOT of stats to a player. If you have normal blue quality equipment you have about 18 materia slots, or about 1080 to allocate to any stat you want.

This isn't even counting the savage accessories and i460 items with extra materia slots, and the fact that if you pentameld an item you're getting an extra 100 at least to any stat of your choosing, and 160 if it's an accessory or belt.

[Nora_of_Mira]

While technically true, materia adds a LOT of stats to a player. If you have normal blue quality equipment you have about 18 materia slots, or about 1080 to allocate to any stat you want.

This isn't even counting the savage accessories and i460 items with extra materia slots, and the fact that if you pentameld an item you're getting an extra 100 at least to any stat of your choosing, and 160 if it's an accessory or belt.

it definitely adds a ton of whatever stats you want to have. but my point was that it wont be making a huge difference in any non-Savage content, save for skill/spell speed. it will often be make-or-break on 1% enrage fights in savage but you dont have to worry about that in Extremes or dungeons.

[ErryK]

I don't care what they meld as long as it's usable by the job, and you aren't +0'ing any stats. But I don't go out of my way to shame people with those types of melds.

[Derio]

The only time I look at other ppls gear is to see what glam they have. I could care less about materia

[White_Wolf_X]

No.

/10char.

[Nyvara]

I only do dungeons, normal trials and 24 man content. Only person's materia I worry about is my own.

[MistakeNot]

I rarely even look at what gear other people are using, and never at what materia (if any) they use.

Should I ever check, I wouldn't worry about what materia they are using as long as it isn't something completely useless - and at low levels I wouldn't worry about that either.

[MariaArvana]

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.

[Magnedeus]

I one had a fresh lvl 80 healer in a df run that had nothing but piety materia in their gear. (MP regen is a joke right now but whatever.) Did i shame them? No. But I'm sure there are players that would have pulled their hair out seeing that.