For the past 4 months, I have been grinding to collect all the ARR relic weapons to get their glamors. I have made it to the novus step, which requires you to meld at least 75 (there is a chance to fail) various combat materia 1/2/3 per weapon, so at least 750 total for them all.

The only way I can find to collect these materia is to intentionally under-ilevel my gear and grind out spiritbinds. On my datacenter, these materia sell for 2k - 10k each, so I would have to drop 2 to 8 million gil on a single relic weapon step to move forward. I believe the reason they are so pricy is that the game has mostly moved past the sub-level 50 content, so players are no longer naturally spiritbonding low-level materia.

I think there ought to be another way to obtain these, such as through a merchant. The Ixal vendor sells low-level DoH/L materia for Oaknots, so something similar could work for the combat materia too. Alternatively, perhaps Mutamix Bubblypots could degrade materia to a lower level (for example if he could exchange one Quickarm materia II for two random materia I).

I realize I am trying to play old content, but I dont think it ought to be completely obsolete.