Gear Melding Question

[Jeeqbit]

Melding gear is a waste of time until you are max level. The reason for that is you will keep upgrading your gear every few levels on your journey to 100, causing your newly-melded gear to be thrown away. The max level is 100.

You can't meld "main stats" anymore. It used to be possible to, but it no longer is. Everything you will meld now is a substat.

Substats on gear tend to work where one of them is capped, and the other is not. So you can meld any stat that is not capped. In some cases, melding multiple pieces of materia will cause the other stat to cap as well - if this will happen, it will show as RED when you hover over it in the meld window. You should normally avoid melding that stat if it shows as red.

Normally, melding the second substat on the gear doesn't overcap it, but sometimes it does. It depends. A lot of gear allows you to meld two pieces of materia.

There is one exception to this: crafted gear. Typically, when item levels increase, it's extended by 30 item levels:
740 - Crafted / Normal Raid gear
750 - Weekly Tomestone Gear
760 - Savage Raid Gear / Augmented Tomestone Gear (augmented via Savage)

So crafters can do something called "pentamelding" to the crafted gear, where they go beyond the materia limit (which is usually 1 or 2). They can go up to 5! The catch is it's a random chance, and if the chance fails, they lose the materia. Thus, it can be costly. Again, we don't worry about that sort of thing until max level and beating MSQ usually.

You do not have to meld the second substat on the gear. You can meld a stat completely not shown on any gear that you have. This is done on tanks, for example - they don't naturally have Direct Hit on their gear anymore, but they meld it regardless, because Direct Hit is really good.

By the way, you can also ask New Player questions in the New Player Forum where your thread won't get buried by other threads as much: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ew-Player-Help