FFXIV: First Ever Pentamelded Gear!
Posted on May 3, 2023 by Aywren
Back in March, I talked about how I wanted to up my crafting game in FFXIV. So I have!
One of the things I mentioned was aiming to get a fully pentamelded set of Indagator’s crafting gear. Over the past years, I’d have a high quality set of the best crafting gear, but would only have it partially melded. Either I just ran out of steam in the attempt to finish melding, I worked on too many characters at once, or forgot about it as something like this takes me quite a while to complete.
Last night, I finally finished fully melding my crafting gear set – for the first time ever. While I did use the Budget Meld setup, I’m not a super-mega crafter, so I’m content with that.
Before I say anything else, maybe I should define what is a pentamelded set of crafter gear? Why is it such a big deal?
What is Pentamelding?
Basically, gear that accepts material melds will have one or two open slots on it. You have a 100% fail-proof chance of melding into those slots – you might be familiar with doing this for your battle gear, for example. As long as the gear doesn't state "advanced melding forbidden" you can put more than just one or two materia into the gear.
When you OVER meld, or advanced meld, that means you’re trying to shove materia into slots beyond the first one or two. As you do this, depending on the grade of materia and which slot you’re trying to meld, there is a decreasing chance of actually making the meld stick.
As an example, here’s melds for the crafting goggles.
You can see the first two materia have 100% chance to meld. But beyond that, your chances drop to 17% for the third, 10% for the fourth, and back up to 26% for the last.
Some, like this ring…
…get even more tricky. You only have one 100% meld and the final meld only has a 5% to succeed.
Melding and Materia FAQ
What’s the point of pentamelding anyhow? To boost your base crafting stats. You can see the materia have different effects, such as adding +27 to craftmanship, etc. Every little stat counts, and some of the higher level crafting recipes can hinge on the extra stats you have.
What happens when you don’t succeed the meld? The materia explodes and you lose it!
This means you need stacks of materia to make those final melds and you are always at the mercy of RNG!
How do you get those materia? Well, for those who have enough gil stockpiled – rich crafters – it’s no sweat to buy them off the marketboard. I’ve done my share of selling materia for gil, for sure!
For people like me, however, I get my materia through scrip exchange.
I’m not a fan of grind crafting, though, so I do most of my scrip earning through the weekly Custom Deliveries. At higher levels, you easily get enough scrips to buy a stack of materia each week and give it a try.
Note: I had 3 characters (now 4 characters) who have at least one crafting job leveled to 90. That means that I could turn in custom deliveries across all of these characters, take the scrips to buy the materia on them, and send them back to Ben so that he could attempt to meld again.
This only took two and half months because I had 3 characters funneling resources to one character to shorten the time it took to do this. And sometimes, Ben got very, very lucky in his melds. Doing this with only one character will take much longer!
Anyhow, I’m so happy I finally got this goal done. Now I need to take the next step into learning how to Expert Craft!