Omni-Gearing for Melee Jobs

The melee DPS in this game fall into one of three categories - Maiming, Striking, and Scouting. Maiming includes Dragoon and Reaper, Striking includes Monk and Samurai, and Scouting is only technically a melee, since they have the same Role Actions, but they share gear with no one. Ninja need not be included for this reason. Below, we have gearsets designed to be used if you want to flex between the two Maiming or the two Striking DPS with minimal need to re-meld gear.

The buttons linked below will lead you to the job specific gearing pages.

Dragoon and Reaper share the exact same stat considerations, and their best weapons have identical stat spreads, which allow for identical stat tier hits. As such, the two jobs almost just use the exact same gearset. The only difference is the two melds on the chest piece. Melding two Savage Might (Determination) Materia is optimal for Reaper, while two Heavens' Eye (Direct Hit Rate) Materia is optimal for Dragoon. In practice, the sub-optimal option results in a single-digit DPS loss, so it's recommended to meld for your main and deal with the loss on your alt spec, unless you feel like re-melding each time you switch classes.

Monk and Samurai share much of the same stat priority, as Critical Hit Rate reigns supreme. As such, modifying the best set for Monk to be compatible with Samurai's best set costs only a very small amount of outgoing damage. Every piece of gear shared by the two sets uses exactly identical melds, with the only unshared piece being the headgear. The only downside to this is that the shared set utilizes a 2.15s GCD for Samurai, which is "SlowSAM" and not everyone's preferred speed.The two sets share every piece of gear with identical melds, and they simply need to swap weapons (obviously) and headgear to both be essentially optimal. The Monk set is only about 0.5% weaker than the optimal set for them.

Due to the desire of Maiming to run 0 Skill Speed and Striking to run more-than-zero, there ends up not being any way to completely marry the Slaying Accessories between the two sets of melee. This is the closest they can be - differing only by a singular meld. That is, the Striking classes meld the earrings with DET/SKS while Maiming melds DET/DH, and Striking melds the Ascension Ring with CRT/DET instead of the Maiming's DET/DET.

If you want to avoid remelding, the recommended play is to simply swap the DH meld from the earring for a SKS, and put that DH onto Reaper's weapon in place of its SKS meld. This only negatively impacts Dragoon, and minorly. For the ring, you are welcome to meld it CRT/DET. This has slightly weaker stat tier hits for the Maiming classes, but not by enough to make a sizeable difference in the final damage numbers.