Do not meld unless you're save scumming. Even the highest ritual is 99% junk.
OK... I'm getting super tired of people spouting this nonsense. It's completely ridiculous to skip melding if you want to be time efficient about getting high level decorations. It's the most time efficient way to get high level decorations by far. It's not like you are doing anything else with the research points and streamstones. You should absolutely be melding.
Melding gives you 3 guaranteed worn feystones (2nd highest tier).
Chance for melding reward to be Rare 7 deco: 6%
Chance for melding reward to be Rare 8 deco: 2%
Compare that to a 3 reward tempered elder. Each reward slot has a 72% chance for worn feystone, and 13% chance for warped feystone (highest tier). Warped have an 18% chance to be Rare 7, and a 5% chance to be Rare 8. Lets normalize this for each Rarity so we can compare to melding:
Chance for T3 reward to be Rare 7 deco: .72*.06 + .13*.18 = 6.66% chance
Chance for T3 reward to be Rare 8 deco: .72*.02 + .13*.05 = 2.09% chance
So lets say you are reasonably quick at killing tempered elders and the quest takes 5 minutes to clear. Add in load screens, quest end screens, eating, refilling your items, etc, etc. You are looking at 7-8 minutes per cycle.
Each T3 reward slot has ~11% better chance for Rare 7 and 4.5% better chance for Rare 8 compared to melding. How can you say melding isn't worth it? The numbers don't lie, melding is absolutely the most efficient way to get decorations in the game period. Obviously the downside is you have to spend resources to do it, but these resources are not useful for anything else.
I get it... Maybe you just don't like sitting there picking decorations to meld and you think it's boring. That's fine, then don't do it. But please stop spreading this misinformation.
Here's the numbers from capcom's guidebook. The spreadsheet below also contains the rarity of each decoration:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...KB6QWovWLSGlsY/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true#
