Few Questions

Cecil188 has the right of it for the Merit Award. The description of "Heavy Gear" is misleading. That checkbox basically means, "Can be equipped by someone wearing the Merit Award".

For the Tintinnabar, the code of the game doesn't check for an equipment effect flag, but for the presence of a specific relic by index number. Other relics that are "hardcoded" like this are Umaro's 2 special relics. So, even if you changed the Tintinnabar to do something else (like boost HP by 25%), anyone who had THAT particular relic equipped would also have the Tintinnabar effect. The "Unhardcoded Tintinnabar" patch changes the code so that it checks for an item effect flag rather than the index number of the equipped relic. In short, if you want to change the Tintinnabar to do something else, you need that patch. If you want to keep the effect but change how the effect works, you will need to either do ASM or HEX editing. I believe the code in question is located in the C1 bank, but I can't remember for sure.