Best In Slot Feels Good

Over the weekend I decided to go ahead and catch up on acquiring my end of expansion crafting and gathering gear in Final Fantasy XIV. I started with the Indagator's crafting set. The 10 pieces of equipment/accessories and the 5 gathering tools are item level 620. More importantly, the set will allow me to gather the top resource nodes coming in patch 6.5.

In many games going though the effort and expense of getting best in slot (BiS) gear isn't worth the trouble. But as I discovered in Endwalker, fully pentamelded top end crafting and gathering sets are useful until the end of the base of the next expansion. My end of Shadowbringers set is what I used to craft until I reached the level cap of Endwalker. Which is good, because I put a lot of time, effort, and millions of gil in order to get that. At the current pace of development, my new Indagator's gathering set should last six to seven months.

My old gathering set was a combination of Pactmaker's gear on the left side and tools (item level 590) with Ophiotauroskin accessories (item level 560). Some of the Ophiotauroskin items also didn't have 5 melds, resulting in stats without food of:

• Gathering: 3723
• Perception: 3612
• Gathering Points: 900

With my new set of Indagaor's gear and accessories fully pentamelded and my tools with 2 out of 5 melds, my stats currently are:

• Gathering: 3998
• Perception: 3992
• Gathering Points: 903

Higher numbers are always good but do they matter? In FFXIV, gathering has certain breakpoints to trigger bonuses. In patch 6.4, the new breakpoints are:

• [+2 Bountiful yield/harvest 2] : 3713 Gathering
• [+3 Bountiful yield/harvest 2] : 4538 Gathering
• [Required Perception] : 3850 Perception
• [+1 Yield Node Bonus] : 3900 Gathering
• [+2 Yield Node Bonus] : 4000 Gathering(Hidden)
• [+3 Yield Node Bonus] : 4100 Gathering(Hidden)
• [+30% Boon bonus] : 4000 Perception
• [+1 Attempts Node Bonus] : 900GP
• [+2 Attempts Node Bonus] : 950GP(Hidden)

By eating Carrot Nibbles (max 76 gathering/39 perception), I can reach all the breakpoints except the +3 bountiful yield/harvest 2, +3 yield node bonus and the +2 attempts node bonus. When I finish melding my tools, I'll reach the +3 yield bonus with Carrot Nibbles.

Speaking about pentamelding, my strategy of saving up my seafarer's cowries for gathering materia paid off. I spent some 150,000 seafarer's cowries on the specific ones I needed. A rough estimate is I saved a few million gil. I have the gil to spend, but watching a stack of 20-30 materia die to the RNG gods with no effect doesn't feel good if I just spent 500,000 gil on them.

Needless to say, my bags filling faster with materials feels really good. And I'll need that, as my next task is to craft the Indagator's crafting set. Plus, I'll need to pentameld 16 crafting tools instead of 5 gathering tools, so if I want to save some gil, the increased gathering output will come in handy. I tend to spend gil to save on time. Less time required to gather means I spend less gil.

I probably need to go into more detail on crafting and gathering in FFXIV. I hear a lot of disbelief that anyone who had played EVE would like an "anime weeb game" from Square Enix. The two games have a lot of similarities, at least where manufacturing items is concerned. Which is another reason why running around whacking trees and breaking rocks in my best in slot gear feels so good.