Take everything you thought you knew about FFXIV’s end game ilvl 90 armor progress and throw it out the window. We now have daily and weekly Hunts.

What’s Up With Me and FFXIV?

Well, actually, we’ve had these hunts since Patch 2.3 launched last month. I just wasn’t listening at the time, and that was my bad. Actually, I did listen, but what I heard was the players bickering over the A and S level hunts, which apparently cause a zone-wide rush on one boss creature. If you don’t get there to contribute enough, tough luck on you.

That didn’t sound like something I wanted to deal with, and I was already burned out from spending months earning Zuri’s ilvl 90 armor set. Remember how I was so excited about finding Beast Tribe dailies? I was also excited about the change to the amount of Myth earned from Low Level Roulette. Though I said I wasn’t interested in grinding dungeons for Myth, 100 Myth a day was too tempting to pass up. So I started working through all six beast tribe dailies and one Low Level Roulette… and eventually earned all of Zuri’s bard armor in June.

After over two months of doing this almost every single day, my little casual brain was fried. For some people, this doesn’t sound like much, I know. For me? Yeah… it was tough getting over my nerves about running these dungeons daily. But despite that, I found that dungeons weren’t so terrible, and I ended up teaching newcomers how to get through the dungeons and primals from time to time. That was very rewarding.

However, the thought of doing all that over again for my dragoon alt, Tai was too much. I also had no idea how I was going to nudge my duo partner, Syn, into dailies and solo running the Low Level Roulette (since you can’t queue up for it in a party 🙁 ).

All we really wanted was to advance to the story beyond the original main story, and maybe work on our relic weapon, but this grind was a block for us. I couldn’t even fathom doing all this over again for another class on Zuri, either, which made my desire to grind another class to 50 nil. So with those sorts of feelings, I set the game aside for a while, checking back in with my FC when the notion got into me, or working on crafting from time to time… which led to me totally missing on the launch of Hunts.

Which are the answer to the end game soloist’s plight.

What Hunts Give to Softcore Gamers

The requirement for hunts are pretty light. You need to max out your rank in your Grand Company, which means finishing a few ranks of your hunting log and a handful of dungeons, all under level 50. Once that’s done, one quick quest introduces you to the Hunt Billmaster and the hunt board.

All I heard was the bickering about the uber version of the Hunts. What I didn’t know was that smaller daily and weekly versions existed. With patch 2.35, the elite marks became solo-able, which allows you to earn 50 marks and 5k gil a week. The dailies are a mixture of normal creatures and bosses in Fates. While waiting around for Fates to spawn is annoying, you can earn up to 34 marks a day from completing these lesser hunts.

You take these marks back to the Billmaster to exchange for… ilvl 90 armor! The same exact armor that cost hundreds of Myth Tomes… that I grinded to earn, for months, for my first set of armor.

Here they are, costing between 20 – 40 marks each. Do the math. Completing a full set of daily hunts earns you at least an accessory or a lower-cost piece of armor. This means that you can outfit your character in ilvl 90 armor in a matter of days… completely solo.

When I realized this, everything about FFXIV suddenly changed for me.

I prodded Syn, and we got Zeb and Tai through the final hunt log and dungeon last night. Then I was out clearing my weekly and daily hunts for Tai, which took about a hour to do. That hour scored him two full pieces of ilvl 90 armor, something that would have taken a couple of weeks to finish prior to this.

Finishing Tai’s armor is well within sight. I’m also excited about leveling other classes on Zuri again, now that I know that decent gear is easier to get.

90 is the New 50

Maybe this sounds bad to some people. After all, this completely destroys the need for running dungeons for ilvl 60 or 70 or 80 stuff. Will Low Level Roulette suffer because people don’t need the Myth for their ilvl 90 armor?

How is it that a year after the game’s launch, the armor that once took months to complete now takes days? Even Syn asked me if it annoyed me that I spent so much time on Zuri’s armor only to see the time sink significantly reduced by Hunts.

I was like, “Heck no! This just gives me a reason to want to multi-class now, because I know I can deck alt classes out in decent armor without all that grind.”

With all the Myth that’s required for the Zodiac Weapon line, I’m sure folks will still have a need for it. In fact, this move encourages multi-classing even more since prior to this, you’d have to decide whether you were spending that Myth on your new level 50’s armor… or if you needed it for books to upgrade your weapon instead. Now you can work on both (the books are enough of a grind if you ask me).

Those who want the challenge of earning ilvl 100 and ilvl 110 armor, it’s there for you. For folks who are new, or just want to hit up the end game story as it continues, this is a crazy-easy way of catching us up to ilvl 90. I’m not complaining one bit.