FFXIV: Level 70 Botanist! And Crafting Conundrum

The track to level 70 gatherers is almost complete. As of last night, I reached my first level 70 gatherer – Botanist. Both Mining and Fishing are halfway through level 69, so the rest of this should fall in place in a few days.

With the exception of Fishing, I’ve leveled Botanist and Miner exclusively through daily High Quality Grand Company turn-ins. Depending on luck and RNG, this takes anywhere from 30 to 45 mins a day. Since I’m shooting for HQ items, I take and sell the normal quality, and get a bit of gil out of it, too.

Fishing has been leveled through leves and raw experience gained through spearfishing. Though this is more time consuming, it’s also relaxing, so I haven’t minded it much.

Now that I’m nearing 70 on all gathering jobs, I started to look at what I needed in terms of my crafters to supplement them with gear. I heard that the gear you get from yellow scrips, with the exception of the main hand item, can easily be matched by HQ crafted gear and accessories.

Crafting Conundrum

Though I priced these items on the marketboard and they’re fairly affordable, what I’d like to do is actually put the work into making mine this time around. This requires leveling my Weaver and Leatherworker… both of which are my specialized jobs.

However, I ran into a little snag.

Weaver is fine. I can easily use my botanist to gather what I need for this. But Leatherworker is a whole different animal… in that it requires hides, and LOTS of hides.

Now, you have two choices on this. You can go out and farm those hides. OR. You can send a hunting retainer out to gather them for you.

Both of my retainers are gatherers (miner and botanist) so that they can bring back crystals and crafting materials. I forgot that what I used to do is rely on Tai’s retainers to go out and hunt, since his are battle classes, and send the mats back to my main for crafting.

So, I hopped over on Tai only to remember… I hadn’t leveled him or his retainer at all. Therefore, his retainer couldn’t go out on ventures for hides from new creatures in the new areas.

DOH.

That’s when I remembered his main retainer is a level 60 Dragoon.

Now… the problem with that is… I’m not sure how I feel about the changes to Dragoon. Just about every other day, I see a thread on the forum or Reddit about how bad a state the Dragoons are in. So, I had shelved Dragoon on both my characters, and considered taking up Samurai on Tai.

But, since your retainers can only be as high a level as your character’s job is… his retainer would be stuck at 60 Dragoon if I abandoned the job. Thus, being unable to gather the materials I need.

Also, restarting the retainer as a new job, such as Samurai, would send him back to level 1… Which means I’d have to spend all that much more time leveling my retainer again!

Soooooo… the logical thing to do? Level Tai’s Dragoon.

Meh.

I kicked around a few MSQ quests last night until it gated me at level 61. Then, I filled in the gaps using PvP on Tai — just two rounds did it. So now I have a level 61 Dragoon, and his retainer is starting to gain experience again. I’ll work on leveling my Weaver until his retainer is at a point where it can bring back hides (I read this opens up at level 62).

The things I do for crafting.

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