FFXIV: Easing into Patch 4.2
Sometimes you just need to take some time to organize and clean out the old MMO inventory.
You know what I mean?
I’ve been playing FFXIV for over 4 years now. This means that things have been piling up, mostly on my main character. I’m one of those folks who refuses to buy extra retainers, so I’m constantly struggling with storage.
This patch fixes all of that struggle.
Revitalize. Reorganize.
Syn is out of town on a work trip until Thursday, and I always play story/dungeons with her for the first time. So, that gave me a few days to really ease into the patch… somewhat backwards.
Usually, I’m rushing right into the story and Expert roulette because that’s what everyone else is doing. And this time around, there’s new Omega Raids, including Savage tier.
But you know what? It was kinda nice to take some time to just sit down and reorganize everything. And I mean EVERYTHING.
The new Glamour Dresser (Commode) allowed me to toss in all those random pieces of gear I’ve held on to for years for whatever reason. Some of this was second tier AF armor from level 50. Some of it was just cool looking weapons or neat individual pieces I’ve been hoarding away forever.
Since you can’t pull anything out of the Commode once it goes in (yet), I didn’t put important things in there, such as Mogstation items. Or Amon’s Hat.
But that cleared a significant amount of space for me.
Then, a bunch of sets, such as the Maid outfit, the Far East outfit, the random Amazon hats and the Yuna gear were finally able to go into our Armoire with this patch. This was close to, if not more than, 20 slots of inventory by itself. For every character on my account.
Then, we got Chocobo Saddlebags. This quickly became my fishing tackle storage and place for random things like Anima weapon crystals. Yeah, I still have a bunch of those crystals, and I’m not sure why.
Not to mention the game now allows things to stack to 999. I have incentive to go out gathering again!
So, I went through and just cleaned major house. This took a LONG time on my main character. But when I was done, it was so refreshing to have all my crafting mats organized and soooooo much storage space open.
I haven’t had this much space since I started playing. I’m not kidding.
Glamour Prism Problem
So, in order to put gear into the Glamour Commode, you have to spend one Glamour Prism per item. Considering you’d have to spend a Prism every time you changed your glamour with the previous system, this is actually saving resources. You just spend one up front and can apply the glamour as much as you want after that with no extra cost.
This was no sweat on my main, who can easily craft Prisms or just buy Prisms from the Grand Company. But, this was a roadblock for my significantly less-leveled group of alts in my private <<Alts>> Free Company.
Going through each alt inventory, I quickly realized that no one was at a proper rank in their Grand Company to buy Prisms. And I’d not leveled anyone’s crafting/gathering at all.
Since there’s still no way to transfer items to alts in this game (boo!), especially if they’re not in your FC, I had to decide on how to approach this. As always, I wanted to be able to do this on my own. So, crafting/gathering it was!
After mulling about it for a bit, I chose an alt – Zuri – and decided to put my nose to the grindstone. The Glamour Prism recipe unlocks at crafting level 15. And that’s not too terrible to get to. This required me to also level a gatherer in order to gather the materials required, since I wanted to be self-sufficient.
So, I made it my project last night to level Zuri’s Goldsmith to 15 and Miner to 21 (the level it takes to mine the Silver ore required for ingot). She didn’t have a lot of money on her (under 20k gil), but I found it easy enough to use materials she had on her retainer plus some she bought from the supplier to level her crafting.
Mining took a bit longer. But unlocking leves in Drybone shot me up from 15 to 21 pretty fast.
After I unlocked the recipe at 15, I realized there was a problem.
You see, the Glamour Prism recipe used to unlock at level 30 crafter. They recently moved it to level 15. But they never actually changed anything about the recipe. If you’re coming into the game brand new, you can’t craft it at 15. At least for Goldsmith. I can’t speak for others.
Not only do you have to craft Silver Ingot (level 23), but if you are gathering your own materials, Silver Ore is a level 25 gather.
On top of that, it requires Fire and Wind crystals. Not shards. Full crystals. These are mined from level 30 nodes, and the earliest you can access them is level 26.
So, after all that time spent leveling and gathering, I plunked down to start making the prism and realized I had no crystals. Ugh!
I was able to grab a few stacks cheap from the AH (Someone put up a stack of Wind Crystals for 1 gil each!! Thank you!). I usually don’t like buying crystals on the AH, but at that point, I wasn’t going to be making anything if I didn’t.
During all this, I was watching Zuri’s meager gil reserve drop further and further with the cost of upgrading gear from 1-20 for crafting and gathering jobs, buying mats, and then buying the clear glamour prisms on top of it.
So, I decided to throw a few prisms up on the AH. And what do you know? They were selling like crazy last night.
Makes sense. Everyone needs them right now. I also realized that the demand will drop once people finish filling out their Commode.
So, I rushed out to gather more silver and make more prisms to sell. In the end, I’m pretty sure I made back all the money I spent to level her, which makes me happy. I know that it’s not technically a lot of gil, but for a character who has very little, it was exciting to sell stuff on the market.
Not to mention, I also sold the stack of iron ore I mined up while I was grinding to level.
Zuri’s still not level 26 miner, so she can’t get her own crystals yet, but I’m going to work on that. I’m also leveling a retainer who can hopefully, eventually, bring resources back, since she’s going to become the sole source of glamour prisms for my whole personal Alt Brigade.
Needless to say, I had a lot of fun. It was random. It was relaxing. I threw on an audio book and just leveled.
I need to do this more often.
