Thoughts on the abundance of cheap and free equipment.Follow

One big change I've noticed in this game is that equipment has become highly available. Class quests and other open world quests hand out weapons and armor for quest completion, and if you don't get what you need from there, several vendors around the world sell full sets of armor for a mere few hundred or thousand gil (depending on the level). I've noticed many of the items given out in popular quests (like class quests) hit rock bottom on the market boards, seeing several for less than one hundred gil. Though even if they didn't, if you're following your quest line, you would receive the update for free.

This makes staying up to date very easy, as there's a good chance you're getting what you need to stay up to date as you play, and what you don't is available for very reasonable prices from vendors or from great supply on the market boards. I wonder, though, what effect this has on the incentive for a new player to craft. Playing the market seemingly becomes very difficult when vendors and quest givers are handing out equipment so easily, making it so your market becomes only that which isn't so readily available for players who would even bother to buy anything else.



Edited, Sep 3rd 2013 9:24pm by Susanoh

Call it my vanity to collect pretty clothes but I really hope crafters start getting some recipes for cute things to wear.

I spent a small fortune on my cap collection alone in FFXI. Why? Just to look stylish. Take my money, crafters!!!!

I was thinking the same thing, but since everyone can level all the classes on one character, i feel that there will be a demand for gear once all the quests dry up after leveling a few classes, so once there is no quests for armor and people are full of gil they wil turn to the market bored to get gear, plus you cant forget turning items to materia, so they wont save the gear for ever. One more thing HQ items sell for decent gil.

From what I understand, top tier gear is dropped OR crafted HQ stuff. And getting the HQ stuff requires certain minimums in Craftsmanship and Control (like 275 and 255 respectively or something), in addition to luck on the crafting conditions and just plain old luck in general, while also using HQ ingredients.

So, to use a WoW comparison, you could think of much of the "free" gear you get from quests as "white" or "green" gear in WoW terms. It's the baseline basically. The HQ crafted stuff and dungeon drops/token rewards are more in-line with the blue and purple colors from WoW, and those tend to require much more effort. Essentially, SE has set up the quest system so that anyone can, through soloing and 4-man parties, have access to the gear necessary to finish the main storyline of the game. Those who put in extra effort will be rewarded thusly, but as you level up, you find that while some quest gear rewards are upgrades, they also pale in comparison to their HQ crafted or dungeon drop counterparts.

There are an abundance of common level gear but if you want any of the good items then you will need to run end game dungeons and/or craft them yourself.

Especially crafting gear....there aren't a whole lot of crafting quests that will give you gear...the only ones I can think of are the class quests but even then you probably want to craft your own HQ versions.

But I do agree that a lot of quests give gear and I mostly took the gil since I already had all the gear the quest was offering me.

Turning items into materia is a good point, as it removes equipment from the game so that people end up buying new ones. Although some things, such as vendors who sell cheap equipment, will sell that equipment infinitely, and since each class has its own quest line that updates that class's weapon and some of its armor, those will be available no matter how many classes you take up.

Ya but I don't feel those extra stat points make a huge difference, I've been able to clear everything up to Aurum Vale with just quest gear, whereas in FFXI when you barely get 1 or 2 exp parties a day, hitting that extra 1-2k exp an hour, gear made a big difference. I'm sure for the harder 50+ stuff it makes a difference, but there is no sensation like in FFXI of pimping out your lvl 12 thief with really good gear you've saved up and lvling sub jobs faster. It made that gear much more worth taking the time to farm/camp. Now the lvl 1-40 grind is just fates and leves, and it hardly matters if you got that extra stat or two.

Thats good to know im really excited to see how far it goes and the type of gear i can make for my self!

Yeah, would be really cool if they had an icon on the Character screen to swap between the 'Combat Gear' and your 'Displayed Gear' like some of the other MMOs do.

Maybe later once we get those stylish crafter clothes you mention they will

Come 30, while you'll still get gear rewards, it'll probably be wiser to take the gold rewards if there isn't a specific piece you can use from the pool. I can't speak for endgame gear, but crafting a lot of basic stuff is actually fairly cheap. The only complication at the moment on non-Legacy servers is a lack of supply to fuel crafters while there's a bit of over-supply on finished products, including quest overlaps. Weaver hits a bad spot in the early 20s with diremite webs only being farmable, for example. Though goldsmithing doesn't seem too bad at this range if you have mining to support it. I'm trying to do a better job of keeping my mining and botany up with my BLM, but they're still about 10 levels behind and being unable to meld gathering materia to my gear is an obvious complication, hence why I've been trying to work on weaving since my BLM's generally gotten by on quest loot.

I really need to educate myself more on this...

The money is in selling HQ gear for people leveling secondary classes, and just in bulk/HQ gear at max level for turning into materia.

All gear in this game is turned into consumables in the form of materia, so even if people don't need it as BiS, they're definitely going to want it to create BiS (5 meld gear).

If gear on the exchange is that cheap then the thing to do is to take the Allagen pieces as quest rewards and buy the gear. Which I've started doing. I've been picking up HQ gear in most cases for less than the opportunity cost of taking the Allagen pieces as quest rewards, so it's a win for me.

Edited, Sep 3rd 2013 11:34pm by KarlHungis

Your average player is gonna be slowed hard in the early-20s, especially if they don't have a gatherer leveled on the side. I think I've gathered like 700 cotton bolls and I'm technically not out of its phase in weaver yet (still need some time to do crafts/leves to use them). I've spent a metric ******* of time just gathering, too. Probably 2-3 actual game nights.