Hey Friends! This is a bonus Saturday post because something came up yesterday that made me think it might be worth talking about. I post a lot of information on twitter about Final Fantasy XIV, in part because I know I have a lot of friends who are still in the sprout phase. This is a game that has systems within systems that take a considerable amount of time to unpack. I was talking about getting my Monk ready for the leveling process, and the first thing of course was to create a new glamour. It was around this point that one of my friends chimed in about not being certain if it was worth setting up a glamour given that you would have to keep changing your appearance as you leveled. I mentioned the wonder if Glamour Plates and my friend had no clue what I was referring to. This made me think it might be high time to talk about this system.

Essentially Glamouring is the process of changing the appearance of an item, and you can right-click on any piece of gear and choose glamour to replace its current appearance with that of another. In order to make this system a little easier, Square added a few systems to the game. The first of which is Glamour storage in the form of either the Armoire or the Glamour Chest. The first has been in the game since release and was a way of storing very specific types of information without taking up retainer or inventory space. The second is a specific chest that adds 400 inventory slots for keeping appearance items. When you add an item to the chest it resets the spirit bond to 0% and removes materia or any other customizations. It costs one glamour prism to store an appearance, but after that point applying that appearance to new gear doesn’t cost anything.

This in itself is useful, but it requires you to go back to your Inn Room or Squadron Room to keep changing appearance on items. To make this a little simpler, the game allows you to set up Glamour Plates, which are predetermined appearances that you can apply on the fly any time you are in an area flagged as a “sanctuary”. Generally speaking this means you are in a large city, be it one of the original three capitals, one of the expansion hubs, housing areas and a few other specific locations like the Doman Enclave. A Glamour Plate itself is a series of slots that you can select appearance data from our Armoire or Glamour Chest and combine it with dyes to create a specific outfit. You are given fifteen of these and if you need to update one, you can return back to a location that has a Glamour Chest. Right now sadly these are not available to be placed in personal housing, because there is some negative interaction that can occur if two players try and access it at the same time.

Glamour Plates interact with another system in the game called Gear Sets. This allows you to configure a specific set of gear and is the functionality that allows you to rapidly swap between jobs. This unlocks when you hit level 10. Glamour itself unlocks around level 15, or when you reach Vesper Bay for the first time depending on where you are in the Main Story Quest. If you right click on one of your predetermined gear sets, you can link it to a saved glamour plate. What this allows you to do is to reapply that specific glamour to that gear anytime you switch to that gear set. Now the same rules apply for swapping glamour plates, namely that you have to be in an area flagged as a sanctuary. However this allows you to associate a certain appearance that you want to go along with a certain jobs gear set. So anytime I swap to Monk, for example it will reapply the same appearance that is seen in that very first screenshot.

I’ve learned over the years that if you look cool while playing a class, you end up enjoying it more. As a result the interaction between these systems allows me to always look like I want to look regardless of the gear that I happen to be wearing. I don’t have gear sets for every job yet, but I figure as I finishing leveling them I will be doing this interaction to create a semi-permanent associate of appearance and gear set. I feel like I gave only the highest level overview of the system, but hopefully it is enough to give you the basics and let you feel comfortable enough to start exploring this system.

As always if you have any questions feel free to drop me a line below.

Friends… I have been plying a dastardly trade and I think they are beginning to suspect something. I spend an awful lot of time in my Squadron room in Limsa Lominsa. It has access to glamour resources and is some place I want to go a few times a day, unlike the Inn Room which at this point serves very little point. Honestly, I wish we had a bit more control over the Squadron room and could decorate it based on our exploits. One of the systems it does give me control over is the makeup of my Squad themselves, and slowly over time I have been recruiting Lalafells and replacing the stalls with them. As of yesterday, there are only three remaining, and based on the reaction poor Cecily is giving me… I have a feeling she suspects what is happening. She is a sweet girl though, and part of me is considering keeping her around… because we might need someone that can reach the pedals.

I’ve spent a small amount of effort gearing my Machinist. There are times that I don’t want to tank content, and more often than not that includes raids. We are in the process of pulling together information about raiding interest, and I will be tabulating that this weekend after letting the survey run for two weeks. When it comes to free company and my friends, I am absolutely on board with tanking. Tanking for a group of strangers in harder than dungeon content… well that is less than exciting to me. A lot of my joy from tanking comes from protecting my friends, and in a small dungeon group, I can pretend they are friends for long enough to get us through the content. Tanking for something that lasts thirty minutes like an Alliance Raid brings me significantly less joy. So as a result I have been spending a lot of time on my Machinist because they do a great job of being mobile and also dishing out a fair amount of damage in the process. it also gives me cause to create great cowboy-themed glamours.

Last night as a whole though was an evening where I played catch up on the Main Story Quest. Things are getting really interesting, which is usually the case with that final patch of an expansion. The *.3 patch generally wraps up the conflict of the expansion, and then *.4 presents a new challenge that will ultimately ignite the conflict leading into the next expansion. With that in mind, the *.55 patch is that new conflict coming to a head and presenting a central conflict that sets the tone for the world state of the expansion launch. Last night I reached the final dungeon of the expansion and it looks to be a doozy. I didn’t have time to get through it last night, but I look forward to running it tonight and am probably going to do it the first time with a Trust group. I’ve really enjoyed that as an option because firstly it gives me a chance to get used to the mechanics in a purely judgement-free environment. Secondly, the idle banter and reactions of the NPCs really add to the experience of a dungeon, and given how much story is going to be crammed into this one I am absolutely looking forward to it.

The mission to level all of the things continues unabated as well. At the moment I am sitting at level 77 on the Scholar, level 58 on the Dark Knight, and then each of the gatherers is at least 74. I managed to push Fishing up to 75 because I was following the Qitari quest line and hit a reputational break point giving me two sets of quests in a single day. Since Fishing is harder to level through the Diadem I am using it as my Beast Tribe daily class and getting my levels for it through that method. Doing a single level each day in the Diadem seems to be a reasonable option and by next week it should mean I have level 80 gatherers and can start collecting maps. After that I need to sort out what it takes to level through Ishgard restoration and start putting some effort into crafting classes. I am feeling the need to get up Culinarian so I can craft my own food so that might be my first focus.

That said, I do want to spend at least a bit of this weekend over in Destiny 2. I managed to complete the opening quest of the Season, but have not gone much deeper than that. The problem I am having is that I have things I want to do outside of FFXIV… but I am so engaged with the game that I don’t really want to dettach to go do them for fear I will lose my momentum.