Pre-Expansion Prep

It’s been a few days since I have written a post about Final Fantasy XIV. When we last addressed the game I was working towards infusing my Novus weapon so that it could in fact become a proper Nexus weapon. I’ve done that and now have the Nexus weapon glamoured over top of my real axe. I’ve made some progress on the next step in the quest aka the “Braves” weapon Ragnarok but unfortunately I’ve hit a wall. Basically you need 400k to progress past this and I am way too broke to do that at the moment.

Between my buying my way up to proper item level when I came back to the game, and the money spent on Materia… I have been hovering around the 150k mark for a bit now. That will regenerate over time, but for now we have to close the door on the Zodiac weapon quests and be happy with the shiny spikey state that the weapon currently is in. I am sure at some point in the near future I will pick this back up as expansions tend to come with a windfall of money. Additionally I am using the shit out of my retainers to auction off various baubles, which are moving… but moving slowly. In theory I need to learn some strategy for making money on a reliable basis in this game because I never quite landed on one that did not involve crafting.

For the last several days I have been entirely focused on cleaning house. Recently I pushed the last of my classes to 50, freeing up a bunch of room for getting rid of any older gear that was clogging my vaults that was not something I actually wanted to wear. With the new classes starting at level 60, it is highly unlikely I will ever have a sub 50 character again… and even if I do it will probably be along the lines of blue mage where it more or less came with its own set of gear that I did not really upgrade out of until 50. I currently have 9 items in my inventory… and this is the closest to “inventory zero” I have ever gotten. In truth several of these items could be tossed in the vault but whatever this is a stark improvement over having roughly five item slots free at any given time.

Over the last several days I have set about a very tedious process of sorting my retainers. Previously there really was no rhyme or reason to how I was storing things. At one point yes there was a pattern but as vaults overflowed I wound up just shoving things into any open slot I could find. Which lead to the situation of having a random assortment of items in pretty much every retainer’s vault, making it very hard to find upgrades as you encounter them. I subscribe to additional retainers, because ultimately I had to in order to keep up with the mess. What we have wound up with is the following scheme.

  • Druin – Melee Weapons – Yes I have enough of these to warrant it’s own bank
  • Tiga – Strength Melee Class Gear
  • Tallow – Tank Gear
  • Dauphin – Dexterity Class Gear
  • Belgrave – Caster Gear
  • Waxwood – Healer Gear
  • Dorma – Jewelry for Every Class
  • Finni – Crafting Gear, Materials, and Assorted Token Items

This is the final scheme that we ended up with, and largely Druin becoming a weapon vault was a thing that happened late in the process. I can honestly already see some need for variance as Tiga and Tallow the Strength and Tank vaults respectively are close to overflowing. So in theory I will have to do something in the near future to further split things up. I could in theory split off the striker and lancer gear into their own vaults, because there is a pretty clear delineation between those archetypes. However tank gear is tank gear… and they don’t really have much in the way of paladin or warrior specific gear for example other than class sets.

I can add one more retainer now if I so choose, and I figure with the coming expansion they will increase this by another slot. So in theory I could split up tank gear by slot, and have 3 of the slots in one bank and 3 of the slots in another bank or something like that. Whatever the case we have some semblance of organized for the first time in the roughly six years I have been playing the game. This is a major achievement because it absolutely does not carry over to any other game that I am playing. I tend to be a packrat in life and a bigger packrat in video games. A large part of why I no longer play Everquest II is that I just have too much crap and did not want to take the literal hours to sort through it.

In truth to get to the state I am in right now probably legitimately took me about 8 hours worth of diligent sorting and slowly ferrying items back and forth between vaults and or selling them. Here is hoping that I can manage to keep things in order as we go into Shadowbringers.