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.