Returning player seeking advice on gear

I'm still familiar with the old gear swapping for ultimate effects, but after taking a long break I've come back and learned there's so much more newer stuff and that everything I've known for years is now completely changed.

So my question is what is good for a level 99 rdm who acts as both a support job and solo melee? And please no ultimate gear like the upgraded AF+1 as that is something I'd have to work on for weeks to afford and I really need something to upgrade to now that is simple to get.

I'm already familiar with the Espial set. Looking at the stats it looks like I won't be needing to swap anything for nukes/enfeebles/enhancements etc. Is that the case now?

Sadly, the AF upgrades and such are a must for certain things. However, your best starting point is the iLvl 117 Sparks and Bayld gear. Looking at the stat vomit on items may give the impression that gear swaping is not as important anymore. But it is as important as ever. I made my first goal the Espial set as I tend to do alot of soloing and Meleeing as my play style. After choosing which gear you think would be the most beneficial to you and your play style, decide what upgrades you want to aim for and what you can do with the entry level gear you purchased. and try to work around it.

109 AF and relic shouldn't be to expensive? a completely reasonable goal for anybody really.

but you gotta start somewhere i guess, so before that look into eminent dagger/scimitar, espial set, orvail +1 set, and weatherspoon+1 set. none of that is optimal, but it's all extremely easy to get. (honestly, a lot of the tutorial sparks of eminence quests function retroactively, you likely have a bunch of sparks waiting to be claimed) bayld you can get by doing coalition missions. some are as easy as running a delivery. i've not done any colonization reives myself lately, but supposedly the lowest tiers of them were made quite easy so that could be a way to make bayld that's not tied to the impromptur timer.

once you have those, you should be able to easily go back and do the lower end content. run through abyssea for example, the emp set for RDM is still relevant. maybe farm dynamis ( i wouldn't say RDM is an ideal job for dynamis really, but any job with any solo melee capability can sub dnc and do it.) run through any mission lines you didn't finish back in the day. rajas ring is still often useful, suppa as well. do walk of echos to unlock CDC, so on etc.

delve and skirmish also have a lot of solid pieces, and with a good group they're very easy. that being said, if you're just coming back you might not be able to just raid a fracture. so perhaps take delve on in chunks by popping the nms individually in the field. most nms have a very specific trick to defeating them so it's way to much for me to go over here, try BG.

there are several usable pieces from wildskeeper reives as well, but they're kind of a crapshoot. server wide event and all. still, keep an eye out for the /yells and maybe tag along once you have enough bayld banked up. this might vary by server but in carbuncle, the days of the 2 hour long clusterfuck wildskeeper reive seem to be over. make sure to activate the subjugation quest in records of eminence before you do the run btw, get the full value out of it and all.


as for not needing to swap anymore, that's simply not true. granted all iLVL gear has a smattering of str/dex/int/mnd so on, but espial doesn't have any cure potency, fast cast, magic attack, enhancing skill, pdt, or magic accuracy. so as you get a wider variety of ilvl gear, you'll start to see the potential swaps take shape again. (for now it MIGHT be true that all the iLVL int/mnd on just an espial set will beat out your older specialized casting sets. but that doesn't mean you don't wanna try and find newer iLVL casting sets, you dig?)

Ah right, thanks guys. I'll keep hold then of some things that I know are necessary.

also, upgrading af and relic gear is not that hard. even if for some reason you can't get a party together to do the high level fights, you can just collect sparks and trade for the necessary pages for upgrading. most of the af is really cheap to upgrade now. some of the relic gear can cost a couple mil gil to upgrade, but gil is fairly easy to get nowadays. you can go solo salvage2 in like 30 minutes and get about a million gil worth of alexandrite to sell.