Returning - Not sure where to pickup where I left off

[Concerned4FFxi]

More quotes from forums, this one about mnk and bb (blackbelt), taking from a forum about a new player who wanted to know about gearing his 50ish level mnk, the forum link is

WARNING: the following is more of a series of long term plans that just so happen to be fairly easy to get done despite looking hard once you are up there in levels.

Skillup your staff club and h2h when you're a decently high job level. get dmg one weapons from events if you can. you can still get a dmg1 club from the Christmas event right now i believe. There are fortilaces in castle Z in the wotg zones . you can engage with a dmg 1 weapon and afk there attacking it for hours while asleep ro whatever to skillup staff and club(and a little h2h but h2h hits harder) so long as you stand in a spot where you wont get aggro. By having these skilled up you can "proc" "blue" during abyssea blunt times for better drops. The fortilaces skill you up to somewhere between lv 70 and 80 skill caps.It's high enough to get the rest done on your own just via playing so its "good enough"

Full aurore is generally the sign of a complete noob so i'd avoid wearing it. Get your brown belt quested, save up your kindred seals because SE made your black belt near impossible to get.
The following is some tp gear suggestions.
Buy some fuma kyahan since 3% haste is better than the 2% on aurore feet.
Get a brisk mask since you presumably cant get a walmart turban. it drops off glaviod which you're going to want dead for abyssea boss kills anyway and can be easily done if you manage to find competent friends.
Neck is gonna be a rancor collar once you can afford it. Ziel charm should cover you for neck and you can go duo it with a whm while proccing blue for a decent shot at it. If you've done cop by this point as you should since it's easy as hell now you can also try for a faith torque.
Thew bomblet is cheap and you can buy or kill the NM for it.
Work on limbus kills for beastcoins to buy a brutal if you dont wish to buy them with gil. Bcnm drops raised in price by huge amounts so you could sell off utsu ni for a mil or whatever for your gil to buy AH items. kill omega for the atma you can get in abyssea which can tide you over until you have apoc atma.
Body options are a bit hard for you to obtain off the bat I suppose so I guess you can slum it with pink aurore body. It beats most of the old options anyway. Provided you got your atma Loki's kaftan should be semi easy to kill the NM for and will destroy aurore body. Ok.. it's probably harder at lower levels but provided you have a competent whm, those blue procs i told you about before and enough patience you can just kill the NM over again until it drops via duo.
Aurore hands are tolerable until you have better gear with more haste.
ring 1 should be rajas. seriously just stomp COP and get it.I'll let you figure out ring2 to use for now until you obtain an epona's ring from rani.
Best back is altheling for now but get a good DD back until then.Belt is duh and hope you get lucky on ks99.
Legs can be b haidate since its really easy to kills/farm now but you can get tantra legs now too. levels make a ton fo difference. if you have a ls by then you can drag 2~3 people(assuming competence which si a rare commodity) and just kill the gods within seconds. http://wiki.bluegartr.com/bg/Synergy is some motivation to give them for coming if nothing else. You can also take advantage of the synergy augments to old sky/kings gear so unlock it for yourself too.

Work on your nyzul isle climbing because ascetics fury is your best bet inside abyssea where you will spend alot of time until you get victory smite. While on that note work on your empy weapon asap unless you plan to solo in dynamis for relic knuckles. It's still faster to do vereth imo so I personally think you should just do that then you can work on relic knuckles if you're bored or like dynamis.If nothing else it'll be a source of gil to you if you get the hand of solo/lowmanning in there. There are various other h2h that can tide you over until then. Oh right don't forget to flag voidwatch stone collection. It sucks and is horrible because it went back to SE's old methods of 1% drop rates combined with people whom already got the drop getting the drop over and over again while not being able to even give it to anyone else. You're going to hate it and tbh if you aren't using it for the drops to sell mnk can luckily unlike everyone else generally ignore it as far as having an amazing drop you want but cant get goes. It's an easy source of cruor so you can at least use it for that.

Oh and dont forget your empy+2 gear for mnk since itll destroy most of the other stuff for tp.

There's also(physical damage taken) pdt and (magical damage taken)mdt gear. in short you wear pdt gear when not punching or when something hits REALLY hard and you dont want to die before being cured. mdt gear is for when you're gonna be hit with something magical.If you get enough of it you can actually cap haste while meleeing in mdt gear vs something that spams alot of magic damge on you. the caps are 50% in damage taken. shell V is 25~26% ish mdt mdt which means you only need about 24% to get the maximum reduction in damage. That leaves more room for DD gear.

I disagree with his comment on aurore gear, I say wear it as a noob its good gear, but it is true that it is the sign of a noob, but screw what others think, this isn’t high school. That said, he had some great points to make so I ioncluded his knowledge and others to my list

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...ime-Party-Spot

Aurore gear is fine for leveling until you get your af3+1 or better, the fact is you are a noob now, returning player or not. Your gil status and gear status is that of a noob, and while you shouldnt play like a noob you should definitly conserve your gil and spend it wisely, hence not wasting it on gear that will be replaced soon and using the perle, teal, and aurore at 78. For the amount of money it costs to buy, the amount of money you get back when you sell it, and for the level and it's easy availablity to all new players and those who dont have decent gear or gil, THERE IS NONE BETTER at 78, period. It's not like your going to jump into a great gear set at that level without investing time or resources, so this is the best option and gives you more time to do things you need at the 78+ bench mark, like xp and do missions. Screw what people think, your not gonna be stuck wearing it forever. Why would you waste your gil on something that your going to replace soon anyway, dont spend your gil on gear that is going to get replaced in 5-10 levels.

Just get a decent weapon for every ten or so levels, until you hit 95. Like I said, consider the magian trials as soon as you hit 75 and work on one of those. Work on your af3+1/2, af2+1/2, see what cheap gear is on the AH for jobs 95+. That is were you want to spend money on gear, 95+, not on gear under 95, unless that gear is still useful/affordable alternative at 95+.

As for bb, its going to costs about 4.5-5.5m gil on my server to purchase all three items from mercanaries (1.5m for behemoth tongue, and 1.5-2m each for the other two items, 2m is reasonable, this is an idea how much you should be paying, at least on my server so don't pay too much more on yours, and dont trade gil first until item drops and make sure you can trust the people doing the bcnm for you to buy the rae/ex from). So yes, that's in your future once you start npc'ing cruor from abyssea, no your not going to jump into gear better than aurore right off the bat without a sponser. I've been playing for years and I have under 1000 kindred crests, so doing the bcnm and thinking you are going to get your bb that way is complete bull, now that kindred seals are useally replaced by kindred crests and high kindred crests. Back in the day, you'd have over 1000 kindred seals from xp pt, today you'll have over a 1000 kindred crests instead from your xp pt. It's just the way things work.

Also, you dont need to listen to people complaining about you not gettinmg fast xp, they just want you to do it the old way like they did. I say get the xp fast. You can always go back and skill up solo, duo, trio, whatever and learn your job better and cap your skills as you earn merit points for your job/stats/and other things.

Fact is, at 70 you are gonna have to stop xping and cap skills anyway if you want to beat maat, so you can take this break from xp to skill up while you farm your testimony, besides, when you can't get an xp pt there's the time to solo and skill up. Once you are able to level in abyssea you will cap your skills there.

HOWEVER, DO NOT go xp with people and be extremely under cap. This is what the previuos poster was speaking of, that's one reason they said not to burn your job. In other words, don't offer your services to an xp pt or a af3 seal farm if your level is 95, but your weapon skill level is that of a 75. This is unacceptable. What I did is I burnt a job to 20 levels or whatever, then I go and I skill up solo till I'm close to cap, or at a reasaonable skill level and understanding of my job so I can contribute to a higher level xp pt. Then, and only then, do I join xp pts at or around my level and offer that job.

The fear some players have is you will be a noob who doesn't know how to play your job correctly, I suggest that you read the wiki, especially the section pertaining to you job. In it there are a few player written guides on the specific job you want to play, read them, use the techniques discussed. Most are outdated now, but it's a good start for understanding one's job. Don't worry, after years of play I still learn various tweaks to my jobs, all 20 of them. It's never too late to learn something new.

Except it's all perfectly possible for a noob to do. The main obstacle was that he'she didn't know the option existed in the first place. Lets say that npcing all the misc items+ weapons from dom ops gave about 200k cruor. It's probably alot more but eh. that's 500k in gil when used with blinkers right off the bat before getting into all the gil earned via npcing dom ops weapons and misc npcables from the parties and the pop items to sell.
But lets just say 500k for now. The kyahan cost about 70k on ah. Then get resold at lv 72 for sune ate. Net loss of 5~6k that beats noob aurore and doesn't make other players tremble in fear.

Brisk mask= free if you have friends or just ask one of the people killing and/or shouting to buy pops in pj if you can tag along. It is 1 level higher than the "much vaunted" aurore beret and for the simple effort involved in asking nicely we have a net GAIN of gil due to the cruor dropped when the NM dies + a lunar abyssite. Walmart is 20 imp gold coins which translates to max 160k which is less gil than would be made from simply leveling and npcing items before even beating maat if she really wanted to have something to wear pre brisk .

Thew bomblet 20k or free if just killed directly. Let's go with bought i guess.

Ziel charm= free and gives acc when skills are far behind until it's time to buy a rancor after saving up. Those were suggested to get some practive but we have spectacles for 20k in AH. Faith torque probably wont drop but the instant you're at lv 80 with capped skills/decent gear with a mage helper the entire battle becomes laughable. in addition it's still very good depending on h2h skill/gear so as far as current gear stands it's not outdated.
My goodness if no cruor was npced from the glaviod we've lost 45k so far. Truly we're going to become broke soon.
Earrings can be some coral since newb. Brutal is on the todo list because it never geats beaten for tp still but can be farmed via soloing limbus while free over time.

Body. Aurore actually is decent here bravo. buy it for 20k. Turul isn't that hard to kill and having proper atma onyl makes it easier so we have a free option here too. Drop rate sucks but isn't ultra horrid presuming there was proper skilling up done.

so far that's 65k
Hands put us at 75k since they're actually good until empy+1

sniper's ring are 10~25k in ah. There are other similar options but im too lazy to look em up atm. Rajas will be easy to zerg for eventually but counting both snipers @25k that's 125k out of 500k so far. The other suggestion aka eponas was something to aim for because it would be remiss to tell a person what to get without telling them what the stuff that's actually the best option is. Especially since this is the type of item a newbie would actually overlook the most.

Forager's mantle is 10k in AH,

135k so far.

Belt. I suggested going out and camping. it's 400k in Ah for reference

legs.
B haidate. NOT HARD. 2 people helping. kill some monsters for diorite while getting bonus skillups. Have your freinds kill despot. Then usea silent oil and kill byakko. Since SE made sky mobs drop multiple pops now we might have 2x byakko. Byakko lasts about 2 minutes when I fought it last and only because perfect dodge existed. make scraps from the seals for synergy or if not going the synergy route just scrap it anyway and sell the parts. Make the abjurations into tatters as well. There's not much reason why a newbie wouldn't want to see some missions done so a little time aside to work on zilart missions isn't unreasonable.

less than a day's worth of effort and you're swimming in noob dollars.

End result. 135k spent on all of that minimum wage gear without making people(that don't suck) afraid to pt with you from all the aurore. nearly 400k is left making brown belt easily buyable with a tiny smidge of effort
You actually earn more gil than that doing regular missions for rank 10. I dont see any reason to tell a person to purposely suck when they can easily wear something alot better easily.
Then there's the bcnm loot. Utsu ni is 1.3 mil and drops fast. There's PLENTY of gil to be found for even new players. There should be some basic guides lying about the forums for newbies. And please remember haste> all gearwise for tping until you hit 25~26% aka the gear cap on haste

great post, but completing cop in of itself is going to take days. I like your plan, i think it will help others, but at some point a new player, mnk in this case, is going to be wearing pink theres no way around it, while he/she does cop, while they gather the pt for glavoid or camp the ???, while they are xping, and hope they can get an invite for the clear off some empyrean weapon poeple's kill. You have detailed a great plan for a new mnk's future, ill use this post you have there as a reference for future players leveling monks, I still say he/she is going to be wearing mostly pink for awhile until they complete your steps.

PS: i edited down my tone and I apoligize, I read your post incorrectly the first time, sorry. Also, I apreciate you offering the alternative, and I'm sure any new mnk here does too. I just cant see new players going into sea or sky and farming it successfully as easily as an experienced player would, that's why I suggest aurore gear. Most new players want to xp to cap first, then go back and do storylines and missions, sky, cop, etc. So while they are xping to cap, they will be wearing the abyssea aurore gear, etc. It's a logical first step of many baby steps.

HAPPY HUNTING ^;^

Here’s some interesting links, old FF vs. new FF post abyssea to read up on:
http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/104...I-Then-Vs.-Now)