So I get the thing to upgrade the thing with the thing thing?

[0nionKn1ght]

Right so I have been back for just under 48 hours now, and getting very comfortable again in the pilot seat of my F-16 RDM Bomber Exceptionelle, but having hit level 80, im noticing that I should be upgrading into Empyrean (yup check me out using the new buzzwords) gear.

Now I am pretty savvy with a wiki, and have already done the arduous task of typing in the gear names into it and finding out where it comes from, but there is still a bit of an air of mystery about the whole thing. I want to know a few things, if people wouldn't mind clearing up these questions for me please!

1a) The level of the first tier pieces (the belt and lower end items) seems around level 80-85, but I have no idea of the kind of challenge im facing with the NM's that drop them. Am I expected to be able to solo them at 80, or is this a full alliance dealy?

1b) The items themselves require stacks of items to trade in for them, are we talking a stack farmable in a few hours, or is this something that I would focus on over a period of weeks? Are these items one drop per group, multi drop, or auto dropped to you when you pop it?

2) I have a Traversing Stone and tonne of Voidwatch points, but no idea what to do with them, other than the stone is to give me time in Abyssea. Where should I be heading, and what should I be doing, what should I be aiming for?

3) Creor (sp?) seems to be the currency of Abyssea, and it seems I can spend it on some rather swanky item sets, but is there any other requirements for obtaining these, and if so, what kind of things am I looking for to join up with others to get this currency?

4) I have all expansions unlocked, is there anything more I need to do (completed all up to the final fights in the moogle, shantotto and crystalline ones) to be part of the cool kids in Abyssea? Is there linear progression, is there an unlock chain like Dynamis, or is it all just waiting for me to die in?

Thats all I have on my mind right now, any pointers or tips outside of the wiki I mentioned would be most welcome too!

[Luvbunny]

Abysite info:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Category%3AAbyssite

Atma info:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Category%3AAtma

Abyssea info:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Category:Abyssea

[Luvbunny]

Basically find a LS that is abysea newbie friendly to help you gather atmas, seal farming for your empyrean gears, and most of your questions can be answered by reading the wiki and play the abyssea content of the game.

1. All abysea gears can be low man with 2-3 people party set up, usually called seal farming, try to level seal farming jobs such as thief, ninja, dancer, black mage, white mage, warrior, yes you do it at lvl 99.
2. Atmas can be done mostly with 3 other people, you need to get the to 10 atmas for starter.
3. Try to get abysite as well and complete the Abysea quests.
4. Try to finish all expansions if you can, mostly for the gears and accessories. The mini add ons has some gears that are useful for certain jobs.

[Luso]

This is from my own experience in dealing with farming these items with and without friends, so yeah.

1) I think that you might want to at least level to 99 first when you attempt to farm for these upgrade items called "seals". You can farm them by yourself at around 85+ with certain jobs, I would like to think, but it's better to stay safe and get to 99 on the job you're thinking about farming. It doesn't take that long now, assuming this is your first step into Abyssea, because you'll see that getting EXP is very easy in Fell Cleave/EXP PTs and it doesn't take that long to get to 99 if you're starting from 75. However, if you're farming with others, 80-85 and onward is a good place to start if you're in a group.

2) Voidwatch is separate from Abyssea; the only thing the 2 share in common is the currency both content use to acquire items, etc. You really want to just save up on stones so that you'll be able to stay in Abyssea longer when you need to. The stone is used to give you about 30 minutes of time in Abyssea up to a max of 120 minutes.When you leave Abyssea, the time you had left will be retained. Any time acquired over 120 minutes is deleted and just reverts to 120 minutes. If you log out while in Abyssea, you will still stay in the zone and your "lights will be retained", but your time will be expended as if you were still there. After your time is up, you will automatically be teleported outside the area to the maw you teleported in with. After that, if you leave without expending at least one stone in Abyssea or are forcibly ejected in the mentioned method, you cannot enter Abyssea for one hour. More time can be acquired and added to the clock by finding blue chests, or pyxis, and finding time bonuses inside them; they can also contain cruor. You usually get these blue chests to appear after defeating a monster; they must be defeated with magic. When they fall, you acquire an "azure light" increase. Azure lights increase the rate at which blue pyxis appear; the more azure lights you acquire, the more likely a blue chest will appear after a monster is felled by anyone in your PT and/or alliance. These "lights" are temporary for however long you stay in Abyssea; if you leave, they reset to a counter of 0 and must be increased again the next time you enter if you wish to utilize any of their effects. How many lights there are and what they do for you can be found on the wiki associated with Abyssea.

3) Cruor is the currency used in Abyssea and some other content; it is used for teleporting to areas in Abyssea, buying armor from NPCs in Abyssea, etc. It's basically used in place of gil, except for the instance of Battle Trophies***. You can get them easily by joining up in an EXP PT. EXP PTs usually do Dominion Ops, which is the equivalent of Grounds of Valor and Fields of Valor; you kill monsters assigned to you by an NPC (designated as a page; they can be around 5 or more "pages" for you to choose from if you want to kill harder or different monsters) and you acquire a bonus amount of EXP and cruor each time you complete it; you must report back to the NPC to obtain the reward and you must sign up for the page again if you wish to take it on. (Unlike GoV and FoV, you get cruor each time you do it regardless if a day has passed or not and it does not repeat; you must go back to the NPC, as noted before. The EXP gained also does not increase unlike GoV, unless the difficulty [denoted by stars in the game] of it is raised due to circumstances happening in the area (Martellos being drained of their HP, outposts being overrun, etc). This is a very easy and fast way to gain cruor. The NPCs assigned to this event are called Dominion Sergeants.

4) Really, you can just dive into this stuff. As an RDM, you'll probably just be healing anyway and doing some backseat black magic casting to kill monsters for azure lights if needed. Other than that, you don't really need to anything else.

Just as an extra note, you only get one stone a day if you just started out. You can increase the amount of stones you obtain if you acquire Abyssite. These key items basically imbue you with extra properties, such as gaining more time when you trade in a stone, increasing the amount of stones you can carry at one time, etc. Atmas are key items that increase your combat potential, essentially. Some give you increased STR, a 3MP/tick Refresh, increased Critical Hit rate and damage, etc. You get atmas by killing NMs when their "weakness" is hit. All NMs in Abyssea have a weakness (or really, several: there are Weapon Skill weaknesses and magic weaknesses). By striking their weaknesses, this causes them to be stunned, leaving you with an advantage. Striking true with magic causes the items they can drop to have a higher chance of dropping. This means that if they drop a seal you need, they can drop more of it and also at a higher rate. It's not always guaranteed you'll get the amount and the seal you're looking for, but it it always good to get the magic weakness done if you're seal farming. The other weaknesses are usually for atmas and just plain weakening the monster down so it can be defeated. Read up more on this and the other things I mentioned on the wiki associated with Abyssea: http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Abyssea

If you have any other questions, ask and I or someone else will try to give you a quick explanation on whatever it is that you need to know.

***These are things that are acquired after defeating an NM in Abyssea. They usually drop these; these are leveled one through 5, I believe, and can be exchanged for armor provided you have the correct amount of trophies. (You can have more than one of each trophy at each of the 5 levels; the higher the level, the more powerful the NM is, usually. You get better armor presumably when trading in higher leveled trophies.) This pieces of armor are given augments that basically makes each one you get unique; they aren't given random augments until you trade for them.

[RAIST]

In the mean time, while you are leveling....look into some of the quick Resistance Ops in the Bastion zones if you are in those areas (some only take seconds to do, and offer a chance for seals--can run one while party is gathering and such). When getting XP in the Dominon areas, you'll be spamming pages for the bonus xp, which also grants a chance for seals. So, you may find you knock out some of your seals along the way.

[wish12oz]

I instantly dont care what you have to say because you type in an ugly color and it doesn't look like it's suppose to.

[Hachiiiiii]

1a) The level of the first tier pieces (the belt and lower end items) seems around level 80-85, but I have no idea of the kind of challenge im facing with the NM's that drop them. Am I expected to be able to solo them at 80, or is this a full alliance dealy?

Some of it depends on your RDM skills, but most Abyssea groups are small parties: anywhere from solos, to duos to sixman. Seeing as how you're starting out, you likely have no Atma, and so your chances of soloing these mobs drastically goes down. Some people -have- done it as RDM, but they had a lot of really good gear and were really good RDMs- I don't know if this is true for you or not, I'm just saying. If there's an alliance it's either for EXP or helping a person get a lot of particular drops.

1b) The items themselves require stacks of items to trade in for them, are we talking a stack farmable in a few hours, or is this something that I would focus on over a period of weeks? Are these items one drop per group, multi drop, or auto dropped to you when you pop it?

If you know what you're doing, gathering enough seals for any one given piece of Empyrean armor (hereafter referred to as AF3) only takes hours. Under proper situations, multiple seals can drop from any one NM, and distribution is based on lotting. Read on here to find out how to make multiple seals drop, under Yellow Weakness. Long story short, you need a BLM buddy, preferrably with /BRD, and it wouldn't hurt for you to go RDM/NIN.

Popular jobs in Abyssea, by the way, are WAR (red weaknesses), MNK (tanking, duoability with WHM, also blue weaknesses under the right time), NIN (tanking, red weaknesses, some yellow weaknesses), BLM (yellow weaknesses), WHM (duoability with MNK, some yellow weaknesses), BLU (some yellow weaknesses) and SAM (some red weaknesses). The entire metagame of Abyssea revolves around hitting weaknesses. Simply killing the NMs is a trivial task in many cases, but without hitting weaknesses (slang: proccing (proc red, proc yellow, proc blue)), the chance for drops is much lower. A red weakness will guarantee a pop item drop to the person that spawned/initiated on the NM, yellows guarantee at least one seal drop and often grant multiples, blues nearly guarantee rare/ex drops from certain mobs. If you don't have one of those jobs levelled, it'll be a harder row to hoe if you don't have friends/LS mates/really friendly shout groups.

2) I have a Traversing Stone and tonne of Voidwatch points, but no idea what to do with them, other than the stone is to give me time in Abyssea. Where should I be heading, and what should I be doing, what should I be aiming for?

3) Creor (sp?) seems to be the currency of Abyssea, and it seems I can spend it on some rather swanky item sets, but is there any other requirements for obtaining these, and if so, what kind of things am I looking for to join up with others to get this currency?

Here's what you should do to get a bunch of cruor and what you should do to start your career off right:

Join an Abyssea EXP alliance. Likely, this will be a worms party in Abyssea La Theine. Stay there for hours, even as you hit your current level cap and start gaining merit points. Stay and stay and stay. You will get nothing for a while, but then eventually start gaining EXP and Cruor. After 5-6 hours of this, you will have a workable cruor base.

Go to one of the Heroes Abyssea zones (Abyssea Altepa/Grauberg/Uleguerand) and buy an Ivory Abyssite of Celerity from the Cruor Prospector inside. This is 9000 cruor, and it will make you gain traverser stones at an increased rate.

Do this quest. Find which of those working items in the list are the cheapest, buy them, and use them to complete the quest. You did that so you could then do this quest, which will give you a Crimson Abyssite of Celerity, further increasing your accumulation rate.

The next thing you should do is buy the maps for the Abyssea zones and/or run all around them, collecting conflux warps by speaking to the confluxes. This will help you get around much faster.

Your next goal is 100,000 cruor to buy the Lunar Abyssite (from Abyssea Vunkerl/Miseraux/Attowha), which will allow you to be infused with Atma. You probably don't have any now, but you will, soon. To get Atma, you first trigger a Red Weakness (see the earlier link) on an NM, then you kill it. To get further Lunar Abyssites, join groups that kill zonebosses, though your best bet at this point is to join an LS that can help you with that.

4) I have all expansions unlocked, is there anything more I need to do (completed all up to the final fights in the moogle, shantotto and crystalline ones) to be part of the cool kids in Abyssea? Is there linear progression, is there an unlock chain like Dynamis, or is it all just waiting for me to die in?

Fortunately, Abyssea progression is separate from every other event in the game. The progression is:

Kill the 9 Abyssea zone bosses.
Kill the 6 caturae.
Kill Shinryu.

There's details in between them, but stripped down to its barest requirements, that's it.

The best part is that you do not have to kill the zone bosses and caturae in any given order. So long as you obtain the title for the kill (you don't even have to be alive), it'll count towards the progression of the quest. You could, theoretically, be part of parties that kill the caturae before clearing all the zone bosses, and then when you get to the caturae part of the quest, it'll automatically be completed.

[Vivivivi]

Most of your questions are answered above, but just to clarify~

The only requirement for Abyssea progression outside of abyssea is having a level 30 job to enter it (although you can't do much until level 80+). It's not like Dynamis in that sense. Good luck!

[Limecat]

You put the lime in the coconut, and trade them to the moogle.

[0nionKn1ght]

Thanks for the help everyone, the tips and information provided really help me hit the ground running