Gearing up your retainer for ventures

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Originally Posted by Sic_Pirate

That's what I was mainly wondering. I have no problem with everything else, but I wasn't looking forward to keeping up with accessories for them.

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Note that that applies only to gathering retainers. Since the score they use is their perception score, and all gathering accessories give only GP (unless melds) they get zero benefit from accessories.

Combat retainers, however, are about ilvl. Leaving them with completely empty spots on their right side really hurts the iLvl. Note that you can give them any accessories you might have at hand, it doesn't matter if you kit a rogue with healer accessories, as long as it increases their iLvl enough for the requirements they need.

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Originally Posted by Sida

For gatherer retainers, yes kitting them in HQ benefits them in the form of better Perception score , but you can also totally skip accessories (unless you happen to have some old ones with perception melded at hand but that's not really required.)

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It's the Gathering stat, not Perception stat, that matters. So basically, they should be wearing DoL chest, gloves, and pants, and BTN/MIN should have an off-hand tool. Items that only give Perception (like most DoL hats, belts, and shoes) are as useless to them as accessories that only give GP.

Q. How in depth do you need to be with retainers gear?

A. Everything, besides the ilvl is irrelevant. So don't worry about the gears stats. Just focus on ilvl.
In order to use new hunts/expeditions/field explorations. Every 10 levels, you will need to update your retainers ilvl.
Which needs to be 10 ilvls below your current ilvl (until you hit lvl 51).
Level 10, has a lvl i0 requirement (so don't worry about gear just yet). Level 20's new content requires ilvl 10 to unlock. (etc. etc.)

Source: Myself. I own 8 retainers per character. My main has 6 lvl 51 hunters, and 2 lvl 8 hunters.