Stop Gating The MSQ By A GOd-Aweful Dungeon Grind :(

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Originally Posted by Pintsized

The only way to unlock the 430 gate for the Grand Cosmos was to grind umpteen Amaurots, etc. to get enough bling or else buy 450 crafted gear

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If nothing else, you seem to have missed that there are two more optional dungeons unlocked as soon as you clear the game. Akademia and the Twinning (unlocked via sidequests that start in the main cities) both drop the same i430 accessories as Amaurot, and you'd earn tomes for completing them that you could then spend on getting those few critical pieces you needed.

50/60/70 roulette also gives a generous amount of currently-Goetia tomes, if I remember correctly.

Echoing what everyone else said: goetia 440 and phantasmagoria 460/470 tome gear, eden 450 gear, copied factory 460 gear, crafted 450/460 gear. There are a lot of gearing options so use them!!

Crafted is fastest and 1m gil is not hard to come by doing maps and other things.

Also in general you will want to get ready for the tome grind where you want to cap the newest tomestone every week for gear upgrades, usually by doing roulettes.

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Originally Posted by Avenger

Also in general you will want to get ready for the tome grind where you want to cap the newest tomestone every week for gear upgrades, usually by doing roulettes.

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I feel like the weekly tome grind, while important to folks who are raiding, is probably less so to folks who don't care about the raid content at all.

That said, even without aiming for the weekly cap, I think it'd be possible to buy most of a full set of the new gear ahead of 5.3 this summer, and thus stay a good chunk ahead of any upcoming ilevel bump.

I get that you're annoyed but I don't really see the reason why.

I mean when you're playing current content, the MSQ does not hand out gear when you're doing the post expansion missions (the gear that was handed out after being ARR, HW and SB were originally gear that you got while earning end game tomes at that time when the content was relevant). It's only after the content is "irrelevant" to end game that they assign where you're going to get the gear that people got during other stages of end game to catch people up once the new expansion is out (to get those people to the next expansion if they haven't).

Or in otherwords if you quit the game now and didn't play until the next expansion release (and started playing after the release) SE again would be handing out gear to help get you through post end game of ShB but they aren't going to be doing it til than.

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Originally Posted by Pintsized

What the hell is a new player supposed to do here?

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Nothing. New players shouldn't be qualified for expert dungeons anyway.

Even if somebody buys a skip potion, they need to be good enough to not get kicked out of every pug they join to complete the story. Once you get good enough for that, you're not new. Maybe semi-new, but not new.

If people aren't willing to meet the ilvl requirements for the dungeons, then I really am uncomfortable with them being in them. Especially when it's so trivial to get the gear necessary to enter those dungeons.

Yeah, I can see where a new player's confusion would come from - I see this with new 80s in my FC and it happened to me at the end of the SB msq when I returned to the game a couple years back.

What SE does is each time a new expansion is released, they add gear rewards to the previous expansion's patch quests so that players can easily gear up to meet the ilvl requirements of its patch dungeons (usually it will be the stuff you were buying for tomes if you played when that expansion was endgame). So if you're starting from scratch, you can easily catch up to the current expansion without stopping to consider where to get better gear. But everything after the latest expansion's main content is considered 'endgame', so they no longer hand you that gear - they expect you to do endgame content in order to earn it. It can be very jarring when you suddenly encounter that after everything else had flowed so smoothly, but the point is to keep players occupied in between patches. So yeah, they do actually want you to stop progressing the msq for a bit and catch up in ilvl first.

There are some really good suggestions in this thread on how to do that. :) I think the game could do a better job of pointing players in the right direction, but once you find your feet, you'll get a feel for the flow of patch content and gearing.

Good luck, and welcome back to the game!

There is little to no grinding for casuals in this game.
Just get equipment from the normal quests if they give any, a lot of them actually do.

Eden, Nier alliance raid, crafted, Geotia, phantasmagoria. Even 1 piece from each of them would probably have you sorted in 2 weeks.
Log in Tuesday run Eden, nier, expert. Buy crafted set, exchange times for 1 piece each. Log off.
Repeat. Done on your second Tuesday. Only a few hrs work both days.