Gear Upgrades? Perceptive of you...

Heya. I've been L50 Miner for a couple of months but I've been ignoring mining for a while, working on my crafting. So I was surprised the other day when I dropped into Mor Dhona and noticed the new trader with the Forager gear.

Imagine my shock when I saw, getting the gear required turning in this newfangled "Umbral Rock" - and HQ to boot - and that I'd need 332 perception just to SEE the darn stuff.

So, I was wondering, what everyone's using for gear and melds, to kick their Perception up to that level or above, without also scarfing down a food boost?

Well, you're going to have to meld pretty hard with a few forbidden melds if you want to eventually hit up the 2* nodes. Something like this, eating Beef Stew for GP. If you have 625+GP you can do Toil > Sharp Vision > hit 5 times > Solid Reason > Deep Vigor > 2 guaranteed HQ. Or if you don't want to eat, you can just use Toil + Unearth II and pray.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/MFPN

Well I've managed to get the last forager gear on sunday evening. That was the botanist one so I have all the forager gear on all. I have most accessories overmelded with just one though I got lucky with some off hand overmelds and used hq stuffed artichokes to get myself to 370 gathering and more than that perception. And with 580 as minimal GP needed - you can do unearth II - hit the slot(it's the same one always) then get 4 strikes hit solid reason, hit again... then deep vigor. If you get the deep vigor chain you are guaranteed atleast one.

But yeah spent 250k gil on the melds.