When do I need to start worrying about "HQ"? Also, what is "HQ"?

So, I've gathered that HQ gear is "high quality", but I'm not clear on what that means. Are they just rare drops? Do I upgrade existing gear to get it to HQ? I'm a bit confused by this.

Also, if someone could explain what this Spiritbond stat is and what it's for, I'd be immensely appreciative.

When you craft an item, it can be made in one of two ways. Normal Quality or High Quality. High Quality usually has better stats when it comes to gear, weapons etc.

Spiritbonding allows you to convert an item into materia, the stuff you can meld to the empty slots on gear to boost stats. Particularly important at higher levels, especially for crafters who need to max out their gear to do the 2 and 3 star recipes.

It is probably worth your while to convert any 100% spirit bonded gear as you are levelling up, but you often change items fairly quickly and rarely reach the full bond in the short time you are using it.

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Originally Posted by Mikal52

Particularly important at higher levels, especially for crafters who need to max out their gear to do the 2 and 3 star recipes.

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So, crafted item quality is dependent on your crafter's gear?

Somewhat. You have to increase quality while making the item and the more quality it has the better chance of the final product being HQ. Better gear just makes it easier to do so, or in some cases, possible at all.

As an example, say you have a recipe that normally takes you 3 progress actions to complete. If you get better gear and you can suddenly begin completing the synth in 2 progress actions, that's an extra quality action you can take that you couldn't before and having better gear tends to make the quality increases more "Potent".

The better the stats you have on your crafting gear, the easier it becomes to craft HQ items. The high level recipes have minimum requirements for craftsmanship or control which you need to equal or exceed in order to make the item. Those levels aren't obtainable from just wearing the HQ gear, you will also need to meld materia onto the gear to obtain the required levels.

It's not something to worry to much about until you hit 50 and are planning to do 1 star and higher recipes, but as you are levelling you stand a better chance at getting HQ items if you keep your crafting gear as up-to-date as possible, but melding that levelling gear is pretty much a waste of materia.

The stats you get from gear will help you get HQ easier, but while leveling you wont need materia to make HQ items. Just keep you gear current and you'll do fine. It helped me a lot to level Weaver and Goldsmith first, and I would make myself HQ gear to wear as I leveled. A LOT of it has to do with leveling multiple crafts to get all relevant cross-class skills.

Here's a breakdown of crafting that might help you understand:

http://www.ffxivinfo.com/images/crafting-progress.png

Every item has Durability, Progress and Quality. Durability is like the item's health, it goes down as you work with it and if it hits 0 the item breaks. Crafters have skills to raise Progress and Quality, but they cost Durability to use. Progress is how done the item is, and must be filled before durability hits 0. Full Progress means a completed item. In order to make the item HQ, you need to fill the Quality bar as much as possible before the item is completed. The higher the bar, the better chance you have that the item is HQ. It caps at 100%, so if you can fill the quality bar every time, you will always get an HQ item. At lower levels its pretty much impossible to do it since you wont have the skills unlocked to heal Durabiliy, so you just take whatever the RNG decides to give.

Oh, using HQ materials will also give you a healthy boost to Quality. HQ materials are semi-rare drops from enemies, or gathered by DoL classes with sufficient Perception skill.

Think of high quality gear as normal gear with slightly better statistics. So, a Plumed Maple Shortbow for a lv.10 archer will have 7pdmg but the hq will have 8pdmg, equivalent to the lv.11 bow. These effects are multiplied the higher level you are, and the higher the item level is.

high quality crafting materials simply give you a higher starting value in quality when crafting. This makes it easier to high quality an item as instead of starting at 0 quality, you may start at 1000 quality, but both have to end at 2000 quality for hq.

As for spiritbinding, that is the primary method to obtain materia. Spiritbind stats on your equipment simply increase the rate at which your item spiritbinds, allowing you to spiritbind more items in the same amount of time. It's a small percentage increase though, but the potions are enough to shave a few hours off with the right party.

Thank you so much for all your helpful answers! The community I've seen so far is definitely one of the best things about this game. ^_^