What is Easiest/cheapest way to equip retainers at 80?

I have a couple of battle retainers at 80, and 1 bot and min each that have almost reached cap.

And while I realize more is always better, I'm looking for the cheapest and easiest ways to equip these retainers to be able to do every venture option at 80.

For Battle retainers, I know that you can use your 430 role gear to get a good start. For the rest of the accessories, can you just use npc bought gear.... and if so where is the vendor that has the highest gear? It seems that the crystarium only has lv 70 stuff.

For Min/Bot, the crystarium gear vendor has lv. 78 stuff. Will this be enough to get a high enough gathering rate? Is Gathering rate the only thing that matters? If so, do I only need to buy the pieces that have that stat on them?


Thanks for any help and or a point in the right direction.

White scrip gear. Seriously white scrips are nothing and with just over an hours worth of farming scrips I was able to gear 2 retainers. You could also use the white scrips you can get super easy from weekly turn ins, just max them out by choosing the ones that give you 60 scrips per turn in. That's 600 scrips for about 10 minutes of work alone.

Nice..... I don't have a ton of experience with white script collectibles, so I guess thats why I didn't look at this route before.