Praetorium and Tomestones of Soldiery

I've been grinding poetic tomestones so of course, I end up doing the MSQ roulette. Every day for at least a week, when I queue for the roulette, I end up getting into Praetorium. I started asking if people actually queued for it and, most of the time, someone responds that they are grinding soldiery tomestones.

Praetorium, in my experience, averages roughly 50 minutes to run. It awards 200 poetics and 10 soldery tomes. This averages out to about 4 poetic tomestones per minute and 0.2 soldery tomestones per minute. On the other hand, Castrum Meridianum lasts roughly 25 minutes, awards 200 poetics and 7 soldery, or 8 poetics tomestones and 0.28 soldery tomestones per minute.

Going off the raw averages, it doesn't make much sense to chain queue Praetorium if you're farming either tomestone. It's not the speediest. Even with the queue time, the break-even for the two allows a 10 minute queue between Castrum instances. So, what am I missing? Why are people explicitly queueing Praetorium?

It's not the speediest, but it takes a lot less effort than Castrum since you have long breaks during cutscenes.

Castrum is faster but you have to be alert for more of it.

cuz you can afk most of it.

Classic error. Failed to account for effort.

So, here I am, decided to start again on a different server and am up to Castrum/Praetorium in order to polish off the original ARR MSQ. Have put it off untill the weekend when I will have the time to sit through the interminable cut scenes. Hopefully you guys will all be queuing up so at least I won't have to wait too long in a queue as well. After that I will have the dubious reward of cranking through the 100 or so quests before Heavensward for little or no reward. Pray for me.

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Originally Posted by Holymoly

After that I will have the dubious reward of cranking through the 100 or so quests before Heavensward for little or no reward. Pray for me.

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You do get EXP and gear out of it.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

You do get EXP and gear out of it.

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XP is like 8k from memory? Doesn't really even nudge the progress bar when each level is costing in the multiple millions. The gear is probably hideously under levelled if you're on a preferred server and doing daily roulettes.

You get several sets actually, just like you would have if you played through the content patch by patch back in the day. The final set is i110, so close to top tier for level 50.

If you're doing roulettes on your main class and are constantly overleveled, that's on you though.
Running dungeons tied to MSQ progression will have the same effect as getting the gear sets through the post ARR story: they would be good but you're so overleveled it gets outclassed by white vendor gear. For a more rewarding experience it's generally recommended to not do roulettes on your main class unless you need to fill an exp gap to continue with the MSQ.

If done at roughly the recommended level, the last set you get before you hit HW is actually pretty good. And you can always chose a different set to quickly gear another class if you don't/ can't spent tomestones on Ironworks gear.

Worth pointing out that it really doesn't matter how much "better" gear you can get, or how "underleveled" gear you're getting is. The gear only needs to be relevant to the content you are doing. Instanced content syncs everything down anyway. So it doesn't do much good to worry about getting level-appropriate gear, just make sure the gear is keeping up with the content.