Best Way to Farm Gil with Retainers?

I have several retainers now at level 80 with my main character and two other characters which are now members of GC's and in the process of leveling up retainers as well.

My goal with all these retainers is to get them to level 80, equip them with the best gear, and then use them to make gil. (I want to save up enough gil to eventually buy a nice (ie expensive) plot of land).

What experiences do you have using retainers to farm gil? Are some types of retainers better at it than others? What are the best types of missions to send them on? Does the absolute best gear (lvl 80 HQ melded gear) make a difference?

Thank you for your help!

For me, and I think everyone is different... They level incredibly fast on quick ventures so it's no big problem to just try and see.

The green/blue junk they bring back can be traded for GC seals and FC credits (from memory on past threads you created your own FC so the credits will be incredibly valuable for ceruleum tanks and actions) GC seals are convertable to both more venture coins and fair money. You can watch the price of things like coke, glass fibre, hardened sap, T3 soils and trade seals for them. You also get a lot of housing junk that can be marketboarded, or desynthed.

For me, there is really little benefit from melding, or anything more than base crafted gear if you take this route.

You don't need melded gear, it doesn't work the same as gear on our characters. There is a hard cap on them and increasing beyond that cap won't do anything. For dow/m it goes just on ilvl, other stats don't matter. And you don't need the best gear, I just use the gear from the latest dungeon and its well above what is usually needed. When it comes to gathering, scrip gear is good enough to get them to bring back the best items and is incredibly easy to get.

You can try quick exploration since you can score with dyes and what not that sell high, but most of the time you are going to get just crap or dungeon gear. The perk of this is you can trade that gear in for gc points which you can convert to coke or hardened sap, etc, that still sells for a fair amount. Although this won't be too quick.

You can do standard ventures for crafting materials, but most of the time they are the same materials that go for nearly nothing on the market board or are slow sellers. So the best thing you can do with them is to farm raw materials and craft them into something that sells for more.

You can also try the 18 hour ventures which will bring back hq crafting items, again generally ones that don't sell for much, along with a few thousand gil worth of allagan coins.

All in all its good to have a mixture of battle and gathering retainers, because its particularly helpful, esp if you have an fc and want to make the best parts for your ships, furniture and such as well as be able to bring back basic items if need be for other crafting purposes. But I would not count on them for a steady flow of income because the good stuff can be few and far between and the raw crafting items they can obtain usually are the items that sell for the least on mb. Usually they are merely a way to supplement your income.

First of all I'd say that sending retainers out on missions is not the best way to make a huge amount of gil, but lets look at the options that you can use:

1) Check the items your retainers can bring back during their Hunting/Mining/Botany/Fishing Exploration and compare that with what sells for an acceptable price on your world. I'd expect that only a couple of items from the "Hunting" (DoW/M) that are used in either Ishgard crafting or high level recipes will sell well. So I'd take a look at the last two pages of Hunting explorations and compare that with your worlds marketboard. Soil from Mining Explorations, aswell as a couple of seeds from Botany (specially those that are used in furniture recipes) might have a chance to sell well aswell.

2) Use your retainers to get yourself materials you need to turn them into items that sell better and/or for more gil. You could sent your Hunting retainer out to get you the ingredients for level 80 raid food or crafting teas. If you have access to a garden, you can sent your Mining retainer out and just use the soil yourself to crossbreed stuff or grow plants that sell well.

3) There are two ways which rely on luck, but can yield some money:
(a) sent your retainers out for the 18-hour Field Exploration, picking the ones that can yield minions. Before you do that, you should check wether or not the minions actually sell for enough gil for you to warrant this. Here is a guide that includes all minions that come from ventures: https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-14-retainer-ventures-minions-guide/ - crosscheck this with the marketboard and see for yourself if any of it is worth it.
(b) sent your retainers out for quick ventures and hope that they bring back something rare and useful. This has the neat side effect that they'll often bring back useless dungeon gear that you can turn in for GC-seals, which pay for your retainer ventures (or some mats, that may or may not sell well... most probably dont any more).

Gear makes a difference up to a certain point - for DoL the gathering stat is important, anything else doesnt matter. For DoW/M the ilvl is important, anything else doesnt matter. Or, in other words: You dont need the absolute best gear and HQ and melds only make a difference for DoL when its gathering materia melded.
The gathering stat or the ilvl decides wether or not your retainer has access to certain ventures (mainly the 18-hour Field explorations, the higher the better the gear needs to be), how long ventures take and how much they yield (the "Targeted" ventures, Hunting, Mining etc.) and wether or not they can find rare stuff during Quick Ventures. For the last one at least the game will give you a message after each completed venture with something along the lines of "Your retainers gear is good enough to find rare items" if your gear is good enough or something like "If you improve the gear of your retainer you can get rare items" if it isnt.

All in all I'd say that retainer ventures are best used to get you some materials you need for crafting that are otherwise time consuming to obtain. I wouldnt rely on ventures for a steady income - the ones that have the potential to pay well also include a lot of RNG.

What I was used to do was to send them to do exploration ventures when I will be outside the game and when I come back, as soon they have finished exploration, switch to quick venture.

Of course you can send them gathering/hunting -in order to resale- but that's not that efficient to compare with pets or gear they can bring back.

And if you plan to craft, you get materials really faster now doing it by yourself if your gathering jobs are at the higher rank (especially since you can level and gear with custom deliveries and tribes quests pretty fast).

Random rare materials are more interesting than gathered ones from this point of view. It's not that absolute because of RNG but in the end, it was the balance I found.

Considering the gear :
gathering : custom deliveries gears are perfect. It takes some time but melded gear doesn't worth the work (or the cost) for retainers.
hunting : tomes(or hunt seals, or even dungeons but... the more you mix different sources, the more confusing it becomes) will provide you all the gear you need for your retainers.

Note : To make gils, in fact, the fastest way is most likely to find folks to do treasure maps, Eureka (bunny), Bozja (though currently there are a lot of people, prices are probably kind of low), PotD, HoH and resale everything

Afaik only gathering stat matters for retainers so you could work on maximising that by melding gathering materia on gear that usually only has perception.

Thank you all for the information you have provided. From this I conclude that retainers are not the best way to make a lot of gil. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something I was missing. I plan to make most of my retainers miners, simply because they seem to be the best for gathering shards and crystals which I can use for my crafting, and if I have extras, I will sell them on the mp.

I send my retainers on the highest tier of the 18 hour venture for the allagan silver pieces and then sell those to the doman enclave until I cap them out for the week. Once I get 3 stacks of 99 i usually just vendor 2 of the 3 stacks. It's not that much gil but it's consistent daily gil that will add up over time.