Gear Prep for Dawntrail: crafted 640 enough?

If the game follows the iLevel patterns of the past for combat gear, the first L90 crafted gear available from Dawntrail will be iL645 gear, and the L90 Poetics gear will be iL660. (Of course, the L90 poetics gear won't be available until reaching the end of Dawntrail's MSQ.)

Top crafted gear now is 640, but it can be upgraded to 650.
And the top tome gear for casuals is 650 as well, which I believe can be upgraded to 660 by grinding Myths of the Realm.

Do people think it's worth the effort to grind for 650 or perhaps better gear in prep for Dawntrail, or will the 640 gear be enough?

Having 6 characters currently at End-of-Content all in 640 gear for at least three classes (SGE-WAR-DNC), I don't want to put a lot of effort into grinding gear upgrades if it isn't useful. And I expect I'll easily be able to gather and craft mid-expansion gear (e.g. L96 gear) should it be useful to do so.

640 should be fine. The 660 gear isn't even all that worth it anyways since you pretty much can already upgrade them by the second dungeon of the expansion.

It will be enough for the first few dungeons.

To be clear, the 660 now will be the next poetics so by farming now you will gain on poetics when the expansion will be released. But poetics will only have the upgraded one, you will to buy an entirely new items or do the 3 raid 24 to upgrade an old non upgraded item.

And to be complete on the gear during the expansions.
First quests will give you the 645 ilvl gear, then the first dungeon will give you 650ilvl gear, next quests will have 655 and next dungeon 660.
So with 640 ilvl gear, you will take all items you will found as an upgrade and with 660, you will only have upgrade starting at the 95 dungeon and 660 will be largely enough to go to 100 but not the 640.

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Originally Posted by Kazelus

It will be enough for the first few dungeons.

To be clear, the 660 now will be the next poetics so by farming now you will gain on poetics when the expansion will be released. But poetics will only have the upgraded one, you will to buy an entirely new items or do the 3 raid 24 to upgrade an old non upgraded item.

And to be complete on the gear during the expansions.
First quests will give you the 645 ilvl gear, then the first dungeon will give you 650ilvl gear, next quests will have 655 and next dungeon 660.
So with 640 ilvl gear, you will take all items you will found as an upgrade and with 660, you will only have upgrade starting at the 95 dungeon and 660 will be largely enough to go to 100 but not the 640.

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what this guy said... it's good enough but you'll have to upgrade.

Right now it's easy enough to get your tomey gear so just do that and your relic weapon ez pz

Level 90 Dawntrail gear based off of past expansions would be 645, and leveling gear increasing 5 ilvl per level making the current augmented tomestone gear (660) effectively level 93 gear.

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Originally Posted by Kazelus

To be clear, the 660 now will be the next poetics so by farming now you will gain on poetics when the expansion will be released. But poetics will only have the upgraded one, you will to buy an entirely new items or do the 3 raid 24 to upgrade an old non upgraded item.

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Based on historic patterns:

• The base IL 650 Comedy gear will be upgradable to Augmented IL 660 at the cost of 100 poetics per slot.
• The Lv91 dungeon will drop IL 650 gear.
• The Lv93 dungeon will drop IL 660 gear.
• Crafters will be able to make Lv94 gear that is IL 663.
• The Lv95 dungeon will drop IL 666 gear.

Getting a full set of IL 660 gear now would put you at the max IL available from Lv90 through Lv93, and the max IL available from duties through Lv94. A full set of IL 650 gear now would put you at the expected IL through Lv92 but that set can be upgraded to a full set of IL 660 gear for 1,100 poetics.

The MSQ will give you 645 gear coffers prior to the first Dawntrail dungeon. It will be a complete set (especially if you do sidequests, but I recall it being complete on alts that skipped them). The vendors in Old Sharlayan or Radz that sell MSQ gear will sell this 645 gear as well, but normal quality.

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Originally Posted by Bun_Vivant

Do people think it's worth the effort to grind for 650 or perhaps better gear in prep for Dawntrail, or will the 640 gear be enough?

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640 will be enough, but I would also point out that there's not much reason not to get 650 or 660, because what else is there to do? Even if you have other things to do, you can probably grind the tomestones from a few hunt trains, so may as well do it.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Based on historic patterns:

• The base IL 650 Comedy gear will be upgradable to Augmented IL 660 at the cost of 100 poetics per slot.
• The Lv81 dungeon will drop IL 650 gear.
• The Lv83 dungeon will drop IL 660 gear.
• Crafters will be able to make Lv84 gear that is IL 663.
• The Lv85 dungeon will drop IL 666 gear.

Getting a full set of IL 660 gear now would put you at the max IL available from Lv90 through Lv93, and the max IL available from duties through Lv94. A full set of IL 650 gear now would put you at the expected IL through Lv62 but that set can be upgraded to a full set of IL 660 gear for 1,100 poetics.

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Like I said, no upgrade before third dungeon. You have ilvl 663 from MSQ once but it won't apply for the rests of your jobs. And is not a necessity to continue the expansion.

I'm curious, never found a way to upgrade old Tomes gear with poetics, where did you get the upgrade ?
(You've put the wrong level for the dungeons, you put 8X instead of 9X.)

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Originally Posted by Kazelus

I'm curious, never found a way to upgrade old Tomes gear with poetics, where did you get the upgrade ?

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The upgrades were obtained the same way you obtain the upgrades for level 90 gear now, except with poetics and old hunt currencies.

They just decided to remove the upgrade process and make it impossible to purchase non-augmented gear for old expansions. This was done because it was a nightmare to explain the upgrade process to sprouts in the Novice Network. This led to Yoshi-P posing the question - would there be a problem with making it impossible to obtain non-augmented gear? There didn't seem to be much reaction to that question so they just did it shortly after.

So, when Dawntrail releases you won't be able to obtain non-augmented gear for Endwalker.

You can start with 640 but you'll want to start equipping every upgrade you get along the way.

Just to expand on what Rongway has listed, using the Endwalker dungeons as an example:

Exarchic was the best crafted gear from Shadowbringers at 510 (or Augmented at 520).
Augmented Cryptlurker was the best tomestone gear from Shadowbringers at 530.

You could wear all Exarchic and meet the min ilvl requirement up through Vanaspati. When you got to Ktisis, the minimum ilvl increased to 515 so you needed either half Augmented Exarchic or other
upgrades to enter.

At Aitiascope, the min ilvl was 520 so you needed all Augmented Exarchic or better.

For The Final Day, the minimum ilvl was 540, higher than even the Augmented Cryptlurker. You could still have a couple of Augmented Cryptlurker pieces equipped but you had to mainly rely on 542 gear from Ktisis, 548 accessories from Aitiascope (no left side drops) and 545 gear from level 89/90 quest coffers or HQ crafting.

Remember that any crafted gear you equip should be HQ, not NQ. HQ has a stat budget in line with dungeon/raid/tomestone gear stat budgets. NQ's stat budget is about 30 ilvls below what is proper for the ilvl. NQ is great if you just need one last piece to hit the minimum ilvl to enter a duty but it should never be what you solely rely on once you're out of ARR. If you're using NQ, you're going to be in a serious world of hurt due to the lower stats.