Should I level DoL classes to 50 before leveling my DoH Classes?

Question in the title.

Before I started crafting, I got my Botanist to 50. Then I got all my DoH classes to 15. I'm not focusing on Leatherworker and it's annoying because I don't have a miner to collect alumen. Alumen is pretty expensive and I don't want to pay for it.

Should I level my miner and fisher up to 50 before I continue crafting? Will this save money in the long run?

You're paying something for it either way.

Mining your materials looks to be free, but you're still paying by way of not selling it. There's no difference between buying 50,000 gil worth of mats and farming up 50,000 gil worth of mats and then choosing not to sell them. Additionally mining takes TIME - both to level your miner, and to gather up the mats you need. That's time you could have spent crafting (and earning more money), or doing other things in the game that you might enjoy.

That isn't to say that mining is useless. You guarantee yourself supplies. You might like the notion of building stuff with materials you gathered up yourself. You might just like mining as something to do when you have some time to kill.

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Originally Posted by Viviza

You're paying something for it either way.

Mining your materials looks to be free, but you're still paying by way of not selling it. There's no difference between buying 50,000 gil worth of mats and farming up 50,000 gil worth of mats and then choosing not to sell them. Additionally mining takes TIME - both to level your miner, and to gather up the mats you need. That's time you could have spent crafting (and earning more money), or doing other things in the game that you might enjoy.

That isn't to say that mining is useless. You guarantee yourself supplies. You might like the notion of building stuff with materials you gathered up yourself. You might just like mining as something to do when you have some time to kill.

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It's nice to have some degree of independence from the price fluctuations, strange stack quantities, and availability of the marketboard.
(Especially on smaller servers, where prices & availability of mats generally isn't as good as on higher population servers)

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Originally Posted by Viviza

You're paying something for it either way.

Mining your materials looks to be free, but you're still paying by way of not selling it. There's no difference between buying 50,000 gil worth of mats and farming up 50,000 gil worth of mats and then choosing not to sell them. Additionally mining takes TIME - both to level your miner, and to gather up the mats you need. That's time you could have spent crafting (and earning more money), or doing other things in the game that you might enjoy.

That isn't to say that mining is useless. You guarantee yourself supplies. You might like the notion of building stuff with materials you gathered up yourself. You might just like mining as something to do when you have some time to kill.

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That's not correct. You will have obtained the materials yourself, and as such ''earned money''.

Hence why gathering your own materials if you have the time, is typically the best thing to do.


Altho the crafting expensives are the same, if you gather you earn part of it back right away.


Typically while leveling a crafting class it only loses you money rather then earning it.

These suggestions make a lot of sense. I was riding on the fact that I knew I wanted to get my gathering classes to 50 at some point but I was trying to do it in a way that would maximize profits overall.

For example, I wouldn't want to get all my DoH classes to 50 then start working on DoL because that would just be unnecessarily expensive. I ask because I wanted to see if there was something I'm missing.

I guess I'll just go ahead and farm/leves while I'll level up my ninja with the duty finder lol.

It really depends on how much crafting you plan on doing..
If you plan on going hardcore into crafting, you're on Jenova so I can say.. most of the people selling 4star items right now don't gather their own mats, in the time it takes to gather a stack of mats, you can just craft 10-20 pieces of gear and it's much more profitable to sell those than spend your time gathering.. Not to mention the ~40-50k saved by gathering your own stuff isn't really that much money to some of them.. Hell, I've seen'em buy out mats/clusters over a million gil in value without changing cities and paying the 50k city tax..


So if you plan on doing some hardcore crafting, gathering won't be used later on. It may be helpful while you're leveling up and it is convenient to have around, but leveling it is a pain

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Originally Posted by GenJoe

So if you plan on doing some hardcore crafting, gathering won't be used later on. It may be helpful while you're leveling up and it is convenient to have around, but leveling it is a pain

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So you're saying it's better to just craft and rely on the fact that the initial investment for the materials (via marketboard) will pale in comparison to the profits made from the items I make. Does this apply to early levels?

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Originally Posted by AngelKode

So you're saying it's better to just craft and rely on the fact that the initial investment for the materials (via marketboard) will pale in comparison to the profits made from the items I make. Does this apply to early levels?

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It's not so much an issue of crafter level, but your market.

There will be some markets where you have enough demand to be crafting 3-4 hours a day consistently and the items will sell out.
Admittedly, this late into ARR, most markets have seen a decline but there are still some items where you can sell a few stacks of each day (I equate a stack of finished products to 1 hour of crafting)

You would still want an item with decent markup (3000 per craft) which puts you at about 300k an hour in profit. If you can reach that point (at end-game crafting, you should strive for that goal or even higher) then it starts becoming pointless to gather mats..

At my peak crafting, I was crafting 10-14 hrs a day and still couldn't satisfy the market demand, MB has changed, but by expanding your wares you should still be able to find a few markets which combined give you hours upon hours of available work. At which point, you won't be gathering your own mats as you have a more gil efficient ways to spend your time.

I'm not saying that it's feasible right this moment, I personally think it is, but you may run into some stiff competition. But if your eventual goal involves crafting a lot for a lot of gil, then having a gatherer won't really help you make or break it..

Of course, the above only applies if you want to make gobs and gobs of pointless gil and you're willing to babysit the market board for it.. It's completely optional.



If it's funding your early crafting that you're worried about, I'd look into making secondary mats as your level up items.. i.e. make lumber with CRP and sell that on MB, you'll at least break even on most cases and sometimes make a pretty penny. With BSM/ARM/GSM you have the ingots etc.

It's not fool proof, market fluctuation can get you with its ups and downs which is where having a gatherer comes in handy, but whether it's worth the trouble of leveling one from 1-50 just for that bit of independence, for me personally, I don't think it's worth it. Unless I'm not seeing ANY items for sale, I rarely go out to buy it.. The way I see it, if i overpay for mats, I'll just overprice my products and make the money back :)

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Originally Posted by CGMidlander

It's nice to have some degree of independence from the price fluctuations, strange stack quantities, and availability of the marketboard.
(Especially on smaller servers, where prices & availability of mats generally isn't as good as on higher population servers)

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True.

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Originally Posted by Aeyis

Hence why gathering your own materials if you have the time, is typically the best thing to do.

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Originally Posted by Aeyis

Typically while leveling a crafting class it only loses you money rather then earning it.

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Time has value. If you can earn money faster than you can mine it, you may as well do that, buy the mats, and come out ahead.

I personally think that MIN is valuable and FSH not so much. There are a few annoyingly expensive materials that require fishing (with the help of alchemy usually), but they're expensive because they're annoying to get. MIN plays much differently in that if you see yourself making a couple stacks of electrum ingots or something you can spend a half hour or so gathering all the necessary materials for that endeavor. If you need some shark oil...well hopefully the sun just set and you need to go mooch a bunch of fish and hope.

It mostly depends on the scale you are looking at. Do you want to make millions? Gathering would definitely be helpful. Do you want to make tens or hundreds of millions? Well, if you're crafting that much then gathering is likely not so necessary.

I gather almost everything myself, but my goal is mostly independence, not market dominance or vast unnecessary (to me) riches. I like to be able to make anything I might need and have enough gil for anything that might cost gil and be outside of what I can craft or gather (mostly just dark matter, gyshal greens, teleporting, and housing).

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Originally Posted by Viviza

True.





Time has value. If you can earn money faster than you can mine it, you may as well do that, buy the mats, and come out ahead.

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This is true, but people in this thread are kind of forgetting that the OP still has to level his classes. Buying mats en large while leveling will only cost him large amounts of gil.

In addition he would have to collect a lot of materials that he cannot sell (but also cant use since his crafters are already past that the level where they need them), making his DoL leveling time less effective.


Time is money, and using own items still means you used their gil worth; thats only one side of the coin.
The other side is that if you do have the time, then you can turn that time into money by gathering. And obtaining value without spending any that way.
Crafting always costs money, the question is just whether you will obtain more from selling what you crafted then you originally invested.
Starting from scratch, without a gathering buffer to fall back on (you can always gather materials for a craft yourself when you are short on gil funding) is not something I would advice for a leveling crafter that does not know his markets.

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Originally Posted by AngelKode

Should I level my miner and fisher up to 50 before I continue crafting? Will this save money in the long run?

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Keep miner level near the levels of your craft classes. This will be enough. Fisher is optional - very few fishes are really needed in crafts.

I tried to be self sufficient as possible, so I kept my gatherers around the level of my crafters. My goal was to be able to always keep myself in the latest gear, hopefully HQ. I used GC turn ins as a major source of exp - for gathering, I'd aim for 10 HQ if I had the time, then the NQ was saved for crafting purposes.

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Originally Posted by Alx789

Keep miner level near the levels of your craft classes. This will be enough. Fisher is optional - very few fishes are really needed in crafts.

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There is one notable exception that I can think of off the top of my head though.

Shark Oil. >_<

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Originally Posted by CGMidlander

There is one notable exception that I can think of off the top of my head though.
Shark Oil. >_<

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Yes. This can be solved only when you will try to catch one of the first Big Fishes. Other ways are hard enough )
But it is a very few market positions.
Red Coral - too.
Later (3-4 star crafts) - Rough Ouster + Razor Calm ( less than lvl 20). I send retainer to catch.

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Originally Posted by Alx789

Keep miner level near the levels of your craft classes. This will be enough. Fisher is optional - very few fishes are really needed in crafts.

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Yea it works out well if you level them simultaneously. DoL will feel like less of a level grind. May need to slow down on Leves though if you're allowances get low.

And Shark Oil sucks even if you are a Fisher.

Hammerheads are okay, but Silver Sharks are pain to gather considering all that work for one shark only == one oil.

Either just buy the SSharks or level Fisher just with the intent of getting a Fisher retainer to gather them for you.

It's a level 45~ gathering Venture, so will be awhile can get this set up. But Fisher retainer is nice. Gathering yourself as fisher is rather time consuming.

I personally leveled all gathering classes to 50 before started working on crafters because I do not like being restricted by what others have gathered and bothered to sell, sometimes at extreme prices. I would rather have the option of being both self sufficient and capable of avoiding being ripped off by getting my own when needed.

The thing is.. If you don't have a gathering class, you're always going to be stuck buying off mb. Those times when you only need 5 of something, but the only thing on mb is a stack of 99 for 30k gil.. Not easy for a beginning crafter to deal with. At least if you have them leveled it's easy to get a few things if needed, or a stack if needed. Then once you have some gil to play with it's not so bad buying off mb.

Pretty much everything you need for crafting will be gathered by a gathering class of the same level as the crafter.