How many Retainers

Just curious how many retainers some here run to keep up with the sheer volume of mats once you get into hardcore crafting. At the moment, I've managed with four, though may increase that since I have yet to level an alt and am pushing inventory space.

Two, with a lot of free slots too. I buy the mats I need to craft and after crafting I sell those I didn't use. The only time I store mats is right after new patches when prices are too volatile and I plan to regularly craft in the next days.
Though I probably can't be considered a hardcore crafter.

Like Lastelli Im sure i dont meet the minimum requirements to call myself a hardcore crafter, and i dont store anything either. Ive got a few stacks of stuff in my inventory and thats it(and if im being honest with myself, i could lose most of them and im just too lazy to go through and see whats worth selling off). When its time to craft i mostly buy/gather/make what i need.

Two retainers. I play since beta and alone 7 pages are glamours. I am 3 star crafter and only whenever I start hoarding stuff like the favor items or all the relic and beasty token I run low on space but what for do I have mogmail storage?
But yea used up a lot beasty token lately for the relic - [turn in for shields -> turn to GC seals -> moonies] and sold the favor items so made some space... plus occasional retainer tetris is a must.

I currently have 3 retainers however if I weren't lazy to clear them properly, 2 would be fine.

In my opinion crafting is way too easy atm. I only use 2 hq mats in the entire game to do my crafting. They're:

- Hq Luminious Fibers - This is a 2* recipe which I can just run through the 2* macro I made (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...stats-required)
- Hq Celestine - Only a level 54 recipe so quick to hq & gives a nice boost to starting quality.

Since I craft these without hq mats then it means I don't need any other hq mats at all which really helps with inventory/retainer space but when 4* crafts are introduced then I may need to use more hq mats. Guess we'll have to see.

I have 7 but I have a problem....I don't deny this....I LIKE MY STUFF Y'ALL!

Actually 9 b/c i have 2 on my alt...see above statement

2 but I tend to clean out stuff every so often though glamour... so much glamour items...

I found 3 to be the best number, since i craft+gather alot, but two could do the trick too. Imo its more about the sale-space rather than extra inventory or ventures. Retainer 1 sales gatherermats, retainer 2 sells food/pots/everything else and retainer 3 sells 3* expensive stuff. Btw my retainers favourite name is peanutbuterjellytime.

I'm not by any means a hardcore crafter, but working hard to level some of my crafting classes lately and have a second nearing 60, that I'm excited about. I'm really noticing that it takes up massive amounts of inventory/storage space to save all these mats, and as I'm also a glamourholic and refuse to buy into all those hordes of extra paid retainers until SE comes up with a fix to the current inventory limitations that doesn't involve buying more retainers... (which is really a subject for another thread though lol). My way of handling it now is to sell off excess mats (or give them away if anyone else needs them for leves and such) pretty much immediately when I'm done, and just start over with fresh mats next time I need them. If they don't sell quickly I'll just pull them off the market to use what I need then put the rest back up. It's a little annoying having to re-craft things, but it saves space.

Fight now I'm using the two free retainers and the original two paid ones.

Good question! I currently use two for my own crafting and glamours and one for FC needs (with some overlap). I picked up my third during the start of the expansion since I'm second in command for our FC at this point. Which means I have one retainer which is basically a mix of food, airship rewards, and live auction goods. I host a bi-monthly live auction in our FC basement where we do live bidding for various things with a /random discount for the winner. Its super fun but does indeed take up some bankspace.

I currently have 6 retainers. Theyr'e not completly full of stuff but id like to have extra space and i hate buying/gathering whenever i need it so i store up lots of mats. Its also nice to have 6 retainers to gather mats for you.

I have 8 retainers.

It's not so much for storage (though I do store different things on different retainers) as most of my general HW crafting stuff all fits on one retainer.

Rather, it's for Ventures. It's so I can go off and run dungeons or craft other stuff while they're out getting me materials that I don't want to have to pay Gil for. I have two Mining retainers. I have two Botanist retainers. I have three combat retainers, and one Fishing retainer. That breakdown is what seems to me to be the optimal breakdown in terms of materials gathering.

2 because I refuse to pay for extra.

I have 8.

4 DoW/DoM.
2 Mining.
2 Botany.

2 of them used to be fishing types but I no longer needed fishing retainers.

22 retainers across three alts - 8 on my main, 7 on my first alt, 7 on my third alt.

4 Lvl 60 Conjurers
4 Lvl 60 Archers
3 Lvl 60 Miners
3 Lvl 60 Botanist
1 Lvl 60 Fisher

The rest of my retainers are untrained.

My wife has a similar number of retainers but has 6 L60 DoW/DoM retainers, 3 L60 Miners, 3 L60 Botanists, and 3 L60 Fisher.

Do we need that many for mat and glamour storage? No. But once we started leveling alts, leveling retainers as well was pretty easy.

All this and I still have less than 8 million gil between all my alts. My wife has substantially more, tho.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Silverbane

snip

---

:O how much do you pay each month?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AishaNymph

:O how much do you pay each month?

---

$12/mo total for 6 extra retainers. That's 6 extra per character, account wide. Every alt gets 8 at that price.
Three alts, 24 retainers, still just $12/mo. + the $14/mo subscription. = $26/mo. total
Eight alts, 64 retainers, still just $12/mo. + the $14/mo subscription = $26/mo. total

And on a per-hour-played basis, that's not much. Probably about 20 cents an hour if not less.
And it's less per month that basic cable, which we don't bother with.

The challenge is that you cannot friend your alts. So you can only move items amongst them through a friend/spouse, the marketboard, or your FC chest. For this reason, my wife and I formed our own FC, currently populated by all our alts. We have a nice medium plot in the The Goblet, next to my wife's main's small house.

I didn't know extra retainer is account wide . Much cheaper than I originally thought

I have 2 and only roughly 50 slots are used for crafting materials. I'm the opposite of a hoarder, I only keep necessary things. I even have an alt because of specialists with 2 empty retainers.

I'm against paying extra for retainers, I don't see why I should pay extra when I'm already paying subscription.

I have 8.

3 to store materials.
3 to store glam.
2 semi empty but will probably store mats or glam.

Please define hardcore crafting.

I have 4 retainers total. 1 MNK, 1 MIN, 1 BOT, 1 FSH. This works out pretty well for ventures, though DoW/M seem to be much more useful and I'm constantly wanting more things from that retainer than the MIN/ BOT ones.

For storage I use the first retainer for misc items. Things that have no specific place or temp storage. I'll put collectibles there if I'm waiting for reset or for something to be 'starred', for example. I would put maps there, except they don't stack so everyone gets maps. Furniture and materia go here also. The second retainer is all glamour (that I'll probably never use). Third retainer is metal and gems (basically stuff for ARM, BSM, and GSM) mostly. Fourth is cloth, leather, and reagents (WVR, LTW, and ALC). I don't usually keep a stock of cooking supplies, but what I do have is on retainer 1.

Retainer 1 usually has a decent amount of space while everyone else is shuffling between 75% and 100% full. HW really made a mess of my inventory not only with the sheer quantity of items added, but the volume needed to do much of anything. Many recipes calling for 3-5 of a raw ingredient to make a nugget/ thread/ leather/ etc. and you end up with recipes that require something like 100 ingredients once you account for all of the steps between raw ingredients and finished product.

I'm way behind on crafting. It feels like blue/red gatherer scrips are just free and easy while collecting any reasonable amount of crafter scrips requires an enormous amount of time and planning, even if it's just keeping a huge supply of the ingredients for your one preferred recipe. Really the crafting scrips seem to require a Hell of a lot more gathering than the gathering scrips.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cgbspender

Please define hardcore crafting.

---

Primary reason for logging in spends majority of time crafting...is my own opinion. It is subjective ofc

Im a hoarder, so I use 4 retainers. Each time i get a new retainer its empty for a short time then gets filled super quick.I have 1 for food ingrediants, another for ingots (Actual ingots leathers, lumbers, etc), the 3rd is gear and materia, and the 4th is raw mats such as ore or logs.
I lowered quality of all my duplicate items so that cleared up some space but i refuse to throw away items, cause what if i need it?

I have 8 but it's not all about hardcore crafting. I am also a bit of a hoarder. My retainers are: 1 BTN, 2 MIN, 1 FSH, and 4 DoW. Fisher I usually just have out on ventures to try to get minions. The others are usually collecting crafting mats (when I have ventures). When I save up a bunch of ventures, sometimes I'll run a bunch of quick ventures. For storage, one retainer is for primarily processed items (ingots, leather, gems, etc.), two are for raw crafting items (ore, logs, fleece, ramie, sands, plants, waters, saps, etc.) and split up in no way I can possibly explain, one is for CUL items, one is for gear drops from dungeons and raids and old gear to be reused on new jobs (i.e. ironworks gear previously used for WAR now saved for DRK), one is for glamour items and furniture, one is for materia/demimateria and seeds/gardening items, and one is for special items (unidentified, coins, crafting gear from dungeons/raids/trials, favors items, etc.) and fishing gear/bait

I have five retainers:
Retainer 1 - Wood, cloth, leather, alchemy materials, all NQ.
Retainer 2 - Metal, stone, gems, bones, all NQ.
Retainer 3 - Cooking ingredients and fish, all NQ.
Retainer 4 - Materia, potions and other consumables, a stock of assorted HQ ingredients.
Retainer 5 - Glamour, gardening seeds, fishing tackle, assorted tokens (Goblin dice and cups, favor mats, beast tribe tokens, etc)

Most of these retainers are full or nearly so. I could probably clean them up a bit, toss out some ingreds that I'm likely never to use, but even afterwards I'd likely still need five. They'd just have more elbow room.

5 on my main and 5 on my first alt who's into post 50 crafting. My other alts aren't high enough to worry about more than 2 yet. I also handle FC matters so I store overflow from our chest in some of the space.

I have 3 retainers, but I don't actually use any of them for materials anymore.

Hoarding materials (unless they are materials that are annoying to get like glass fibers or what have you) just feels pointless to me these days when I can just grab them off the marketboard for a few k or gather them myself as I need them, so I just sell any materials I don't immediately need.

I have 8.

Four of them are DOW / DOM and I use them for ventures like yak milk / dragon blood most of the time. Other times - when necessary for blue scrips / or for the sake of stacking mats that I think are relevant - I can send them on other items (deep tear eyes, etc...)
Two are botanist, and help me keep a continuous incoming flux for culinarian recipes.
One is miner, and I rarely need it, except sometimes for ores.
The last is fisher, I use it mainly for sweetfish, and dravanian bar (perch ? I never know what they're called in english) and desynth them into Skillspeed IV.
iner
I main culinarian, if I were to change anything, it would probably be remove 1 DOW and take another Bota instead. And swap my miner with another Bota as well.

That's not gonna happen, I'm constantly struggling to send them on ventures, because of tokens, and I won't spend another levelling up 1-60.

I'm an aspiring crafter, but after getting my gatherers to 50+ I made it a point not to hold onto mats. I know how nice it is to have mats on hand, but the stress of inventory management just isn't worth it. More retainers = more management, so I currently have no additional retainers and acquire/craft mats as I need them. The only reason why I want additional retainers is to increase my ability to acquire mats, not really hold on to them.

Some mats, especially regents and other cross mats I will mass gather/produce HQ and hang on to them, but even these are thrown in the company chest after I am done for everyone to use. I'm hoping I can keep this up throughout the leveling process using the two retainers I currently have. I still need to level the classes I want to assign to additional retainers.

I currently have 5 retainers! I tried to manage with the original 2, but once I got further into crafting, it became MUCH more difficult. xD 2 of those 5 are primarily dedicated to holding glamours that don't go in the armoire!

4 retainers right now.
0 crafting mats on them. Those four are just for glamour + housing alone.
I originally had one with crafting mats but just gave up in the end because I never could store enough significant mats so I resigned myself to gather/buy everything I need in the exact quantity that I need when I want to craft something.

I have 4 total retainers, but 2 1/2 are for glam and various stuff only, another is for mats
Also have one for housing, and maps, etc..

I have 4. 1 for glamour, 2 for crafting, 1 for tokens, housing items, misc., etc. Thinking about a 5th. My housing items are starting to need their own retainer.

i use 8 retainers

1. Gear
2. Materia
3. MIN/ BSM/ GSM/ ARM items
4. HQ items
5. BOT/ CUL/ CRP /ALC items
6. Hunt/ LTW/ WVR items
7. Event items
8. Space for Craftingorders :rolleyes:

regards small hobbit