3.x MSQ iLvl block

So, I'm a returning player, that have been away from the game since 2014. My character was level 50, with the 2.0 MSQ done.
I came back for stormblood and pre-ordered it ASAP to get into early access. I've been non stop doing the MSQ to finish all of it till then, but now I'm at the antitower quest, and I'm at ilvl 150 (Full ivl 145 from the MSQ armor and accessoreis, and a padjali weapon from the PotD leveling to get to 60).
My problem is, is there any way for me to get ilvl 180 for the antitower and eventually ilvl 230 before the maintenance?
Righ now I'm just regretting getting the pre-order for SB, and doing my HW MSQ before it, cause I know when SB comes, the HW MSQ will most likely get you gear with enough ilvl to finish all of 3.x quests, like HW did to ARR quests.

Do PVP and get Garo event gear and lore/scripture gear can get to the i230 needed for all the MSQ in a day or so

Start grinding for Tomestone of Lore from dungeons or PotD to get 230 gear at Idyllshire.

You can get good gear from doing hunts pretty fast too. Talk to the lady on the left behind the bar at the forgotten knight.

The absolute fastest way would be to buy i255(?) gear off the market board, but that could be costly.

As mentioned, pvp gear is i235, lore gear is i230, scripture gear is i260, centurio seal gear is i200.
There's also alexander gear I believe, but I don't know the stats of those offhand.


All valid options to help increase your item level.
All with varying speed and grind requirements.


If you go with a grind...
PotD may be your best bet.
You can get poetics, lore and scripture from it as a 60, as well as build up aetherpool level to get an i235 weapon.

You can use the lore and scripture to buy i230 and i260 pieces to build up your item level as you can.

The quest to unlock it starts in the gridania adventurer's guild if you haven't unlocked it yet.
The house that death built, is the quest name iirc.

Thanks for the replies.
So, as for the suggestions:
PvP - Never done it, not something I'm interested in this game, and have absolutely no idea how it works. Which of the PvP types is best for farming?
Hunt - I've done a few while getting to 60 and doing the MSQ, but I'm currently at like, 50 or so Centurio Seals...
Lore/Scripture farming - I'd need 5k or more to get full ivl 230, which is kinda... hard, to say the least.

So, apparently I'll have to spend my SB early access farming for gear, and doing HW MSQ anyway. Yeah, I should not have pre-ordered SB, and should not have almost finished the HW MSQ.

Thanks for taking your time to reply guys. ^^

Do the feast pvp mode, it's the fastest way to farm marks. If you dedicate most of a day to just farming marks for the ilvl 230 garo gear, you'll have everything you need to complete the HW story.

That's pretty premature. You have no idea what catch up mechanics they will add like they did for heavensward.

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Originally Posted by Selova

Do the feast pvp mode, it's the fastest way to farm marks. If you dedicate most of a day to just farming marks for the ilvl 230 garo gear, you'll have everything you need to complete the HW story.

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Thanks, will wait till my sister goes to sleep since she's playing now, and will start doing that then. Hopefully by tomorrow I'm able to finish HW MSQ without making half the server angry for losing their PvP matches.

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Originally Posted by Albinosmurfs

That's pretty premature. You have no idea what catch up mechanics they will add like they did for heavensward.

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Uh, unless they, like, GIVE gear when I log in, the only other way I see is giving it through quests, which besides the ones I can't do right now because of lack of gear, I've done everything except for worthless side quests. So the catch up mechanics will most likely be useless for me. And I'm not cashing out 25$ to skip 30 quests... I'm not rich (And 25$ is actually a lot of money where I live).

I needed to get to 230 to finish my MSQ on my nin (returning player as well). I ended up doing pvp dailies to get the weapons that pushed me to the number I needed (I had gotten a few pieces from the raids etc prior). Oddly enough, I actually kinda enjoyed the pvp (I went as MCH) in this game. I was terrible at it, but it was still kinda fun.

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

Thanks for the replies.
So, as for the suggestions:
PvP - Never done it, not something I'm interested in this game, and have absolutely no idea how it works. Which of the PvP types is best for farming?
Hunt - I've done a few while getting to 60 and doing the MSQ, but I'm currently at like, 50 or so Centurio Seals...
Lore/Scripture farming - I'd need 5k or more to get full ivl 230, which is kinda... hard, to say the least.

So, apparently I'll have to spend my SB early access farming for gear, and doing HW MSQ anyway. Yeah, I should not have pre-ordered SB, and should not have almost finished the HW MSQ.

Thanks for taking your time to reply guys. ^^

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Queue for front line roulette or shatter the fastest way to gear up you don't need to be good at pvp or anything just do stuff attack players or ice and not afk you will get enough garo gear to be 235 after a few runs.

If you get close, there is ilvl 150 gear on vendors in Azys Lla I think. That won't help you if you're not really close, though. The market board is your best bet. A couple cheap items, even if they're not for your class (i.e. off-stat accessories) can let you queue into the place. Another possibility (if/when you can enter) is old Alexander stuff. I don't know how many people are queuing for that though.

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

Thanks, will wait till my sister goes to sleep since she's playing now, and will start doing that then. Hopefully by tomorrow I'm able to finish HW MSQ without making half the server angry for losing their PvP matches.


Uh, unless they, like, GIVE gear when I log in, the only other way I see is giving it through quests, which besides the ones I can't do right now because of lack of gear, I've done everything except for worthless side quests. So the catch up mechanics will most likely be useless for me. And I'm not cashing out 25$ to skip 30 quests... I'm not rich (And 25$ is actually a lot of money where I live).

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Or vendors.... they don't have to give you free gear for them to make gear easy to obtain.

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

So, as for the suggestions:
PvP - Never done it, not something I'm interested in this game, and have absolutely no idea how it works. Which of the PvP types is best for farming?
Hunt - I've done a few while getting to 60 and doing the MSQ, but I'm currently at like, 50 or so Centurio Seals...
Lore/Scripture farming - I'd need 5k or more to get full ivl 230, which is kinda... hard, to say the least.

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I found PotD to be fairly quick for tomestone farming, but pulling it off in a few days (along with the MSQ) will be difficult. I'm sure there are faster methods, but PotD is mindless and less stressful, so it's easier for me to spam it.

I also sympathize somewhat with your plight. If SE wants to go the route of providing augmented quest rewards to help people catch up (a la ARR's 2.x quests), they should really make the change a few months before the new expansion launches. That's the window during most returning players will be catching up.

I think someone mentioned it, maybe, but the new areas in SB should have vendors who sell cheap i255 gear (just like the first HW vendors in Foundation and such sell lvl 50 i115 gear). If you have a friend who has access to the new areas, maybe have them buy the i255 vendor gear, which should be pretty cheap, and mail it to you. That way you'd get a full 255 set pretty fast on SB early access release day ^^

PvP is probably your fastest avenue right now. You can get full 235 with several hours of frontlines. You will need to speak to the disreputable Priest at the Wolves Den Peir to purchase the gear. At the very least you should be able to get enough pieces to get into the next dungeon and then use lore, dungeon acquired gear and more PvP stuff to get to the next step.

The alternative if you have a lot of gil available from a friend or saved up previously is to just buy crafted gear.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

I found PotD to be fairly quick for tomestone farming, but pulling it off in a few days (along with the MSQ) will be difficult. I'm sure there are faster methods, but PotD is mindless and less stressful, so it's easier for me to spam it.

I also sympathize somewhat with your plight. If SE wants to go the route of providing augmented quest rewards to help people catch up (a la ARR's 2.x quests), they should really make the change a few months before the new expansion launches. That's the window during most returning players will be catching up.

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Yeah, it's just kinda weird that they gate pretty much all of the expansion (Which attracts a bunch of new and returning players to the game) behind 422 (Literally) quests AND gear grinding, without making it easier for players to catch up to that (At least gear-wise) before the expansion launches (One month prior, or even two weeks).

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Originally Posted by Albinosmurfs

Or vendors.... they don't have to give you free gear for them to make gear easy to obtain.

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Yeah, but to get access to the vendors that sell those items, you have to get to the expansion areas, which are gated behing the previous MSQ.

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Originally Posted by MirielleLavandre

I think someone mentioned it, maybe, but the new areas in SB should have vendors who sell cheap i255 gear (just like the first HW vendors in Foundation and such sell lvl 50 i115 gear). If you have a friend who has access to the new areas, maybe have them buy the i255 vendor gear, which should be pretty cheap, and mail it to you. That way you'd get a full 255 set pretty fast on SB early access release day ^^

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I would do that, but since I've been away from the game for 3 years, and actually got a server transfer, my friendlist literally has only my sister (level 40 BRD lol), and a guy I kept running on during dungeons, which is in the same boat as me. lol

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Originally Posted by Belhi

PvP is probably your fastest avenue right now. You can get full 235 with several hours of frontlines. You will need to speak to the disreputable Priest at the Wolves Den Peir to purchase the gear. At the very least you should be able to get enough pieces to get into the next dungeon and then use lore, dungeon acquired gear and more PvP stuff to get to the next step.

The alternative if you have a lot of gil available from a friend or saved up previously is to just buy crafted gear.

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Will spam some PvP tonight (Probably pull an all-nighter). As for gil, I have like, 300k or less, can't remember at the top of my head, since I never got into crafting, and had to buy gear for leveling my DRK to 50.

I'm on Faerie, too - just send me a /tell and I can get that stuff for you ^_^v

At this point just wait until early access...you have just over 24 hours of server uptime between now and then. 230+ gear rewards will almost surely be added (along with XP) to the 3.x MSQ come early access. Not to mention, the first vendors in SB will most likely be selling 240+ white gear - don't waste your time or gil until then.

You can farm Aetherochemical Research Facility for Lore (150 Lore a pop), to give yourself a decent amount. You can then build up Scripture while you're at it (buy the ring for 375 scripture,, you get 10 scrip per ARF run). As well, get your i235 weapon from 30/30 aetherpool weapon/armor (beat floor 50 for it), in Palace of the Dead. That WILL push you over the i230 threshold, and quite possibly before maintenance too. Then you can enter into Stormblood. Unfortunately you're not on the Chaos datacentre so I cannot help with that by providing quicker queues for you, else I would jump on now and help you. Best of luck!

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

Uh, unless they, like, GIVE gear when I log in, the only other way I see is giving it through quests, which besides the ones I can't do right now because of lack of gear, I've done everything except for worthless side quests. So the catch up mechanics will most likely be useless for me. And I'm not cashing out 25$ to skip 30 quests... I'm not rich (And 25$ is actually a lot of money where I live).

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I guess it's not fair that you have to "grind" for gear or that's gated behind MSQ's, specially if the new expansion was announced like 6+ months ago, also not fair that you get to run the tripple nerfed content already and the temporary increase of weekly scripture tomes. Making it even quicker to gain ilvl 270 pieces instead of having to wait as we all did prior. Guess next time we should just give out free gear everywhere just for people that are subscribed to their mailing list or something.

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Originally Posted by Rita1989

Do PVP and get Garo event gear and lore/scripture gear can get to the i230 needed for all the MSQ in a day or so

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This is the fastest way to get ilvl needed for the MSQ besides buying gear. Just queue for The feast 8-8 matched party. The matches are 8 minutes at max, and if one side or the other gets demolished it's over in 2-3 mins. A loss gives you 250 currency, a win gives you 500. Jewellery costs 1000 per 235 piece, other stuff costs higher.

PvP gear doesn't have accuracy but you don't need accuracy to finish the story content.

I spent a lot of time farming dungeons for stones lore before I tried pvp and its much faster and definitely less hassle. People can't talk to you besides through platitude icons. Just go in, do your thing, try to damage people, and get your points. It's impossible to outright fail, if you lose badly you get 250 points more quickly. Not cool for the pvp people I'm sure,but it's the last day before stormblood!

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Originally Posted by MirielleLavandre

I'm on Faerie, too - just send me a /tell and I can get that stuff for you ^_^v

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Thanks. I'm farming PvP now, so hopefully I'll be able to get the gear.

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Originally Posted by Ayerinn

At this point just wait until early access...you have just over 24 hours of server uptime between now and then. 230+ gear rewards will almost surely be added (along with XP) to the 3.x MSQ come early access. Not to mention, the first vendors in SB will most likely be selling 240+ white gear - don't waste your time or gil until then.

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I would do that, if I didn't have just about 20 quests to do, and I wouldn't have the necessary iLvl for the antitower by then anyway.

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Originally Posted by Paladinleeds

You can farm Aetherochemical Research Facility for Lore (150 Lore a pop), to give yourself a decent amount. You can then build up Scripture while you're at it (buy the ring for 375 scripture,, you get 10 scrip per ARF run). As well, get your i235 weapon from 30/30 aetherpool weapon/armor (beat floor 50 for it), in Palace of the Dead. That WILL push you over the i230 threshold, and quite possibly before maintenance too. Then you can enter into Stormblood. Unfortunately you're not on the Chaos datacentre so I cannot help with that by providing quicker queues for you, else I would jump on now and help you. Best of luck!

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I'm farming the wolf marks from PvP, getting 1000 per frontline match, so I believe I can do it. Thanks anyway.

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Originally Posted by LunaFaye

I guess it's not fair that you have to "grind" for gear or that's gated behind MSQ's, specially if the new expansion was announced like 6+ months ago, also not fair that you get to run the tripple nerfed content already and the temporary increase of weekly scripture tomes. Making it even quicker to gain ilvl 270 pieces instead of having to wait as we all did prior. Guess next time we should just give out free gear everywhere just for people that are subscribed to their mailing list or something.

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I didn't start the thread as a way of complaining, tho I admit I sounded a bit negative, which is comprehensible since I was kinda annoyed by the sudden iLvl block, I started it to get advices on getting the gear. Nor have I said anything about something being unfair. I do find weird, as a business model (not as a player) to gate content that brings new players behind so many hours of older content, but not "unfair". My post that you quoted, is saying that catch up mechanics won't help me (Which is true), and not that they SHOULD give me the gear. But if they're gonna implement those catch up mechanics, it'd be smarter to do so a little bit before the expansion, so people coming for it can access at least the MSQ, jobs, and areas.
Also, I would never have stopped playing this game, if I had the money to keep paying for it back then, now my situation is a lot better, but I had to buy a PS4 and HW, and pay the sub fee. 6 months ago when the expansion was announced I had absolutely no money. Not everyone can afford all of that on a whim just because they announced SB. So sorry if I offended you, or whatever, but your point is completely out of place.

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

So, I'm a returning player, that have been away from the game since 2014. My character was level 50, with the 2.0 MSQ done.
I came back for stormblood and pre-ordered it ASAP to get into early access. I've been non stop doing the MSQ to finish all of it till then, but now I'm at the antitower quest, and I'm at ilvl 150 (Full ivl 145 from the MSQ armor and accessoreis, and a padjali weapon from the PotD leveling to get to 60).
My problem is, is there any way for me to get ilvl 180 for the antitower and eventually ilvl 230 before the maintenance?
Righ now I'm just regretting getting the pre-order for SB, and doing my HW MSQ before it, cause I know when SB comes, the HW MSQ will most likely get you gear with enough ilvl to finish all of 3.x quests, like HW did to ARR quests.

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Do you hunts, buy the i200 AF gear set, then upgrade it to i210 with items bought with more seals. Run PoTD through floor 50, get the aetherpool arms at i235. After all of that, you can continue collecting tomes (which will change after SB arrives, and buy tome gear for i230 and i260 gear pieces. i230 comes along before too long, and you can substitute dungeon pieces as upgrades as you go as well.

I used daily frontline roulettes and some lore / scripture to meet the requirement. Not sure I'm any good at the pvp, but it was fun and it'll do the job to get my msq complete so I can move forward. If you use the roulette option the que tends to pop quicker. Good luck!

Eh? Just wait for SB early access and buy the "white" crafted gear from NPCs for level 60 that will likely be released - just like what happened in HW.

They should be something like i240 or i250. Purchasable off an NPC.

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

Will spam some PvP tonight (Probably pull an all-nighter). As for gil, I have like, 300k or less, can't remember at the top of my head, since I never got into crafting, and had to buy gear for leveling my DRK to 50.

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My suggestion is to do enough to upgrade your worst items to allow you to continue with the MSQ. You will get lore and dungeon drops as you level which might help a bit too. Your end goal is ilvl 230. Keep in mind the Garo gear is 235 and all the lore stuff is 230. You should be able to bump up your ilvl pretty quickly.

Really right now PvP is fastest. Even if your team finishes last its 500 Wolf marks and accessories are 1000 marks each. A victory nets you 1000 marks and the roulette will give you another 1000 on top of that once a day. A frontline match goes for a max of 20 mins and usually go for about 15. If you go into the options of your duty finder and select Frontline Freelancer it will bypass Grand Company restrictions too which will help speed it up. Look for the little cog icon at the top left of the Duty Finder UI. Frontline Freelancer is towards the bottom of the options.

EDIT: Oh I see your already at it :P Well you should be able to get there pretty comfortably. The MSQ doesn't have too much filler in HW. About 40 or so story quests in total, 3 dungeons and a trial.

Fastest way is to do Frontier and buy garo gear with the wolf marks.
Do Frontier roulette before the today's daily reset and then after the reset again. This alone should give you a ilevel 235 gear.
A win give you around 1000 marks, a lose around 600 marks. Garo gear cost between 4000 and 1000 marks.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Fastest way is to do Frontier and buy garo gear with the wolf marks.
Do Frontier roulette before the today's daily reset and then after the reset again. This alone should give you a ilevel 235 gear.
A win give you around 1000 marks, a lose around 600 marks. Garo gear cost between 4000 and 1000 marks.

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I heard a full set (for title) is around 17k marks total?

Why not just wait for release? I imagine that they'll add gear to the msq quests in the same vein as ARR when HW released so you won't have to grind for tome or pvp gear to continue the story.

Then again it takes less than a day to grind frontlines enough for most of a Garo set. Regardless, there is probably not going to be a need to grind for tomestone gear unless you really need to. You can probably grind ARF for lore until you can do Gubal HM but frontlines also awards lore.

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Originally Posted by Altena

Eh? Just wait for SB early access and buy the "white" crafted gear from NPCs for level 60 that will likely be released - just like what happened in HW.

They should be something like i240 or i250. Purchasable off an NPC.

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Thing is, I'm not 100% certain how it was for HW, but I don't remember seeing vendors selling those items in the ARR areas. If it's like people said, and the vendors in SB areas will be selling them, I won't have access to them anyway. Of course, I may be mistaken, but it never hurts to actually try and prepare myself for the worst, as I said, I may have sounded negative, but all I wanted was to know the fastest way to get the gear before the maintenance, which btw, is looking doable.

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Originally Posted by Belhi

My suggestion is to do enough to upgrade your worst items to allow you to continue with the MSQ. You will get lore and dungeon drops as you level which might help a bit too. Your end goal is ilvl 230. Keep in mind the Garo gear is 235 and all the lore stuff is 230. You should be able to bump up your ilvl pretty quickly.

Really right now PvP is fastest. Even if your team finishes last its 500 Wolf marks and accessories are 1000 marks each. A victory nets you 1000 marks and the roulette will give you another 1000 on top of that once a day. A frontline match goes for a max of 20 mins and usually go for about 15. If you go into the options of your duty finder and select Frontline Freelancer it will bypass Grand Company restrictions too which will help speed it up. Look for the little cog icon at the top left of the Duty Finder UI. Frontline Freelancer is towards the bottom of the options.

EDIT: Oh I see your already at it :P Well you should be able to get there pretty comfortably. The MSQ doesn't have too much filler in HW. About 40 or so story quests in total, 3 dungeons and a trial.

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Yeah, I couldn't pull an all-nighter (Really tired from a whole week of doing nothing else besides the MSQ), but even so, I already got full iLvl 235 accessories (with one 230 iLvl ring), So I'm confident I can do it before the maintenance now. There's exactly 34 (35, counting the one I'm on right now) quests left for me, and considering I did all the 2.x lvl 50 MSQ in two days, and those amount for more than double that amount, I'll probably finish it all before the maintenance as well. Thanks for the support. ^-^

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Originally Posted by Lithil

Why not just wait for release? I imagine that they'll add gear to the msq quests in the same vein as ARR when HW released so you won't have to grind for tome or pvp gear to continue the story.

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Would do that, if I didn't have only a few quests, and wasn't currently on one that's iLvl blocked. Plus, I REALLY wanted to be over with HW by Early Access, to avoid spoilers, and all that. But thanks for replying. ^^

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Originally Posted by Pori_Dessu

Thing is, I'm not 100% certain how it was for HW, but I don't remember seeing vendors selling those items in the ARR areas. If it's like people said, and the vendors in SB areas will be selling them, I won't have access to them anyway. Of course, I may be mistaken, but it never hurts to actually try and prepare myself for the worst, as I said, I may have sounded negative, but all I wanted was to know the fastest way to get the gear before the maintenance, which btw, is looking doable.

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People will resell them in the MB, but for a higher price.

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Originally Posted by Felis

People will resell them in the MB, but for a higher price.

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Yes they will, try to resist the temptation to buy your way to better gear, there will be price gouging.

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Originally Posted by Felis

People will resell them in the MB, but for a higher price.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Yes they will, try to resist the temptation to buy your way to better gear, there will be price gouging.

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Considering I'm extremely broke right now, I'm almost sure I wouldn't be able to afford the Overpriced white gear anyway. lol

Hi L'arc - just let me know and I can probably pick up some i255 gear from vendors in SB and mail it - no need to worry about funds // just help out someone else later ^^ Send me a /tell in game as we're on the same server sometime so I can /friendlist you ^^