So I hit level 60 as a White Mage...

So I've hit 60 as a White Mage and I'm now presented with a few options on what to do.

1. Continue through Stormblood.
2. Grind for some good gear, THEN go through Stormblood.
3. Finish all the random side content in ARR and HW.

I initially started grinding for tomes of poetics before burning out hard on the game and leaving it for a few months. I've now come back and I'm wondering if I should change my decision.

If I continue to grind equipment what should I go for? I was in the middle of getting the shire gear (I have all of the accessories and the belt at least). Is that the best stuff for 60? I also don't know what weapon I should get either. Any help would be appreciated.


Also if anyone needs a healer I'm currently in Lich but I've got no real attachments to the place as of right now so I am willing to move :p.

Augmented Shire gear (ilvl 270) is the best you can get at level 60. This includes weapons, armor, accessories. (Ok, there are slightly better weapons out there but they are not worth the trouble to get.)

Considering how easy it is to earn Tomestones of Poetics these days, if you want to grind, there is no reason to grind for anything less than Shire gear.
(All the level 50 and 60 dungeons and trials will provide Poetics. As will many of the roulettes. It should not take you much more than a week or two to end up with a full set of Augmented Shire gear.)

You don't need that just to continue into Stormblood, though it will of course make things easier. Just FYI, the early SB quests will provide you with ilvl 255 gear - so you are obviously not required to have better than that.

I believe you can purchase i255 gear from a vendor in the Jeweled Crozier in Ishgard. It's NQ but it'll be suitable for the initial journey into SB if you don't feel like continuing the grind. It may be in your interest to run some of the SB dungeons a few times once you have them unlocked will both be good EXP and give you at least one guaranteed gear drop for your job (outside of weapon) upon completion. As a healer it'll also mean you'll have a relatively short queue time.

Doing some SB content then doing AAR/HW side quests for dungeon unlocks and alternating between the two to keep the variety up and preventing burnout might be a good idea too. It's up to you. Getting quickly to SB end will also mean you can start collecting the latest tomestones for gear upgrades and I'd lean more towards that if you can maintain the focus.

I would just buy your base Shire gear with your likely capped poetics tomestones, and move right into Stormblood. If you don't have enough tomestones to getl a complete set then just go for the left sidenand supplememtnt with market board accesories and weapon. That gear will last until level 65 around the time of Bardam's Mettle and you won't delay unlocking the content that is gated behind the main story quests.

Talk to Hismena in Iddylshire, you can grab i260 (make sure not to buy i230 on accident, last I saw it was still on the vendor too) Shire gear from her. You can also get an i260 weapon from the vendor to the right of her in exchange for 10 tokens of Scripture and a purchasable tomestone of some kind, all of which are available from Hismena.

If you need more poetics to flesh out your gear run the Aetherochemical Research Facility dungeon - 150 Poetics per run. Very worth it.

Once you've got all the regular Shire gear you want you can upgrade it to Augmented Shire (i270) by buying Illuminati Tautest Gobtwine for left side items (excluding belt/weapon) and Illuminati Deepest/Darkest Gobdip/Gobcoat. Make sure to buy Deepest/Darkest/Tautest not Deep/Dark/Taut, those other ones only upgrade i230 to i240. One upgrades the weapon and one upgrades right side items and belt. I don't remember offhand which does which but it tells you in the item discriptions.

Taking your Shire gear and appropriate items to Seika (also in Iddylshire, she has a little covered tent off the path near the marketplace area - if you walk into Iddylshire and follow the left wall you'll fine her) she can upgrade them to 270. You have to unequip the items to be able to turn them all in.

I thought a more indepth description of how the gear turn in system works was due since it seems natural to people who have done it a few times but for someone just starting it's really convoluted. I wish I had more detail, I'm going from memory.

Good luck! Glad you're enjoying WHM! :)

To be honest, you are more than okay to skip the upgrade step for the Shire gear. Just use the i260 set and that is more than enough. You'll get better gear in Stormblood soon enough, and you don't need the i270 for any of the early content.

Had to re-read the first post because well.. I'm really not understanding why people are even entertaining the idea that you grind 260 gear.
Screw that. It's absolutely unnecessary and a waste of time. Even more so from the fact you're playing the most gear independent class in the entire game (whm).
Finish up your msq to 70, grab some vendor, dungeon, and/or quest gear along the way. And that's it.
Do side quest at your leisure (I know some people love doing them) but certainly don't force yourself into grinding anything at 60, be it quests or gear. The only mandatory grind right now will be the MSQ. If you even consider that a grind.

My one suggestion would be not to insist too much on your lvl60+ class quests if they're too hard. Just do them when you hit 70. Also, lvl 60+ dungeons hit hard so keep your tank topped off during progression.

You'll get gear via the main story so I wouldn't worry about it.

If this is your first job at 60, the main story quest will give you all the gear you need to keep going. So go ahead and keep going.

If it's not your first job at 60, then you can do the other suggestions. Personally with a healer I just like running the highest dungeon I have. You can buy 255 white gear off the vendors, which are good enough to do Sirensong Sea at 61. You can get gear and XP very quickly by running that a few times (including a guaranteed armor drop you don't have every time!), and as a healer you don't have a long queue to wait through. That gear will be more than enough for the next dungeon at 63, and so on.

If you really want to do side content and gear grinding at 60, you can. Nothing's stopping you. IMO it isn't the best idea, as being 70 while doing that stuff unlocks more options and lets you also do endgame content if you make some friends while playing and want to do stuff with them.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

Had to re-read the first post because well.. I'm really not understanding why people are even entertaining the idea that you grind 260 gear.
Screw that. It's absolutely unnecessary and a waste of time.

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Just in case you're including my suggestions in this... I'm not advocating grinding for i260. I specifically mentioned to use whatever poetics tomes you have to get them since they're basically free gear. It's likely that someone who just finished HW will have them capped which should let you get the full set, or at least a good portion of it. Top up the remaining slots with vendor gear (I recommend a market board weapon) then hop right into the SB msq. The i260 gear is better than anything you can get until the level 65 content, so it's worth spending the tomes on them if you have them. If you don't, then just go ahead and use vendor gear.

Use whatever poetics you have (which might be a good bit) to buy as much of the 260-270 shire set as possible. It's great gear and lasts you well into level 65 (I used it until 70 no problem).

There is a vendor in Castrum Oriens that sells 255 or 260 gear for simple gil.

The same gear is now sold, also for gil, in Foundation.

You can get a complete set for every job - right and left side and weapons - for gil alone.

Price is usually much lower than the identical gear on the Marketboard... I highly suspect some people buy it, walk 3 steps to the left in Foundation, and list if on the Market... and then repeat...


At level 63 you can open up the Ruby Tide dungeon - will will give you a FULL SET 'except for weapon' - right and left - at iLevel 270. Because it is one of the best glamours in the game, people are often farming this place - so it tends to have short queues. It also has ALL of the 270 weapons - but they are not guaranteed drops like the other gear...

Here is the full WHM set:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/6dc3f844...q2bo2_1280.png
https://78.media.tumblr.com/87388960...q2bo1_1280.png

- So it's a very appealing healer glamour.

And I mention if because... given the set you can buy from a vendor with gil, and then this set so early into Stormblood... it is best to just rush right into the expansion and not delay with any silly grinds.

I play four characters and frequently switch which one shows to the left in my forum profile icon, so here is my WHM:
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...acter/4912180/
- as of this post just shy of level 65. I'm still in the Ruby Tide gear because I'm a little behind in the MSQ from running Ruby Tide about 10 times to get a full set for the glamour. By the time I hit the next zone... there is quest gear that is, I think 279...

- You can be to that point in about a day or two of solid play if you DON'T grind up the Ruby Tide set. :)

If you're like me, you like to be in the best equipment available before proceeding into the next expansion. As others have stated, you can get i270 Shire gear pretty easily now with poetics. You can also further enhance it through melds, and grade V materia is really easy to get as well. There is one drawback, and this is your ring accessory, which you can only have one of. One way around this is doing the HW 24-man raids. A goblin in Idyllshire gives a weekly quest that requires you to clear Dun Scaith, which is still a fairly challenging 24-man raid with plenty of insta-wipe/KO mechanics. Doing so will give you an item that you can trade for a Proto Ultima accessory, completing your i270 set up. You can also do your relic, which I advise everyone to do at least once.

In short, the more content you complete in both ARR and HW before proceeding into SB, the more experience and knowledge you have with the game. If you want to get into savage content, it would probably be best to not spend a lot of time trying to form parties to run old content synced. It would be better to catch up and get into the relevant savage content. It is kind of a bummer though, because the older content when relevant had very fun and interesting mechanics that are skipped entirely now.

If you quit before because of grinding, I'd recommend...not grinding. The gear isn't that big a deal, and you can pick it up during SB quests. If you don't feel like doing that yet, just do the ARR and HW stuff - there is plenty of it. And you can always mess around with other stuff to keep things fresh - crafting/gathering, getting beast favor, or playing triple triad or something.

When you get to end game your gear will matter. Until you complete SB though, just go with what you want to do that particular day.

You're most of the way to the best 60 gear you can have since you've already got accessories. Doing some Aetherochemical Research Facility (150 poetics per run) will let you have a full set of 270 soon which will make all gear up to the level 65 dungeon obsolete.

You can sell your quest reward items on the MB for gil, skip dungeon grinding for the first few dungeons and move on knowing that even if you don't replace a couple pieces of gear before 70 you'll not be a huge hinderance to your party because you took the time to get the best possible 60 gear to start SB.

If this is somehow too much for you to deal with as some people have implied frankly 70 is going to be a rude awakening for you. From Augmemted Shire up to the level 69 dungeon gear is a gap of 18 ilvls from 270 to 288. Current top tier gear at level 70 is i370, that's a fair bit of grind you'll have to look forward to no matter how you go about leveling through SB. This game at the end of a base expansion is basically a 2 year grind up to the next expansion.

It's not that bad, you have plenty of options to pull yourself into 325+ realm once you hit 70. After that it's pretty streamlined.
You can buy crafted gear, use mendacity, use creation, get gear from dungeons, use centurio seals, run deltascape normal (a little empty atm though, I will admit), run Rabanastre, do ex trials, and probably something I'm missing (edit: eureka.. forgot eureka).
Basically just discover and enjoy the end game content and gear will flow in.
Once you have ilvl 325 you can start working on the current tier of gear by discovering and running this tier's content. Run sigmascape normal for 350 gear, etc..

It's nothing like the mind numbing tome grind from the earlier caps. Even grinding your 360 mendacity gear is less work because you're capped at 450/week