Retainer Changes in 5.4

Does anyone know how the changes will work? 'Better gear = chance of more items/HQ items'

Mainly does this apply only to pieces with the gathering stat on them and is there a cap? In the past gathering stat was all that mattered.

By way of example;

1.Should we add gathering materia to accessories to push the numbers higher or will the normal level 80 HQ gear for gathering be enough to generally be around max returns?

2. Will the retainers get a better chance if we put a hat (w/o gathering stat materia) on them?

I know its early in the release (only 4.5 hours!) but I figured I'd ask to see what people have gleaned.

Thank you in advance.

So far, all I've seen is sometimes having "BONUS!" appear when my retainer brings back a crafting material on a quick venture. Instead of getting one NQ or HQ, I get two HQ. Not especially impressive when HQ on normal crafting materials is useless thanks to the crafting nerfs so those materials don't sell for anymore than NQ materials.

I haven't tried the normal Hunting/Botany/Mining/Fishing ventures yet.

I'm not seeing any yield increases on the 18 hours ventures but then I've only had 7 completed so far.

I'm sure there's a point where "better gear" is effectively capped for the expansion and going beyond that won't make much of a difference, if any.

If your goal is to be making more gil on the MB from crafting materials brought back from retainer ventures, I don't think the increased yield/better chance of HQ will work out for you in the long run. It's just going to further saturate the market with the items, driving prices down.

Example: The first thing I got off a retainer this morning was a Stuffed Alpha. Going MB rate at that time was just over 300k, and sales history had shown it to be a pretty steady price over the last 3 months. Twelve hours later, they were down to under 40k gil because so many had come back from ventures today.

So from my understanding they just changed the way things worked with Quick Ventures, but not the others since it specifically states the changes were to quick explorations in the patch notes. Before certain "rare" items were locked behind your retainers ilvl. Meaning you could only get certain items if you ilvl was high enough. And it was never really that high to begin with.

But now, if I read the patch notes correctly, rare items are now locked behind your job lvl instead of you ilvl, but a higher ilvl gets you a chance to snag more items or hq versions if available. I personally would not meld materia onto my DoL retainers, generally the base stats on the previous patch's gear were good enough to max them out. I put my retainers in scrip gear and call it a day, personally, since scrip gear is insanely easy to get and its more than enough to max them out. Same with DoW/M. They always get dungeon gear and its more than enough.

The only things different I have been getting today were a bunch of deepshadow gear, like a lot of it. And these retainer packages that when used have been giving me rare dyes. I got far fewer fish than normal, which is a blessing. Quicks were notorious for giving you a bunch of worthless fish.

You get like venture coffers from quick ventures.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

So far, all I've seen is sometimes having "BONUS!" appear when my retainer brings back a crafting material on a quick venture.

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My fiance got the BONUS message when their retainer brought back a piece of gear.
Not sure how that works yet.

The Venture Coffers they bring back now are just a replacement for the Rare Items. The stuff in the coffers is the same as the stuff you got from the Rare Items returns. The bonus message when you get it on gear just means it will be HQ gear instead of regular gear. The biggest change I've seen is the new tier of rewards they added to the gear. Now your retainers can bring back level 80 gear, whereas the previous highest level gear was the 71-79 levelling gear. I've seen everything up to unaugmented Crystarium gear (i490), which is pretty crazy since that stuff was the highest ilevel stuff just last patch and now quick ventures are bringing it back for free and not that rarely either.

Other than that some of the other new stuff is higher tier housing items and crafting mats and the dungeon gear they added to the old ARR leveling dungeons. What I want to know is what did they remove from quick ventures? The notes said certain items were removed, and it would really suck if super rare things like the onion gear and helms were one of those....

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Originally Posted by ItMe

My fiance got the BONUS message when their retainer brought back a piece of gear.
Not sure how that works yet.

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I finally had that happen. I'm guessing it upgraded the item from NQ to HQ. Rather disappointing when it was just an Emerald Ring and a Kirimu Coat. I was already getting a fairly good percentage of HQ crafted items under the old system.

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Originally Posted by Espritduo

Other than that some of the other new stuff is higher tier housing items and crafting mats and the dungeon gear they added to the old ARR leveling dungeons. What I want to know is what did they remove from quick ventures? The notes said certain items were removed, and it would really suck if super rare things like the onion gear and helms were one of those....

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Considering the total lack of Hingan walls/roofs/doors/windows/chimneys/etc in what I've gotten the last two days, I'd guess they changed what housing items quick ventures are returning. Now we're getting Stuffed Alphas instead.

I imagine the super rare items have been left alone.

After doing a few hundred quick ventures now I am seeing what the general spread is. It seems they have removed all those junk fish from the pool, and as far as I have seen, the pvp gear as well. The gear pool is heavily stacked towards Shadowbringers gear now, with less Stormblood gear than before, and much less of pretty much everything besides gear. If you want gear, that's great but the random factor of getting any old silly thing seems to have reduced drastically, which I kinda liked.

I'd rather have the junk fish back. At least I could get useful crystals and clusters from them. Powdered Merman Horn? That's not so useful these days unless SE is expecting Blue Mages to start using the stat pots for synced level 60 content..

My biggest complaint about changes is venture coffers. More clicks to get a dye from retainer is not something I needed. There's enough clicks as is.

What I saw the first few days (45 retainers in total) was an insane drop rate of stuff, which made the market prices drop radically. black and white dyes, Neo-Ishgardian, tabletop stuff, partitions, you name it. I then made a post about it (and feedback) suggestion that the drop rate might destroy the market board completely. Probably not my post that made the change, but I now see a change where they seem to have included the number of items available at the market board when calculating the drop rates. Things that were so low priced on the market board that I started vendoring them has now started picking up, and I put them aside, in stead of vendoring them, waiting to see how the prices go. Has anyone else noticed the same?