Old phil mats: what the hell?

[Zourin]

There are ways to obtain guild seals 'rapidly', although it will take an investment in time, effort, and material.

i55 gear can be turned in for 600+
i70 gear can be turned in for 800+

I'm sure I got some bonus seals for turning in a spare HQ militia File, but the materia'ed HQ darksteel scutum didn't seem to fetch a bonus (i'm going to strip out the materia to see if that makes a difference).

SO for the quest for master books can be 'discounted' if you turn the NQ two-star ingots (or equivalent) into a peice of i70 gear, and turn it in to the GC. And the remainder of the seals can be made by pumping out 'cheap' Militia items.

[devwild]

There are ways to obtain guild seals 'rapidly', although it will take an investment in time, effort, and material.

i55 gear can be turned in for 600+ (Double for HQ? not sure)
i70 gear can be turned in for 800+

I'm sure I got some bonus seals for turning in a spare HQ militia File, but the materia'ed HQ darksteel scutum didn't seem to fetch a bonus (i'm going to strip out the materia to see if that makes a difference).

There's no longer an HQ bonus for supply-type missions, it's one of the things mentioned in the patch notes. A trade off for them being worth more.

[Zourin]

Sounds about right. Still, it's a small discount. For a blacksmith like me, it's cheap to turn in a bunch of Militia Files @600 GC each (with HQ nuggets skyrocketing, I can trade down easy), only requiring ~35 files for enough seals to attempt the HQ ingot. Failures can be converted into i70 gear (likely HQ) and either sold or turned back in for 800.

The exchange rate is horrible, but there is a path for those of us that didn't have millions of gil to buy pentamelded crafting gear. It just takes patience. Minus the hyppogryph leather for the files, that's about 5 files every two Unspoiled Node cycles (about an hour and a half), or about ten hours at worst. That's enough for 3-5 ingot attempts a week for anyone with a full time day job and an open weekend.

For other crafts, not sure. Not my specialty, but I'd say that having a statistical time to completion of around 5 weeks for the mastery book isn't an unreasonable long term project.