What's your plan?

[PirateCat]

I really want to craft the i170 crafting gear. However.. What is the point crafting lvl 60** gear at the moment? I really don't understand how it works. You craft i170 gear, which takes loads of gathering/gil/time, only to find out there is i180 gear which is way better.

What did I miss other than the fact that getting i180 takes ages with the current system?

Apart from the fact that crafting i170 gear lets you have the full sets of gear earlier (at the cost of it currently taking a MASSIVE amount of additional time and effort) there's also the fact that the i170 gear can be made to have better stats than the i180 gear if you throw enough materia at it.

As for my own plans: I have two max melded HQ Astral Birch Rings and I'm currently working on getting the gathering belt, since (as far as I can tell) it is the only other item that is possible to max out the stats on without having tier V materia. After that I'll likely start working on the offhands since those are better unmelded than the best you can do with the lower tier. But not pushing too hard on this since I'm waiting for the planned update to the favor system. I was going to do the trade-in version of mainhands since the requirements to get the i170 versions even with those are atrocious, so that gives me something to do with this pile of crafting scrip tokens I'm accumulating.