Late to Eorzea, what to do before EW?

[Floortank]

That depends on what your goals are and how much money you have.

Also, if you're planning to do the side content anyway then it makes sense to do it now when it can save you some gil. You can very quickly get up to the second tier of Eden, which gives you i480 gear. Some of that, some tome gear and whatever you pick up from MSQ dungeons will get you well on the way to i490 and then if you really need to, you buy crafted gear to replace your weakest items at the end of it.

For that matter, in less than two weeks you'll be able to get augmented Cryptlurker i530 gear with poetics, so you can replace some more pieces then.

Overall I'd say the priority is doing all the story content you can get through once, doing those specific older raids that have been recommended, and not trying to gear up fully until 6.0 changes the level 80 gear to poetics.

I am in the process of getting an alt through 5.55 in the final week of SHB. I have grinded them through the entire MSQ.

If I stopped to grind the iLvl just to go into Eden, I might not finish. It would require systematically unlocking dungeons and raids to pick up random loot drops that might not happen in 2-3 runs.

OTOH, I just used 500k I picked up from just doing the MSQs to buy the entire crafted set, saving myself a massive amount of time.

Eden is not a gear skip if you can't even get into Eden because your iLvl is too low. The MSQ is also iLvl locked at certain points along the way. So going through Eden to get into a required dungeon would be adding hours to what could only take you 20 minutes.

If you are running out of time, the ~500k gil is far less valuable than the time you can be using to finish the MSQ and clear optional content that might improve your enjoyment after.

Also, I'm on Crystal, where the 510 set is on average 25-50% more expensive than Aether. I have characters on both. Probably even cheaper than 500k on Aether.

EDIT: Been in an Eden 6 Normal queue while running around doing MSQs for over 20 minutes now and this is only drops 480 gear.