Late to Eorzea, what to do before EW?

[Illmaeran]

Get your retainers geared as well as you can too. If you can craft your own, great. If not, dungeon gear's good too. Since you'll only be getting one set of each type (tank, heal, ranged physical, ranged magic) when questing, you might end up being gear-limited on the retainers.

[Novae]

Complete 5.55
Cap your tomestones
Get glamours from content that won't be played as much after EW release ( Nier raid ).
Unlock Bozja, it's a great place to level alt jobs between 71-80. It will be packed at release, thanks to all the reaper/sage "mains".

[Theodric]

I wouldn't worry about gearing up at this point. The quests in the first expansion zone will offer gear that is good enough to get by with.

My suggestion would be to spend the time in a laid back fashion, just running over the world to see what the various blue quests open up. All of them will unlock something, though the ones located in major cities generally lead to dungeons, raids and meaty side quests. If you have not yet unlocked access to the Gold Saucer as of yet, that's something that I think is worth looking into. The quest that opens it up starts in Ul'dah, not far from the main aetheryte with an NPC called 'Well Heeled Youth'.

[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.

[Skivvy]

-Buy ilv510 items from Marketboard for the class you want to play in EW.
-Prepare lv70 poetic gear for reaper/healer if you want to play these classes. Get Maiming/Healing set, specifically.

-Cap 2,000 of each type of tome, as you can convert allegory and revelation to poetic later.

-Empty your leve allowance with coffee biscuit level. Don't need to craft. You can just buy HQ ones from marketboard, and it is still profitable. Require a lv78 culinarian, though
-Finish Gold Saucer's weekly challenge log.
-Finish a wondrous tail book next week but don't turn in, so that when EW launches, you can instantly gains half of a level bar for your class of choice. Do the book again on the launch week and get another half of the bar.

Do the leves reset in full with the expansion?

[Kacho_Nacho]

Stock up on black dyes so you can go maximum edge with Reaper

Gunmetal black or pure black?

And to answer the OP... everything!

Actually, I'd go through each class and job and make certain that my exp was only slightly into a level. Otherwise, you are going to lose a ton of exp when EW is released.

[StriderShinryu]

I'd suggest just making sure you finish the MSQ over the time you have left rather than leaving it so you have to rush at all.

Other than that, if you've got the Tomestones, just try to get your main job up to BiS. Not because you need it but because it will let you sail through the initial bits of EW without needing to worry about gear at all and you can just take any quest rewards or dungeon drops for secondary or tertiary jobs.

One more thing I would suggest is actually giving yourself at least a couple of days off from FF14 before EW launches. Chances are you'll want to go in on EW at full force so make sure you don't burn yourself out on the game before then by trying to smash everything you may have "missed" into the time between now and then. The content you've "missed" will still be there after EW comes out and if there's bits of gearing or storyquesting you want to do you can do it all later when you have the time to truly enjoy it.

[hobostew]

Gunmetal black or pure black?

Jet Black obviously! You can try to fool others with gunmetal or soot but deep down you'd know you aren't at your maximum edgy potential!

Now if only we could get one of the scions to play a sick guitar riff in the background after every victory...

[SturmChurro]

Jet Black obviously! You can try to fool others with gunmetal or soot but deep down you'd know you aren't at your maximum edgy potential!

Now if only we could get one of the scions to play a sick guitar riff in the background after every victory...

Jet black is alright, but sometimes I like the sheen from gunmetal, for certain pieces. Soot is dollar store black, that one I will rarely use, unless the jet black is way too dark.

[Knot_D]

Clean your inventory, sell the obsolete materias like VII (or VIII unless you keep it for transmute later)