The road to lvl 50 DoH

[EienKibou]

Hey guys
Just recently came back to the game and decided to lvl all DoH and DoL to 50 since i am really not interested in raiding at the moment. (I already had LTW at 50).

I started to lvl up all classes simultaneously, so far it took me around 16 hours to get all of them to 20, my question is how much money do i actually need to get to 50? (assuming i farm all the mats i need and lvl efficiently) I have only 500k right now to speak of and i am worried it will not cut it. I do have a lvl 50 MNK but i never really did any endgame content.

Any advice would be welcome =D

[gornotck]

Assuming you farm all the mats, walk everywhere, make all the ingredients yourself, use levequests, and so on, I'm pretty sure that 500k will see you through. whether you'd have 500k at the end isn't very obvious, but probably unlikely.

[LineageRazor]

Folks always say crafting will be expensive, but that was not the case for me. Even my first class to 50, Goldsmithing, was at worst break-even. When I leveled ARM and BSM (my 5th and 6th classes), I started with around 200k and by the time I was finished I had over a million, due to the fact that I was able to HQ just about everything along the way, and HQs sell quite well on the marketboards compared to the costs to craft.

It probably helped that I tried not to "grind" my way up; I made a point to do all of the Guildleves for each craft, and to craft one of every item in the crafting log. Selling thirty Iron Sabatons (HQ or not) on the MB is a lot harder than selling one each of Iron Gauntlets, Iron Sabatons, Iron Cuirass, etc, etc. On occasions where I DID have to grind, I always tried to grind materials rather than equipment. 30 Iron Ingots will sell a lot more easily than, again, 30 Iron Sabatons.

[Elasia]

Working your way up is not that expensive with leves, paint etc, a lot of what you craft for xp can be resold for profit if you look around... especially right now with the economic boom

The real expense people moan about is depending on your server and if you want to be a grandmaster or just master one... each fully melded set will set you back anywhere from 1m to 3m or so atm... that's just in gil terms but as you craft up you can also make and save your own materia to lower the pure cost since you have to commit that same time to leveling up anyway.

[Shirai]

The real expense people moan about is depending on your server and if you want to be a grandmaster or just master one... each fully melded set will set you back anywhere from 1m to 3m or so atm... that's just in gil terms but as you craft up you can also make and save your own materia to lower the pure cost since you have to commit that same time to leveling up anyway.

This basically, the most expensive part of crafting right now is the melding of your crafting "endgame" gear and getting the masterbooks.

The end the actual cost of getting all 8 of my crafting classes up is ~2 million gil.
(This is a very rough estimate, but I bought the items I couldn't get through DoL and is including all the gear, even the level 50 sets.)

Mind you that I had leveled my 3 DoL classes before I started crafting, this saved me a lot of gil material wise.
Apart from that, a lot of gil I had invested in crafting was earned back quite easily with LEVE rewards and selling off excess materials on the market boards.

Your biggest one time investment will be the gear you need between the levels 20 and 49, but considering you already have LTW at 50 I hope you kept most of that.

[Sadana]

Yay! I'm leveling all DoH classes simultaneously too! It's fun (if a bit slow)! I make good use of the GC supply missions. Turning in HQ (especially on starred missions) gives a ton of exp in very little time. If I have little time to play that day, I feel no shame buying an item for cheap from the mb. To earn gil, I've found that selling crafted mats (like small stacks of aldgoat leather) is good. Farming mobs for drops and gathering your own mats and shards will cut the cost down to nothing.

[Lemon8or]

You have a relatively good starting point. From here on, I would do the following if I were you:
_ Get Carpenter to 50 and Culinary to 37 ASAP. Lumbers should be cheap enough to use your money to buy, craft stuffs and turn levequests in for gil back. Level Botanist if you feel like you're running short on cash. I think your Botanist is good level enough to gather Noble Grape, Chamomile and Millioncorn to get your Culinary to 37 making Grape Juice, Chamomile tea and Cornmeal.
_ After that, you can take Goldsmith, Alchemist and Weaver to 50. Weaver takes mats from your leveled Botanist. Goldsmith, you should level Miner. Alchemist is a mixbag.
_Blacksmith and Armorer should be last because they're less useful to you if you have someone that can keep your tools updated or they're cheap enough to buy.
Always always use levequests to level and try to HQ the items. HQ gives more experience from crafting it as well as turning them in.

[EienKibou]

Thanks a lot for the answers! that will help me a lot. I have been crafting my own HQ gear just fine actually, i am always updated at least up to 25 so far. The thing is i have been converting all my previous gear to lvl 1 materia and using that materia to enhance my control and gathering on my HQ pieces that i am crafting. Is this a bad idea?

Should i been keeping my lvl 1 materia and soon lvl 2 materia instead of melding it to my crafting gear?
From 20 to 25 i made 50k profit with lvl 10-20 crafted HQ items i sold, so far so good XD.

Btw is lvl 37 culinary that important? i keep reading i should lvl that first as well as CRP.

[Lemon8or]

Depending on how easy/hard it is to craft without the melding. I never had to meld into my gears to craft and you can make a good chunk of gil out of it. Level 37 Culinary gives you Steady Hands II which increases your chance of success by 30% (10% more than I) at 25 CP (only 3CP more than I) so it's great to pair with Hasty Touch to improve quality without spending CP (80%). Basic Touch also reaches 100% with Steady Hands II. Level 50 Carpenter gives you Byregot's Blessing which makes use of your Inner Quiet stacks and is unarguably the most important skill to HQ crafts. Getting it would make leveling other classes way easier considering you can pump out HQ gears at your level instead of lower level, being able to HQ level 30 recipes at level 30 with updated gears for example. Pairing Steady Hands II with Hasty Touch to get your Inner Quiet stacks up to blow it all on Byregot (24CP) while keeping CP for Mend/Manipulation/Waste Not is how you get higher HQ.

[EienKibou]

Oh that's awesome i might consider to lvl CUL to 37 ASAP then, hasty touch always feels more like 30% success even with steady hands on lol. If i go for lvl 50 CRP can i make it by only leveling Botanist in paralel for the mats?