3rd Retainer by Default, please?

[Niwashi]

What I really want to see is an "Equipment Guide" similar to the Fish Guide where, when you acquire an item from dungeon loot, the item appears in the guide, and then you can cast glamours from the guide (still consuming glamour prisms of course) without needing the actual item.

That I'd love to see. Either where all gear we get is recorded and we use a glamour prism to apply the look to other gear, or where we use a glamour prism to store the image in that guide and can then freely apply its images to gear whenever we want. (The former gives us a wider range of looks to use, whereas the later enables people to freely swap around between different looks they like to suit their current mood/job/activity. But either would get all the excess gear we're keeping just for glamours out of our inventory space.)

[Intaki]

until you run out of ventures to pay with

If you are actively playing the game this will never happen unless you choose to let it happen.

[Jynx]

There is this fallacy that the additional retainers magically generate extra things or gil, the truth is, at most, they temporarily increase the rate you can do certain things at, until you run out of ventures to pay with, or items to sell. The thing is, you have to have the ventures to pay the retainers with, and you have to already have the things to sell. Once those resources run out you're back to square one whether you have 2, 3 or 4 retainers.

Ventures are hardly a limitation you think they are. Any crafter can quickly, cheaply, and easily gather grand company point that lead to Eady ventures. The only limitation is the players time. Making ventures on capped out retainers not something to sneeze at.

Retainers have insane gil generating prowess if you gave the knowledge of what to tell 5 hem to go get for you.

Someone could easily make at least a mil a day with enough ventures and retainers.

[Kosmos992k]

If you are actively playing the game this will never happen unless you choose to let it happen.

You have a finite limit on dailies, and as I have previously said, actively playing in order to generate venture tokens for retainers to use, is simply another way of using your time. You could just as easily be gathering the items you send your retainer to gather (and you'd be quicker). The retainer does not, can not, generate anything without effort from the player. with 4 retainers, if you play 4 hours, you can burn through 32 venture tokens. How many tokens can you obtain in that time through regular play (assuming you do not start with a stock pile of things that you can exchange for ventures)? Let's assume you spend 50% of your time doing things that do not generate venture tokens, how many can you earn in 2 hours (again without a stockpile of items)? There are limits. 6 beast tribe dailies will only net you 6 tokens, where are the other 26 coming from? Remember that means you have to generate something like 32 tokens every day you play to use those retainers the way you want to describe as automatic. Doesn't sound very automatic to me.

Ventures are hardly a limitation you think they are. Any crafter can quickly, cheaply, and easily gather grand company point that lead to Eady ventures. The only limitation is the players time.

You said it yourself. the limitation is player time. that is the point I have been making. optional retainers are only as useful as the time the player puts into them, they are not automatic gil dispensers.

Retainers have insane gil generating prowess if you gave the knowledge of what to tell 5 hem to go get for you.

So do players. A friend of mine purchased a medium house plot, and decorated using the profits from gathering at unspoiled nodes. No retainers needed.

[Intaki]

What you don't seem to be getting is that you don't need to actively gather venture tokens; you will do it at the same time as you do other activities. FATEs, leves, dungeons, dailies, all of these things and more easily fund the purchase of ventures.

[Kosmos992k]

What you don't seem to be getting is that you don't need to actively gather venture tokens; you will do it at the same time as you do other activities. FATEs, leves, dungeons, dailies, all of these things and more easily fund the purchase of ventures.

There are plenty of activities that people do that do NOT generate venture tokens as well. If you choose to play by running content that will grant you ventures, that's cool. Not all content does so, and you're still avoiding the simple point that retainers can only do what a player tells them to, they are not the seemingly automatic gil fountains that you and Jynx appear to believe they are.

[Nalien]

You said it yourself. the limitation is player time. that is the point I have been making. optional retainers are only as useful as the time the player puts into them, they are not automatic gil dispensers.

Two extra Retainers does not take up a great deal of player time, in fact the extra Venture cost is almost completely negligible depending on what you do in game.

I needed extra space so I had to fork over for additional Retainers, and I have not changed my play style in the slightest, if anything I've gotten lazier (not so much Duty Roulette) and the extra cost of four more Ventures a day still hasn't affected me in the slightest. It is a completely negligible extra cost to my time, but the benefits? Well, right off the bat an additional 10+ Allagan Pieces a day which is just outright Gil, then there's the minions. Doubled my chances of those, what are they worth on your server? I made 1m off a Retainer I payed real money for the other day.

The only time investment with Retainer Ventures is leveling the damn things up, everything outside that is absolutely trivial. Leveling them is an investment everyone has to pay though, except those who buy two additional ones get double the reward from. The fact that people who hardly play the game aren't going to benefit from them is utterly inconsequential. Bottom line is anyone with two extra Retainers has potential to make extra Gil those without simply cannot. Like I said, I made an additional 1m someone who didn't buy extra Retainers simply would not. Two people playing exactly the same, both sending Retainers off on Ventures daily, but one with two extra. The player with two extra is always going to benefit more than the other. That's a simple fact.

Some people being unable to get Ventures/gear them is utterly meaningless. Compared to anyone playing the game in a similar way to me, I have a payed advantage in those two extra Retainers.

[Kaaylryn]

My main concern is for the armory space. SE has already homogenized the gathering/crafting gear into one size fits all. And at this point, many gear sets are sharable between jobs with many of the secondary stats not optimal. If SE ever intends to provide separate gear sets according to job, they will need to address the Armory issue. With the advent of 3 new jobs in the expansion, this will be even more important.

This is one downfall of having ALL jobs available on one character and something that SE should have seen coming. In other MMOs I created an alt if I wanted a caster or healer or tank with each having their own storage. In this game cross class abilities are way to important to do that. I think SE has been very short-sighted in this aspect where Armory storage is concerned.

[Nyalia]

I think everyone here agrees that more inventory space would not be needed if we had some form of equipment guide that we could cast glamours from. I would gain literally 175 inventory spaces from just that one change. I bought an extra retainer just so she could hold all my glamour items, and she's full of them. So much that I've had to start breaking them to fit in more.

In my opinion, I think SE spending money on more sever space for larger inventories (or more retainers - same thing) would just be kicking the can down the road, like someone said above. I'd much rather see the money that would go toward that instead go toward the development of an Equipment Guide that we can cast glamours from. That'll solve the problem for quite a long time as far as I'm concerned. If such a thing existed, I wouldn't even bother storing equipment for future classes, since I can just make fairly equivalent stuff whenever necessary and then Convert it when I'm done with it. I really keep all that equipment just for glamour.

[Ophie-Mio]

This is one downfall of having ALL jobs available on one character and something that SE should have seen coming. In other MMOs I created an alt if I wanted a caster or healer or tank with each having their own storage... I think SE has been very short-sighted in this aspect where Armory storage is concerned.

This is a strange downfall to have as FFXIV has its older sister FFXI to look at in terms of how storage should work. FFXI had WAY more jobs per single character and a lot more equipment than this game can ever hope to have. Every monthly patch they release no less than 20 pieces of various equipment that people do actually strive to have. The difference is that there is a massive amount of storage in FFXI. If you have a single character with more than one job, you need to set up storage to accommodate all of that. FFXI had seven storage tabs ranging from 50-100+ slots. They also had storage NPCs (like armoires) where you could store entire sets of armor. There was literally a whole enterprise that NPC moogles got into with letting you rent in game storage for in game currency.

SE just needs to stop fooling itself. If they were watching how dedicated crafters and dedicated fighters/levelers/glamour lovers actually handle their equipment, they would have realized ages ago that people are bursting at the seams without 4 retainers. Company chests are filled to bursting most of the time. Houses are filled to capacity.

SE has been very short-sighed in the aspect of storage in a general sense. With more jobs and more gear and glamour gear, storage will become a very serious problem. You won't be able to have all your class's gear on you eventually.