[Question] First time DoL looking for advice

[Vandril]

1. You'll be perfectly fine in unmelded NQ gear while leveling. HQ is nice and can speed things up a bit (less chance to fail a gather, higher chance to get an HQ material). Melding at all before endgame gear is just overkill. Once you're pining for your endgame, level-capped DoL gear, you'll want nothing but HQ and you'll want to go out of your way wasting materia to overmeld.

2. Not that I know of. It depends on server. Just browse your market boards, check list price and sale history (to see if it sells for a lot and sells often) for various items, and hope for the best.

3. Players can mark an item as desirable by putting it in their wishlist. The number next to the heart symbol an item has is the number of people that have that item wishlisted. The various versions of the heart symbol (outline, filled in, etc.) just depend on how many people have wishlisted the item (say, if 25 people wishlist an item, it'll get a filled-in gold heart - note that I pulled that number out of my behind). The wishlist persists until the next time the server is brought offline, if I remember correctly, and will then reset. So, ultimately, it can be useful to get a general gist of how much demand there is for an item in the past few days. But since most people don't wishlist anything, it's hardly a good measure on its own, and an item lacking a heart might sell for more and more quickly than an item with.

3b. Expanding on the above: I only really use the heart count to determine if an item that very rarely sells (such as most furniture items) is in demand at the moment. If someone takes the time to wishlist a furniture item, and there's none of that item posted, there's probably some unsatisfied demand there and the next reasonably priced post will likely sell. Other than that, I just ignore it.

4. As you level, there's the very occasional DoH/DoL gear piece from your Grand Company Seals vendor. Other than that, not really.

5. You should use all of your GP every collectable gather attempt, yes. Stock Cordials if you want to hit nodes back-to-back, you'll need them. If you use a good Impulsive Appraisal rotation, you should end up with 1-5 collectables depending on Impulsive Appraisal procs and how many times you can hit the node.