[question] First time DoH looking for advice

[Jelly_Baby]

-Snip Snop-

I 100% agree that levelling crafting isn't cheap, especially if you want to power level it. But since he has gathering classes, all shards/crystals/clusters are free, so the only real cost is the materials, but again, with lvl 70 gathering classes he can gather his own materials.

I'm finally done with: BTN 70, MIN 70, Weaver 50, ALC 50, CUL 37 and CRP 50.

He can easily gather materials and shards for all his classes he's already levelled up.

If he's that broke for gil, just go mine a stack a 99 Doman iron Sand - they are still 700-900 gil each on Midgar lol.

[semoac]

Thank you all for responding.

As for the GIL, I have concluded that the overuse of levequest is the main reason for my financial problems.

After reading the messages I decided to work on the cross-skills you mentioned, and then prioritize GSM and CUL to take advantage of my DoL classes. I will also start working on my retainers which I thought were 100% optional.

Thank you all.

[Shadygrove]

TC, level all the classes to 50 first. Then start leveling them all to 60, then to 70.

Rather than making items (or buying them) to hand in for Leves/GC, craft them yourself and then sell them on the board. You can actually turn a decent profit by gathering materials yourself, crafting HQ, and selling the stuff on the board, even low level stuff sells.

Quoted for truth.

Also leveling in parallel makes it easier on the armory chest.

Don't forget about the Ixal quests from 1 - 50, their delivery quests, Your GC's delivery quests, and the Moogle questline after 50.

BTW the last tier of the Ixal questline is hard, the Moogle questline is dead simple.

(edit) The Ixal quests storyline is NOT TO BE MISSED.

[SirBrighton]

Well, personally, I didn't find Waste Not II to be that useful until late-game Heavensward (level 60 end game). WN II is not very flexible to be used together with Tricks of the Trade. You can only afford to spend 1 step during WN II on a non-durab consuming action, which in most cases, we need it for a single Steady Hand II. Thus, you cannot take any Tricks on the remaining 7 steps of WN II, or it'll equal to losing 10 durab for nothing. This inflexibility is biggest weakness of WN II. I only found WN II to be great for macros, since you are not going too be taking any Tricks anyway in macros. Of course, one argument is that any "Good" conditions during WN II can still be utilized by Precise Touch. But this is assuming you have plenty of CP to spare. Anyway, my point is, even without WN II, it is still OK to just use Master's Mend, Waste Not, or other durab-recovery/conserving actions. After all, when semoac reaches level 65, WN II will be replaced by Manipulation II anyway. I'd rather recommend semoac to level BSM to 50 for Ingen2 or ARM to 50 for Piece by Piece due them being useful even at level 70 (especially piece by piece... currently, pretty much ALL Stormblood 2 star rotations require this skill... There's no specialist skills or new Stormblood skills that can replace it.).

Waste Not II isn't flexible with Tricks of the Trade because it's not meant to be used during Waste Not II. Tricks of the Trade isn't something you should be using at every opportunity, just the ones that aren't detrimental.

Waste Not II is very useful in specific scenarios. It's not as useful in the low levels because of its high CP cost, but it becomes much more useful in the higher levels when you can equip better accessories to have 360+ CP.
Example: Say you're level 60, crafting something that takes 3 Careful Synthesis IIs to complete and you use Steady Hand II and Basic Touch to gain guaranteed stacks of Inner Quiet.
You could get 8 stacks of Inner Quiet using Waste Not II for 352 CP in the same number of steps it would take you to get 7 Stacks of Inner Quiet using Master's Mend for 346 CP.
In this case you'd be getting 1 more stack of Inner Quiet for just 6 more CP. That 1 extra stack of Inner Quiet could be the difference between 88% HQ and 100% HQ (depending on luck), and that will help a lot when making leve turnins.