So I hit level 60 as a White Mage...

[Squintina]

Use whatever poetics you have (which might be a good bit) to buy as much of the 260-270 shire set as possible. It's great gear and lasts you well into level 65 (I used it until 70 no problem).

[Makeda]

There is a vendor in Castrum Oriens that sells 255 or 260 gear for simple gil.

The same gear is now sold, also for gil, in Foundation.

You can get a complete set for every job - right and left side and weapons - for gil alone.

Price is usually much lower than the identical gear on the Marketboard... I highly suspect some people buy it, walk 3 steps to the left in Foundation, and list if on the Market... and then repeat...


At level 63 you can open up the Ruby Tide dungeon - will will give you a FULL SET 'except for weapon' - right and left - at iLevel 270. Because it is one of the best glamours in the game, people are often farming this place - so it tends to have short queues. It also has ALL of the 270 weapons - but they are not guaranteed drops like the other gear...

Here is the full WHM set:



- So it's a very appealing healer glamour.

And I mention if because... given the set you can buy from a vendor with gil, and then this set so early into Stormblood... it is best to just rush right into the expansion and not delay with any silly grinds.

I play four characters and frequently switch which one shows to the left in my forum profile icon, so here is my WHM:
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...acter/4912180/
- as of this post just shy of level 65. I'm still in the Ruby Tide gear because I'm a little behind in the MSQ from running Ruby Tide about 10 times to get a full set for the glamour. By the time I hit the next zone... there is quest gear that is, I think 279...

- You can be to that point in about a day or two of solid play if you DON'T grind up the Ruby Tide set.

[Gemina]

If you're like me, you like to be in the best equipment available before proceeding into the next expansion. As others have stated, you can get i270 Shire gear pretty easily now with poetics. You can also further enhance it through melds, and grade V materia is really easy to get as well. There is one drawback, and this is your ring accessory, which you can only have one of. One way around this is doing the HW 24-man raids. A goblin in Idyllshire gives a weekly quest that requires you to clear Dun Scaith, which is still a fairly challenging 24-man raid with plenty of insta-wipe/KO mechanics. Doing so will give you an item that you can trade for a Proto Ultima accessory, completing your i270 set up. You can also do your relic, which I advise everyone to do at least once.

In short, the more content you complete in both ARR and HW before proceeding into SB, the more experience and knowledge you have with the game. If you want to get into savage content, it would probably be best to not spend a lot of time trying to form parties to run old content synced. It would be better to catch up and get into the relevant savage content. It is kind of a bummer though, because the older content when relevant had very fun and interesting mechanics that are skipped entirely now.

[Locathus]

If you quit before because of grinding, I'd recommend...not grinding. The gear isn't that big a deal, and you can pick it up during SB quests. If you don't feel like doing that yet, just do the ARR and HW stuff - there is plenty of it. And you can always mess around with other stuff to keep things fresh - crafting/gathering, getting beast favor, or playing triple triad or something.

When you get to end game your gear will matter. Until you complete SB though, just go with what you want to do that particular day.

[MoroMurasaki]

You're most of the way to the best 60 gear you can have since you've already got accessories. Doing some Aetherochemical Research Facility (150 poetics per run) will let you have a full set of 270 soon which will make all gear up to the level 65 dungeon obsolete.

You can sell your quest reward items on the MB for gil, skip dungeon grinding for the first few dungeons and move on knowing that even if you don't replace a couple pieces of gear before 70 you'll not be a huge hinderance to your party because you took the time to get the best possible 60 gear to start SB.

If this is somehow too much for you to deal with as some people have implied frankly 70 is going to be a rude awakening for you. From Augmemted Shire up to the level 69 dungeon gear is a gap of 18 ilvls from 270 to 288. Current top tier gear at level 70 is i370, that's a fair bit of grind you'll have to look forward to no matter how you go about leveling through SB. This game at the end of a base expansion is basically a 2 year grind up to the next expansion.

[EaMett]

It's not that bad, you have plenty of options to pull yourself into 325+ realm once you hit 70. After that it's pretty streamlined.
You can buy crafted gear, use mendacity, use creation, get gear from dungeons, use centurio seals, run deltascape normal (a little empty atm though, I will admit), run Rabanastre, do ex trials, and probably something I'm missing (edit: eureka.. forgot eureka).
Basically just discover and enjoy the end game content and gear will flow in.
Once you have ilvl 325 you can start working on the current tier of gear by discovering and running this tier's content. Run sigmascape normal for 350 gear, etc..

It's nothing like the mind numbing tome grind from the earlier caps. Even grinding your 360 mendacity gear is less work because you're capped at 450/week