Help with gearing up

[leocordis]

Hey all,
I know this has probably been posted alot of times but i can't seem to find what i need. I also don't know if this is the right place to post this. I just got back to playing after quite a few months away from the game. I left at the end of stormblood and the only gear i have is my job gear which is i290. I got one item for mendacity so i could do deltascape but i dont know where to go from there. I'm currently at i301 and can't go into sigmascape but thats where i need to go to get a new weapon. So my question is do i go ahead and do all my armor gear first and worry about weapon later or should the weapon be my first priority? Also any other helpful advice would be awesome. Thank you in advance

[Zerathor]

I'd just grind mendacity gear, and possibly beg on the side for some i380 crafted pieces.

Usually the weapon is the best upgrade, but in your case you likely want to raise your average ilvl faster to get into current content first. I would ignore the sigma weapon and aim for the new primal weapon after you can get in.

[Raldo]

- Grind mendacity tomes to buy i360 gear
- Grind Centurio Seals (hunts) to buy i330 gear
- Do the highest level dungeons you can enter and use the drops (up to i355, depending on the dungeon)
- Market board / crafting

Personally, for returners I suggest just buying a 380 weapon off the MB, and getting armor gradually via other methods, but even ~500k is too much for some people.

[Maero]

Also if you can get into Ridorana Lighthouse that gear exists also which is ilv 360. That is the last 24 man that we had, you could run that and the previous 24 man so that you can upgrade the Tome gear to 370 (once you have some of the 360 pieces).
Basically like others have said, just grind away for tomes.

[ChaoticCrimson]

Yeah, you should be making a good amount of Mendacity just from first time bonuses you'll get from catching up on dungeons, on top of running Rabanaster/Ridoranna a few times (you'll want to be saving up those coins for when the new Ivalice raid comes out in a few weeks). With that, you should be able to start grabbing a healthy supply of the i360 tome gear on top of any dungeon drops. I definitely recommend catching up with the MSQ to get all the story dungeons, and also don't forget to unlock Fractal Continuum (Hard) and Saint Mocianne's Arboretum (Hard), particularly the latter to unlock the Expert Roulette, which is very helpful for farming Mendacity and especially Genesis tomes. Genesis gear can get you i390 gear, which is very nearly as high as you can get atm without doing Savage fights. There's also dungeons and trials to unlock through the Four Lords sidequests, so you should definitely look into that as well. Beyond that, it shouldn't take you long to be able to do Sigmascape and eventually Alphascape, the latter of which will drop tokens that can be collected to trade in for decent i380 gear. If you're a glutton for punishment, you could also consider catching up on Eureka for the relic gear, but this likely won't really pay off until you finish with Pyros,which could take some time (you do get some tomes from Notorious Monsters too, as a note). If you like doing treasure maps and hunts you can get a few tomes for doing these on the side as a supplement as well. The Hunt seals can get you the i330 gear, but at this point you'll be finding much better gear pretty fast, so I'm not sure I'd bother with it unless you like the glamour. Don't forget, Genesis tomes are capped off at 450 a week, and you can only hold a max of 2000 of any kind of tome, so spend your tomes wisely! If you fill up on Mendacity, spend those tomes immediately so you can save up some more as Mendacity has no weekly cap. This may all seem overwhelming at first, but once you start getting momentum with your first clears I think you'll be surprised how fast you catch up. Best of luck!

Edit: oh yeah, as for weapons, you have a couple options. You can choose to try your hand at EX trials to farm their weapons. Susano will give you a humble i320 weapon, Byakko will give you an i355, the EX version of the 4.3 story trial will drop i365 pieces, and finally Suzaku will drop a hefty i385 weapon! They'll be tougher fights if you're not used to them, but can be worth it as they're not as bad as Savage fights and are certainly doable for even casual players. Aside from that, if you don't want to try the EX fights you may want to consider using hunt seals for the i330 weapon going into Sigmascape 4.0 normal (O8N), as you'll need to beat that one at least four times for crystal tokens to trade in along with 1000 Mendacity for the i360 weapon. This same process follows for Alphascape and Genesis tomes, though you can currently only get one crystal a week from O12N, and you'll need seven for the i390 weapon. Also, if you really farm the Ivalice raids a lot you can use one of each coin to get items to upgrade the i360 tome gear into i370 Augmented gear!