Quote Originally Posted by Mhaeric View Post
Re: gearing as you go.

At a bare minimum, if someone wants to minimize the amount of gil they spend for gear to supplement whatever dungeon gear they manage to get, I recommend getting a full tomestone set at levels ending in zero and buying HQ crafted gear at levels ending in 5. Between the levels ending from 0-5 you won't even need dungeon gear since the tome gear is better than dungeon gear, and from 5-9 the 5 gear supplemented with dungeon drops as obtained is strong enough to get through content well enough even with minimal dungeon drops. The exception I would make to this rule of thumb is buying the HQ weapon for your level from 5-9 if you didn't get the dungeon drop from the previous tier since weapon has a huge impact on performance for any job.
I know not everybody is going to do it like this, but what I did... and this made it easy as pie to stay geared up, is I would level groups of classes, 2 levels at a time. For example I would have 3 of the tanks (Pld was already 70 when ShB released) and two of the healers (same for WHM) on, say, 63.

I'd level a healer through Shisui until 65. Then I'd level the other healer through Shisui until 65. Then I'd take 1 tank through Shisui until 65 and keep doing that. I got *plenty* of dungeon drops to equip all of my jobs, Almost. I fell slightly short on Doma Castle because doing Beast Tribe dailies caused me to out-pace the dungeon drops and now all 3 tanks are Lv71 with the exception of GNB which will ding 71 tomorrow and so they're all wearing Scaevan. I plan on doing the same with Don Mheg+.

And thanks to Trusts, and the fact I did the MSQ by taking my RDM through all the story dungeons with Trusts, I already have a decent spattering of gear to start with sitting on a retainer.