Ishgard was pretty easy up to now, but now...

[SamSmoot]

The level 70 Armorer turn-in Skybuilder's Counter requires 2 Rhino Beetle Carapace and 1 Moth Scales, which usually require killing big bugs that typically lack the required parts. And I'll be needing lots of them to level up from 72

The insect armageddon begins..

At least both are found in the Peaks, so they should die quickly.

[Yelta_Sumasu]

Send your retainers on 62 Disciples of War or Magic Ventures. I'm farming all that stuff via Ventures.

[SamSmoot]

Send your retainers on 62 Disciples of War or Magic Ventures. I'm farming all that stuff via Ventures.

Hmm, I have one DoW retainer, and I think he's over 62.. I'll have to see how many he brings back.. I suppose I can farm the moths and refresh the retainer in Rhalgr's Reach.

Edit: For moth scales, my level 68 retainer requires item level 245, but he's only at 135.. I've been saving level 70 gear for him, so I'm not about to upgrade early.

[mosaicex]

The turn-ins are not really well balanced, especially for those that require materials that drop from monsters.

Level 80 BSM turn in required normal mats that have to gathered from 2 spots, while ALC's requires only single one.

But the one that's getting short end of the stick is WVR's, which requires Atrociraptor skin, a monster drop. It can be somewhat alleviated by using venture, gemstone trade, and such, but in term of efficiency it has nothing on the two aforementioned classes (and probably every other classes in that tier).

[Doozer]

Yeah the CUL 80 one is just 3 gathered mats from nodes and an item which can be bought with bicolor gemstones. Not great if you're trying to save them, but otherwise always accessible.

[Frizze]

Personally ive been using the lvl 80 goldsmith item. Its 5 gathered mats from 4 zones(resin and mana sand from rak tika, ore from il mheg, sand from kholusia, and silver from south shroud - all of those but the resin are miner while resin is botonist). Not perfectly ideal, but the subcombine is same-class so no need to change between quick-synthing a bunch of mana nuggets and turning them into braziers.

[ChaoticCrimson]

It's a pretty time-consuming process it seems if you're still a lower-leveled crafter/gatherer who's trying to stay on a budget. I spent quite a bit of gil recently upgrading my house to a medium, and I still have some gil to pay back for the person who helped pitch in the last little bit I needed, so naturally I'm trying to rely on the MB as little as possible, especially since the prices on the required mats have naturally skyrocketed recently. I've only had a few hours of time to work on the restoration since it came out, and the majority was spent more on farming the few materials my gatherers can get and killing mobs, and little on actual crafting. I can be patient when I need to, but even including ventures it still seems like a long process unless you hurl tons of money at the MB, but again that's not really an option for me atm.

[Noitems]

Personally ive been using the lvl 80 goldsmith item. Its 5 gathered mats from 4 zones(resin and mana sand from rak tika, ore from il mheg, sand from kholusia, and silver from south shroud - all of those but the resin are miner while resin is botonist). Not perfectly ideal, but the subcombine is same-class so no need to change between quick-synthing a bunch of mana nuggets and turning them into braziers.

I've been switching to ARM one which is very similar to this. I originally was crafting the 70 CRP turn in item which wasn't too bad, but it was eating into my crystals so I decided to swap over to ARM since it didn't use wind as the main resource. It's been working great and gathering around 600 mats has been netting me about 2K scrips per run which is awesome.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

I've swapped to doing the alchemy one since it uses all mats I can gather. Retainers can provide monster drops but those usually come in small amounts from a retainer which is especially hard for things like leather since you get like 10 skins which is only 2 or 3 leather after processing.

[Maeka]

The level 70 Armorer turn-in Skybuilder's Counter requires 2 Rhino Beetle Carapace and 1 Moth Scales, which usually require killing big bugs that typically lack the required parts. And I'll be needing lots of them to level up from 72

The insect armageddon begins..

At least both are found in the Peaks, so they should die quickly.

You could do what I did and just use the Lv60 recipe. I wasn't about to go out and get Holy Basil from a timed node to level my CUL so I decided to instead make the teas that just want Yak Milk which you can buy from the Crystarium. That, and as an added bonus, maxing out the collectability of the Lv60 recipe is far, far easier, especially if you're only Lv72 so there's not THAT much difference. My Lv74 goldsmith will all updated tools, clothes, and jewelry struggled to get Tier 2 on the Lv70 recipe, and the difference between Lv60 Max and Lv70 basic is only 300k.

So you could get 1.7 million for turning in a max collectable Lv60 recipe, or you could get 2 million by doing the Lv70 recipe at the first reward tier, but have to get way more materials (3 different skybuilders' vs 2) and instead of Beetle Blue, you would instead only need a Dark Chestnut Lumber which is easy peasy.