Quote Originally Posted by Mhaeric View Post
Sure, if you buy the expensive gear or waste scrip on gear that's only going to last you a day or two because you're power leveling. Just spend the gil on mats instead and do it with the cheap gear. You get the second collectibility tier most of the time, occasionally get the lowest or the highest due to luck. It's only a 25% increase in experience for the last tier so you'll need at most 25% more mats.
The gear isn't expensive, you can make it yourself easily, and scrip gear costs a few hundred yellows which is currently 3-4 cheap collectable crafts.

It's also not 25%, in fact it's significant for most of the time:

Level 20 -> 146,796 vs 102,715 (+43%)
Level 40 -> 875,604 vs 433,478 (+100%)
Level 60 -> 1,792,967 vs 1,438,130 (+25%)
Level 70 -> 4,113,234 vs 2,876,447 (+43%)

Because of this it's worth investing at 21-24 in gear or food to easily push to 50+, then in vendor HW gear / GC gear you can hit the 3rd milestone of the 40 craft and get up to 62 or so, then do all your class quests which will put you at 71, then from there again it is extremely simple to make 71 gear or just do a few CDs to get scrip gear that can easily hit the 3rd milestone to go to 80 if you opt for this over leves. Notice you never need to craft the level 60 one at all just by adding a few more crafts. At all points though, better gear also decreases how long each craft will take.