An educated rant: Why pentamelding is %@$&*!-backwards

[NegativeS]

Imagine you have your driver's license and you want to drive a car, but before you could even step into a car you had to learn how to learn how to play the violin.

Actually, it's more like "Imagine you have your griver's license and you want to drive a car, but before you do you should make sure the heat/AC works."

Nobody is making you pentameld. I can guarantee more than half of the community has never hand-melded a single materia.

But it helps!

[Eraden]

Thank you for the advice and colorful words everyone. I think I will try out some gathering to pay off my many in-game debts. I used to strongly dislike (hate is a strong word) having to mine every ore deposit I saw in my previous MMO World of Warcraft, but maybe it might be fun in this game. Does anyone have any tips on what are the best materials to collect and sell for my crafter acquaintances friends? Thank you!

My best suggestion is to check the market boards and find out what sells for decent amounts of Gil. When I first started gathering, I collected tons of fire shards because a lot of crafters could not be bothered to run out and collect them as they were pretty low level. I made a decent amount of Gil just selling fire shards for a while. Eventually you should be able to get a feel for what is popular on the market boards and then try to gather those items. Here's another hint...gathered items that are required for making food for the raiders, often sell pretty well.

[Kes13a]

Thank you for the advice and colorful words everyone. I think I will try out some gathering to pay off my many in-game debts. I used to strongly dislike (hate is a strong word) having to mine every ore deposit I saw in my previous MMO World of Warcraft, but maybe it might be fun in this game. Does anyone have any tips on what are the best materials to collect and sell for my crafter acquaintances friends? Thank you!

usually best to ask your crafter "friends" they will know what they need better than what we will

[Illmaeran]

Start with basic ores. Once you get into higher ARR and onward crafting many intermediate products (ingots, etc) require multiple types of metal, one of which is usually something from the previous expansion. Once you can start mining CRYSTALS, not shards, go bonkers on those for a while. Crafters always need them and you can make good money selling in bulk. You may not get a whole lot of XP from them after a bit, but they're a solid source of regular income that you'll be able to tap into to buy periodic gear upgrades until you hit the collectible node tiers for scrips to get gear with.

If you're high enough rank in your GC, using the seals you get from ventures to buy the green company gathering XP buff scrolls will help a great deal. Once you have access to it (level 10?), the Diadem in the Foundation in Ishgard is great XP. I don't know how well that stuff sells for these days, but you can get some pretty cool mounts, emotes, and items with the Skybuilder Scrips you get. It can take a little while to get used to the arrangement of islands on the circuit, but once you do it's pretty smooth sailing.


Gathering in XIV is MUUUUUCCCCCH better than in WoW. Each type of material is found in a small area that has unique nodes for each player. No longer do you have to fly around the entire map and hope someone doesn't snatch the node before you. You'll be running in a pretty tight circuit hitting nodes that only you have access to.

[Kakure]

If I have to play through hundreds of hours of story and six dozen dungeons/trials to access the game's crafting and gathering content, you can stand to spend thirty seconds /shouting for a melder in Limsa.