Gear Prep for Dawntrail: crafted 640 enough?

[Boblawblah]

oh yea..I should start working on that, been playing alt jobs. Don't want to have to get a bunch of gear right as DT comes out.

[Gemina]

The short answer is i640 will carry you all the way to lv94 in the new expansion. If you are 640/650, it would be a good idea to upgrade here as it will be the first level that marginally beats out current BiS. If you are i660, you can skip this. Lv96 will be the first level that you should toss the i660 gear for the HQ set available at that level.

If you currently are using crafted i640 gear, use your poetics to upgrade to i650 and you'll be just fine. Tomes of comedy and Thalia drops are also options to get i650 gear.

[Iscah]

But poetics will only have the upgraded one, you will to buy an entirely new items or do the 3 raid 24 to upgrade an old non upgraded item.

I'm curious, never found a way to upgrade old Tomes gear with poetics, where did you get the upgrade ?

You can't obtain coins from the raids any more once the gear converts to poetics. The upgrade items become useless.

However, the shopkeeper previously tasked with upgrading your gear in exchange for base gear and token is now offering the same service for a payment of 100 poetics per piece, which used to be the cost of the token for non-current expansions back when we still had to buy them.

This led to Yoshi-P posing the question - would there be a problem with making it impossible to obtain non-augmented gear? There didn't seem to be much reaction to that question so they just did it shortly after.

Who actually got asked?

In most cases it's fine because the only difference is dyeability, but I am still disappointed at the loss of non-glowing Gerolt's Masterworks weapons.

[Bun_Vivant]

640 will be enough, but I would also point out that there's not much reason not to get 650 or 660, because what else is there to do?

I guess that depends a bit on how many active characters you have.

I have 8 active chars, across three worlds and two accounts, and while 6 of them are at EoC, two of them are still in ShB. I have a bunch of other chars too but I don't do much with them; none of the inactive characters are out of Stormblood yet, and eight of them are really just mules.

My spouse is in a similar situation, although with a couple fewer characters at EoC and more characters still pushing through the MSQ.

So we're plenty busy without grinding for tomestones.

[CaedemSanguis]

660 will be fine till the 97 dungeon which will loot better gear

The lv100 tomestone will allow you to buy i700 gear? Ar1-Ar4 gear will be 710, so will be the next crafted gear for Ar1s-Ar4s

So yeah don't worry, 640 is enough to start the expansion

[kaynide]

Based on historic patterns:

• The base IL 650 Comedy gear will be upgradable to Augmented IL 660 at the cost of 100 poetics per slot.
• The Lv91 dungeon will drop IL 650 gear.
• The Lv93 dungeon will drop IL 660 gear.
• Crafters will be able to make Lv94 gear that is IL 663.
• The Lv95 dungeon will drop IL 666 gear.

Getting a full set of IL 660 gear now would put you at the max IL available from Lv90 through Lv93, and the max IL available from duties through Lv94. A full set of IL 650 gear now would put you at the expected IL through Lv92 but that set can be upgraded to a full set of IL 660 gear for 1,100 poetics.

Just to plus 1 this.

The final tomestone set will be better than anything until the 3rd dungeon.

At the same time, you can just as easily replace any bargain bin armor via quests and even the very first DT dungeon. You would almost have to go out of your way to be below required ilvl if going through on your first class.

[Eraden]

Is stat increases linear or little bits exponentials as climbings up the ilevels? Mao askings because if linear then differences become relatively less importants over the many ilevels unless critters finely tuned for narrow ilevel range. Whats gonna make HUGE difference, Mao thinkings, is next set of materia.

[Asako]

Crafted gear will last you until around level 93 to 95 as a Tank/Healer before it becomes an issue. Around then as a Tank trash mobs will start to hurt if you still plan on multi-pulls. As a healer you'll feel weaker the longer you go on without new gear.

As a DPS you can bring it to 100 and it wont matter. DPS is irrelevant in this game and you wont be taking damage outside of raid wides that don't deal much, sure you will hit for low damage but it's only normal mode so it wont matter and anything you can get via quests and levelling dungeons will be enough.

Pretty much as long as you meet the minimum requirements of the first dungeon you'll be fine. Can't see it being more than 640/650 and you'll get those from the story quests prior. Don't worry about it.

[kaynide]

Is stat increases linear or little bits exponentials as climbings up the ilevels? Mao askings because if linear then differences become relatively less importants over the many ilevels unless critters finely tuned for narrow ilevel range. Whats gonna make HUGE difference, Mao thinkings, is next set of materia.

Hi Mao!

Unless they do a stat squish, you can generally look at armor progression from the current expansion (so the 81 dungeon to the final tomestone set)

That pattern has generally been the same since 3.x. So, unless they rework stats, it's fairly safe to say any differences in iLVL gear will be along those lines.

To give specific examples, let's talk SHIELDS:

The level 80 Augmented Cryptlurker shield in 5.x has:
iLVL 530........Block 867
STR +61........VIT +64
Crit Hit+41.....Ten +59

These stats are identical to the level 83 Dungeon drop (Imperial Magitek Shield)

The 85 shield is only marginally better.

It's not really until 90 that the difference becomes quite large.
The 90 Augmented Diadochos Shield has:
iLVL: 650.......Block 1140
STR +100......Vit +110
Crit Hit +54....Det +76

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The difference in Materia, is +8 / +24 in the 5.x series vs +12 / +36 in the current 6.x. If I had to do a wild guess, I would expect 7.x Materia to be +16/+48...but we'll see!

Don't know if that helps, but it's just some data to chew on.

[Jeeqbit]

Who actually got asked?

He often poses the questions to himself, the twitch/youtube audience or maybe it's to the interviewee.

Is stat increases linear or little bits exponentials as climbings up the ilevels? Mao askings because if linear then differences become relatively less importants over the many ilevels unless critters finely tuned for narrow ilevel range. Whats gonna make HUGE difference, Mao thinkings, is next set of materia.

Level dilutes the stat over a larger number, making it weaker (in other words, you need more of the stat to achieve the same effect). Most of them are linear but with breakpoints and the breakpoint gaps get larger due to level as mentioned.