I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually come right out and said this, but despite my love of bard and machinist and general pew-pew behaviour in Final Fantasy XIV, I consider myself a crafter main.
A naïve one, sure, but still.
So it wasn’t really a surprise that while my poor machinist is only level 75 a month into the new expansion, one of my crafters is already fully leveled and geared and the rest are well on their way.
Now, this is also the first expansion that I’ve ever played as it happens (I played both Heavensward and Stormblood well after their release, so all the content for them was already out), so there’s been a tiny bit of a learning curve for me.
Here’s what I’ve learned about leveling crafters in the first month of my first-ever expansion!
It is surprisingly easy to level in Shadowbringers.
As soon as I found out that I’d need to level all my crafters to 80 in the new expansion, I started to brace myself for a long, arduous grind.
My technique for leveling crafters and gatherers has always been highly dependent on material-based levequests (you know, the easiest ones because you don’t need a million ingredients from your other crafters) and weekly turn-ins. And I distinctly remember armorer alone taking nearly my entire allowance for leves (which is 100, fun fact) to get from 60 to 70.
I was pleasantly surprised in Shadowbringers, though.
It almost feels like they buffed the percentage of experience points you get from these things; getting my weaver all the way to 80 only took about 30 allowances and one weekly turn-in.
You also get a massive chunk of experience from the new Crystarium deliveries, but it took me a while to benefit from that and let me tell you why.
Leveling crafters is tied to MSQ.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but because I took up crafting so long after completing Stormblood, it never even occurred to me that I’d need to reach certain points in the story to unlock the things I needed to level them.
The absolute most painful of them all was the aforementioned Crystarium deliveries, which I actually didn’t unlock until last week.
It took me that long to figure out how to get them, because we were consistently too busy for story and none of my normal resources had new information for the first few weeks of official release. It’s actually still not posted, as far as I know.
PSA: If you need them, the quest to unlock them shows up in the Crystalline Mean after you complete a level 72 quest called The Crystarium’s Resolve.
Housing item crafters make a stupid amount of gil the first week.
To be fair, housing item crafters make a stupid amount of gil normally anyway. But at the very start of Shadowbringers, it was excessive.
There was a massive spike in prices for all the new housing items (and glams, for that matter) in the first week, especially in early access—and then, as people started figuring out how to make them, the prices just dropped through the floor.
I can only imagine what those brave few who started the Simple Curtain trend managed to make that first week before we all figured out it was a level 38 item.
You need to be max level to meld gear.
Let me be a little more specific here and say that you need to be at least an item’s level to be able to meld gear to it. So my poor level 72 leatherworker can’t attach anything to a level 80 pair of gloves.
This is another thing that probably shouldn’t surprise me, but because I only became obsessed with pentamelding (and just melding in general, really) about two months ago, it never occurred to me that there would be limits.
So I guess my dreams of being a fully-melded master crafter will have to wait a little longer.
So that’s what I’ve learned so far! Do you play any of the crafting classes? What have you learned from Shadowbringers?
2 thoughts on “Tales of a crafter main: What I’ve learned leveling up in Shadowbringers”
I’m just starting FF XIV and just hearing there is a Crafter class makes me excited. Coming from a WoW background, I’m all about crafting and potions making.
Awh yay, that’s awesome! Honestly it was one of the selling points for me too, we were considering WoW but I liked that I could have all of the crafters and stuff on a single character 🙂 how are you liking it so far?