With Patch 7.3 on the horizon, players are once again gearing up for the post-patch crafting and gathering frenzy. Whether you’re a seasoned market board tycoon or just looking to kit out your crafters in the best gear, here’s a breakdown of what you should be preparing and what you can safely ignore for now.
For crafting and gathering players, 7.3 will release our final main gearset for the expansion, which is able to take us all the way to the “cap” of the next expansion. With Square Enix stating that they may be looking at alternative sources of progression, it is hard to say exactly what the “cap” will be. Furthermore, the 7.3 crafting and gathering sets will be used to make crafting gear in 7.4 for raiders.
7.4 will also release a scrip set for players looking at more budget alternatives, but if there is a gearset to go hard on, this is the set to meld heavily. Additionally, a new Cosmic Exploration planet is also dropping in 7.3 providing a new range of difficult expert crafts and Relic Tools to continue upgrading.
What’s Actually New in 7.3?
Final Fantasy XIV is incredibly formulaic in terms of content releases, allowing us to reasonably speculate on what players should be farming. That being said, you should always take things with a grain of salt because things can always change.
- New gatherable materials should be added to existing nodes, not new nodes. These are expected to have higher minimum perception requirements than the current 4740 Perception breakpoint.
- A new item for Aetherial Reduction is coming, old sands in the past have not been used in the new endgame set.
- There’s likely a new Purple Scrip Material coming that is crafter-exclusive, which would also drop from the beast tribe added in the same patch. Historically, this used to be only available via beast tribes however, they started adding it to scrips too.
Recommended “Safe Bets” to Prepare
Even with uncertainty, there are still smart ways to get ahead. There are a few great ways to prepare ahead of time.
Gil, Gil and Even More Gil
This one’s a no-brainer, but it’s still worth emphasising.
Patch day always brings a surge in expenses, whether it’s spamming teleports across Eorzea to hit new nodes, or racing to meld your gear as fast as possible. You’ll also find the market board can end up turning into a free-for-all, with some items becoming very expensive suddenly.
Furthermore, once there is a stable supply of materials it tends to be more efficient to simply buy what you need to craft with. Whether you’re buying mats, flipping items, or paying to avoid farming something yourself, gil is the most flexible resource you can stockpile-and you’re guaranteed to spend a good chunk of it. You have to spend money to make money after all!
Gil Farming AdviceCrafting and Gathering Materia
If you’re planning to craft or gather at a high level for either 7.4 raid gear, Cosmic Exploration or simply want the best gear, you’re going to need a pile of materia. The new DoH/DoL gear is expected to be melded similarly but not exactly identically to the previous sets. Using our current Endgame Crafting & Endgame Gathering meldsets, we can open them in Teamcraft to view an estimation of the amount of materia you should stockpile:
These are set at a .66 confidence rate. However, if you feel extra unlucky, you can always prepare more, especially because it will not be the exact same distributions of materia when our meld guides are updated. Additionally, the first few days of the patch are usually when prices spike, so being stocked up beforehand gives you the potential to offload materia at a high price.
Materia can be farmed through a range of methods both active and passive such as:
Materials Used in Current Combat Crafts
The current Legendary Node Materials will see some reuse as well as the current Tomestone materials. It is great to have a small stockpile of those ready and waiting. These are incredibly easy to gather right now either passively through spiritbonding, focusing on gathering large quantities with optimised rotations or simply buying them while they are dirt cheap.
Hunt Trains can be a great source of Tomestones, but they are also simply thrown at you for farming CE’s in Occult Crescent.
Prep a Whole Lot of Scrips
Condensed Solutions from Orange Scrips should be used to make the DoH DoL gear in 7.3 while there should also be a new Purple Scrip material added. Based on 6.3, you would want 117 of each Scrip material for a full set of both DoH and DoL + Tools. So start stocking now!
How Much Should You Prepare for 7.3?
Honestly, a lot less than you are probably already thinking. Many of the players i see stockpiling for an upcoming patch prepare way too many items, like full stacks of endgame node materials. But then they only make a handful of sets. 7.3 is not a raid patch, every crafter selling on the market is selling to other crafters who can generally also make the gear themselves.
Generally speaking, if you have materia for your own gear ready, scrips stockpiled and a good amount of gil, you’re pretty prepared.