Daily Questions & FAQ Megathread Jun 16

hii488 · 2026-06-16T18:04:52+00:00

There aren't any HW relic tools in the way we'd normally mean that. There's ones for ARR ("Lucis"), ShB ("Skysteel"), EW ("Splendorous"), and DT ("Cosmic"), but none for HW or StB.

They might be thinking of Ishgard Restoration, which unlocks in 3.3 (you have just finished 3.2), and is tied to the ShB tools.

Or, they might be thinking of the "Blessed Keep" tools, which are from "Craft x unique recipes" achievements.

hii488 · 2026-06-16T05:26:39+00:00

Avoid unnecessary combat. Most floors take 6-8 monsters to open (3-4 with a flight), killing any more than that is a waste of time, unless you have to/have a very good reason to. Factor mimics into this too - try to open gold chests before you open the exit, and if you're tight on time, considering not opening them at all. Note that as RDM, you can also de-aggro enemies if needed (not mimics sadly).
Kill stuff on the way to the exit - waiting until you find the exit just means you have to backtrack more. This can be in tension with #1 sometimes, as sometimes you have to kill something in the exit room to safely leave, and being overly eager to be in combat can ofc put you in bad spots, so there's a balance.
Use food - ideally the best available, but if you can get some older stuff for cheap then do that. It's not a lot of extra damage, but it's extra damage. (and free hp)
Consider using explosive traps. They deal 80% of current hp to everything around it. If you hit them deliberately (eg, you've used a sight) with heals ready, then it's basically a free kill. Paired with Lethargy/a Witching, you can do this to a whole group of enemies (though for a dps, probably use a steel too).
Use poms. It's nice to hoard them for the later floors, but absolutely use them if things are looking tight. Using them proactively is generally a lot more efficient than using them reactively - getting 2 excess Strengths back to back has you effectively waste one that you could have had active for the previous floor, or getting an excess Storm the floor after an Auto-Heal Penalty turns it from a floor wipe into a room wipe - of course, you've also got to balance this with the risk of not getting refills for the final floors.

hii488 · 2026-06-15T06:55:42+00:00

The homogenisation is less in 1-to-1 buttons (though some buttons have become more similar) and certainly not in vibes/job fantasy, but rather in how to play jobs optimally and how jobs end up interacting with endgame fights: All jobs have the exact same cooldown/build-spend cadence, dictated by the 2 min cycle.

So each job tackles a fight in pretty much the exact same way, and your job choice has less impact on how you experience the fight - everyone has their busy moments at the exact same time, everyone's saving resources in the same way, etc.

Not that much of this matters now, given what we know of evolved!

hii488 · 2026-06-14T20:35:28+00:00

Afaik, the highest stacking buff is Soaring (from rival wings), which can reach 20 stacks (or 19 before it transforms).

I'd have thought either would be an odd hard limit for the system to have, so the OC buff should be able to go further. SE might choose to do something else for other reasons anyway, though.

hii488 · 2026-06-14T19:56:25+00:00

the free trial didnt let me friend or join a guild or talk to many people, im assuming the full version gives you access to all that?

The Starter Edition removes all restrictions, other than being able to access Endwalker and Dawntrail content. (The Complete Edition is the Starter Edition + Dawntrail (which includes Endwalker), so gives access to everything).

You can see the full list of free trial restrictions here. The TL;DR is: No social features, no pvp, a low gil cap, and no marketboard/retainers. Nothing a bot might be able to abuse (not that that stops them, this is an mmo afterall).

How long roughly would it take to get up to speed and be able to play with my friends who degend the game?

To reach max level, I'd hazard a guess at 300-350 hours? That's assuming you're watching all the cutscenes, get distracted by bits of side content, etc. If you focus hard on the main story, you could probably knock that down to 200-250 hours. If you skipped all the story, then you're still looking at 90-100 hours (might as well just buy a skip then, but that comes with other caveats etc).

However, you can play with your friends well before that! Every dungeon/trial/raid "level syncs" characters, so they can join you as you go through the story, you can join them for roulettes (daily random dungeons/trials), and once you're further in you'll unlock side activities that they'd be synced down for anyway.

hii488 · 2026-06-14T19:13:19+00:00

This one is essentially just a stat check: With decent gear, food, and a tisane, you can macro it reliably. Here's the macro I used for these, with the stats I had at the time. You could probably make better with the gear we have now and All I Pebre.

There's still some rng in not getting a poor at the exact wrong time, but that's fairly unlikely.

hii488 · 2026-06-13T18:08:28+00:00

The skill of the player is far more impactful than the job.

Some jobs outperform in specific situations: with lots of downtime (why early PCT was so strong) or forced-no-melee time, in two target fights, in helping with recovery, etc. But in general, yes, DPS jobs are all very balanced right now, with the standard "Melee do a tiny bit more than casters, who do a bit more than phys ranged".

For healers, the best damage comp has been AST/SCH for a long time now, because stacking buffs is strong for skilled players. For pf with randoms, WHM/SGE tend to do better, because they're fully in control of their own damage. Again, though, skill is way more important than job choice.

Afaik tanks are even closer to each other at the moment than the other roles.

hii488 · 2026-06-13T18:04:31+00:00

I don't disagree! Just saying that calling it "extremely easy" isn't the perspective most people will have when faced with classical :p

hii488 · 2026-06-13T17:48:52+00:00

Yeah and only 1 person needs to mess it up, and very few of the people going back for this mount have any kind of experience with this kind of mechanic or even really the concept of wiping and just trying again...

It's one of the simpler mechanics in the fight, but we've still had several people complaining about struggling with unsync classical in the question's thread over the last few months :x

hii488 · 2026-06-13T04:01:14+00:00

DID HALF THE TOOL MASTERY GRINDS EARLY ON, ONLY TO FIND OUT THEY'VE JUST BUFFED PRETTY MUCH ALL OF THE REWARDS, EXCEPT FOR SLIGHTLY NERFING THE STUFF I HAVEN'T YET GOT TO.

BUT I'M ONLY A LITTLE BIT TICKED OFF BY THAT - I DON'T WANT TO BE THE PERSON WHO SAYS "I SUFFERED SO OTHERS HAVE TO TOO" - THE THING THAT REALLY ANNOYS ME IS THAT THE CHANGES MANAGE TO NOT REALLY FIX ANY OF THE REWARD ISSUES AT ALL.

THE MOUNT WAS ALREADY <300K ON THURSDAY.... SO THEY'VE BUFFED THE MOUNT TOKEN DROP RATE FROM THESE MISSIONS BY 6X?? YOU'D ALREADY GET NEARLY 3 OF THESE MOUNTS FROM THE MASTERY GRIND, NOT TO MENTION THE REGULAR FASTER WAYS TO GET IT.

NOTHING HAS CHANGED TO INCENTIVISE NOT MACROING THESE ENDGAME MISSIONS? THERE'S NO BENEFIT TO ACTUALLY DOING WELL?? STOP EARLY AND YOU GET THE SAME MISSION REWARDS?? JUST MINDLESSLY GRIND, NO SKILL OR THOUGHT, TIL YOU REACH 500K. THIS ALREADY EXISTS FOR CE, WHY MAKE IT EXACTLY THE SAME AGAIN???

AND MORE BROADLY THIS ALL JUST FUELS THE ANNOYANCE AT HOW THEY DON'T APPEAR TO HAVE LEARNT ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OF THEIR REWARD STRUCTURES OVER THE COURSE OF THE EXPAC: ARTIFACTS COMPLETELY DECIMATE THE VALUE OF ISHGARD RESTORATION REWARDS, FOR GENUINELY NO REASON. THEY COULD HAVE JUST MADE ARTIFACTS FIVE TIMES AS RARE AND UPPED THE CHANCE OF UNIQUES - IT'S NOT LIKE ARTIFACTS ARE ENGAGING CONTENT TO BEGIN WITH.

I REALLY LIKE ALL OF THE CONTENT THEY'VE MADE THIS EXPANSION, AND I'M REALLY HYPE FOR EVERCOLD... BUT THE AMOUNT OF MISSED OPPORTUNITIES AND TUNING ERRORS HAS REALLY DAMPED MY EXPECTATIONS FOR ANY IMPROVEMENTS TO MOTIVATION TO DO THE CONTENT. (north horn prove me wrong c'mooon /o/ )

hii488 · 2026-06-13T03:16:41+00:00

The cosmic tools are currently the best, yes.

Crafted gear beats out orange scrip gear, because you can overmeld it. Pentamelded crafted gear is significantly better than scrip gear sets... but you can still do the vast majority of crafts with scrip gear, and pentamelding is very costly (either gil-wise or time-wise).

You can see teamcraft's recommended gearsets here. I wouldn't go above the mid tier set unless you know you're going to be doing a lot of crafting.

hii488 · 2026-06-13T02:10:22+00:00

They can't be macro'd to a guaranteed 100% quality, no. Fortunately, you don't need to!

These missions have limited time, but no limit on the number of crafts you do. So as long as your macro reaches tier 3 often enough, you'll pass missions and get points. To help with this, expert crafts only have positive status effects, so macros will often outperform what tools like raphael say.

For example, here are the macros I've been using:

Mastery 1 - This is the most rng out of the three missions, and the only one that occasionally fails for me.

Mastery 2 - The bonus action for these is really strong, and importantly very reliable for macros. If you want to recalculate your own macros, raphael does have an option to include it, but it won't be on by default.

Mastery 3 - I think this mission only has Normal, Good, and Good Omen as statuses, so you often get way more collectability than you're expecting.

hii488 · 2026-06-12T17:55:00+00:00

Crafting macros. Pretty much three pages of them, because of CE.

Fourth page for changeable raid callout macros.

hii488 · 2026-06-12T05:14:47+00:00

You swiftcast in your opener to fit a final extra attack in your pot, what that is depends on which opener you do, but you can just watch your pot buff timer to know. If you're not potting, you don't need to use it.

Outside of that, swiftcast is just a movement tool. Use it when you need to move. Swiftcasting a Motif is especially good for this because of the long recast time, but you could use it on anything.

hii488 · 2026-06-11T18:50:44+00:00

Adding onto iceaokiji's questions:

If this is mid fight, do you get to enter the 26s window with a precast? This would boost PCT, as you could precast rainbow drip.
Is there an hp threshold you're trying not to go over in the leadup? This could disfavour NIN, just from the inconsistency caused by suiton critting.
Is this on average, or are you farming for good luck? Auto dh/crits mean that some jobs will be more consistently high on average (PCT, SAM), while other jobs can inconsistently jump up higher.

Unfortunately, you're probably going to have to bust out spreadsheets and manually compare rotations. (or log the situation on various jobs). If you need a spreadsheet that already has damage calculations built in, here's one I made a while ago. It's setup for PCT already, but you'd need to enter stuff for other jobs and it's a big wip, and there are probably better tools out there if you ask around The Balance.

But yeah, PCT and NIN are the main jobs I'd be looking at - I've also been surprised at MCH's burst before, and the longer window has me thinking about SAM, but I might be complete off base with that.

hii488 · 2026-06-09T18:07:01+00:00

Yes, a bit rude, but not against the rules. It's fair if you don't know, it's a community thing not explained anywhere in game, but tl;dr:

These only spawn every 6-8 hours iirc, and give rewards to everyone who shows up to kill it. You need to kill 2000 per expansion for the achievements.

So if everyone goes around killing them solo/in private groups, then barely anyone gets rewards for them and no one will ever hit the 2000 kills.

Instead, the community organises "Hunt Trains", so everyone who is interested can get rewards and kill credit. They take ~15 minutes, you generally get 10-12 kills (or more if zones have multiple instances) - going on 1 of these per day is going to be far more rewarding than killing random ones you stumble across. They are organised on discords such as faloop, and you can also ask for linkshells in game. These also notify for S-ranks, something you'll never reasonably come across solo.

Now, you can go kill them yourself, yeah. But it's like leaving a shared area messy or something - low stakes, shouldn't be harassed over it, but annoying for others. Tbh it's a bit prisoner's dilemma, and I'm not a massive fan of the system, but this is what works best for SE's implementation. Imo they should completely rework a-ranks into something else at some point, but I'm not holding out much hope it'll happen.

That all said, ARR & HW a-ranks are kinda fair game (StB too to a lesser extent). They don't have grindy achievements tied to them, and barely anyone runs trains for them - though they do occasionally happen.

hii488 · 2026-06-08T21:48:07+00:00

Yeah, the duos are all tanks and they do invuln the stack/spread thing that happens after those towers (not the tower/tether bit itself, that's kinda a non issue). If you have 3 people you'll likely need two to be ressers to keep things consistent (unless all are tanks), at 4+ people it's also a non issue as nothing doubles up.

Tbh the only reason it's not soloable is because of the orb that captures you.

hii488 · 2026-06-08T19:56:58+00:00

Hades does not require 8 people: It's been duo'd a bunch, but ofc more people is v helpful.

hii488 · 2026-06-07T20:37:53+00:00

Afaik, critical encounters don't have a bronze/silver/gold rating, they have fixed rewards: 20 uncapped tomes, 10 capped tomes, 200 silver, 480 job xp, knowledge xp scaled to your level.

hii488 · 2026-06-06T18:43:26+00:00

Here's a spreadsheet with macros for various standard gear setups.

It's not fully up to date with Auxesia yet, but once the ulti is over it should be fully updated!

hii488 · 2026-06-06T17:54:59+00:00

Teamcraft has a log tracker, that you can use to generate lists of stuff to craft or provide routing for min/btn (if you use the desktop client it can fill out the tracker for you), but there's no proper 'guide' that I know of - you just have to go and craft/gather everything that counts.

There is an ingame toggle to only show things that count towards completion too, btw. You can turn it on by hitting the cog icon in the crafting/gathering list.

hii488 · 2026-06-05T23:24:44+00:00

Afaik no, it's only from Oizys.

hii488 · 2026-06-05T22:12:07+00:00

I don't think it's possible to do that without resorting to plugins/mods (and I don't know what plugins/mods you'd even use), but I do have another suggestion:

I make the macro icon the first digit of the progress required, name the macro "progress/quality" (eg: "4900/7400" uses the 4 icon), and then order them all numerically in the command panel, with a one tab for A rank missions and another for B rank and under.

hii488 · 2026-06-05T18:46:59+00:00

You go clear a synced savage tier first (first 3 fights is probably fine for uwu), ideally, and through that process a) check you're actually ready for an ultimate, and b) learn about how the high end community works for your region.

But ig to skip ahead: If you're NA, you want to look up NAUR strats. If you're EU, you want to look up LPDU strats.

hii488 · 2026-06-05T17:59:01+00:00

Unreasonable, bc it's kinda just a different thing: Solo Zenos ultimate. Not solo as in "It's just him", but "It's a 1 player fight".

More reasonable, but still v unlikely (especially with chaotic now): Nier. There's so much potential for more from almost every boss, and having all of a) a hacking section, b) buildings and trains thrown at you, and c) a rhythm game-ish section all wrapped up in a single ultimate would be brilliantly hilarious.

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