Seeing a rank 20 marauder shouting in Limsa for repairs of his level 45 gear has caused me to post this. This is something that Ridere pointed out to me, in hindsight it's obvious, and my gil has tripled in 2 weeks. Here's how:

ONLY EQUIP WHAT YOU CAN REPAIR!
EDIT: of course you can break the rule on a couple pieces of gear if you want to

Instead of spending
17,842 gil on your helmet
13,502 gil on your belt
23,660 gil on your harness
18,260 gil on your breeches
9,951 gil on your boots
etc
every other day


Cloth products (body, head, hands, legs, waist)
Is your weaver rank 10 or less? Use hempen gears, keep a stack of hempen fent for repairs
Weaver rank 11-19? Cotton gears, cotton fent
Weaver rank 20-29? Canvas gears, canvas fent
Weaver rank 30 or above? Velveteen gears, velveteen fent

Leather products (body, head, hands, legs, waist, feet, weapons/tools)
Is your tanner rank 10 or less? Use sheepskin gears, keep a stack of sheep leather spetch for repairs
Tanner rank 11-19? Dodoskin gears, dodo leather spetch
Tanner rank 20-29? Leather gears, buffalo leather spetch
Tanner rank 30 or above? Toadskin gears, toad leather spetch

Jewelry (rings, wristlets, neck, ear, weapons/tools)
Is your goldsmith rank 13 or less? Use copper gears, keep a stack of copper nuggets for repairs
Goldsmith rank 14-23? Brass gears, brass nuggets
Goldsmith rank 24 or above? Silver gears, silver nuggets

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* Smithing and armory are used for weapons and body armor, and these should usually be the-best-money-can-buy regardless of your crafting jobs
* Carpenter and Alchemist are also involved in repairs, but to a lesser degree.
* Obviously this guide is not strict, for example some dodo leather items require level 17 leatherworker just to attempt them.
* Repairing your own gear means your gear goes to 100% durability, which means you have to DEAL WITH REPAIRS LESS OFTEN

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Or you can be like me and rock out 1/xxx on every single peice of gear with seemingly no disadvantages ((aside from my weapon at 1/xxx causes my acc to be abit lower)).

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No sig because 3 sigs in a row people make me change my sig and I refuse to have a pony sig!

I'll admit that being able to repair your own gear is a huge plus, and if you have time to level a craft you should level something that can help you repair your own stuff. However I think it's a bit silly to say that you shouldn't use any armor you can't repair yourself. Really now?

You can't expect rank 30-40 melee people to not be using Iron armor simply because they don't have Rank 30 Armorer levelled to repair it themselves. The fact that this kind of armor doesn't break very often means it's very easy to get it repaired by a friend before it gets too low. I tank during parties and I can go an entire week or two without needing any repair on my main body piece.

Similarly, you can't expect a rank 30+ crafter to also have Rank 30+ Weaver just to repair all the canvas/velveteen gear they might have. This stuff breaks a lot faster but in my experience doesn't have much effect on your stats when broken. (More below on that)

Instead, you're advocating that rank 30 people should be wearing rank 10 gear. That's just silly. Obviously this isn't FFXI but in that game you wouldn't invite someone to your party who turns up wearing gear 20-30 levels below them.

We've got an LS full of crafters, just get them to repair your stuff when you see them. It takes only a few seconds and it's basically free SP/gil for us as the majority of these repair items we're always carrying around and cost us barely any gil to make. The majority of the LS crafters can always be found in one of the three cities, and usually visit at least two of them a day. It's not difficult to keep track of where they are or where they're going (ask!) so you can meet them and have them repair your stuff.

Weapons break more often unfortunately. Solution? Carry more than one. I usually carry 2 or 3 copies of my most recent weapon. It's quite rare to break all of my weapons to 0% durability before I run into Limit or someone to repair them.

My view is: Yeah, avoid using the NPC repair service unless you really really really have to. But that doesn't mean you should be gimping yourself wearing paper thin armor. Bare in mind that weapons and armor still work at 0% durability, and the penalty is actually relatively minor in a lot of cases, especially now that SP gain from kills is static. In particular I've found that crafting gear works perfectly fine with an entire set at 0%. I believe that any stat "bonuses" work perfectly fine on broken gear, it's only the base stats such as Attack/Evasion/Defense/Accuracy/etc that take damage penalties.

Hopefully when we get a Company HQ people can just idle in there with their broken gear and have the crafters run by and fix everyone's stuff every so often.

EDIT: Btw, sorry if I sounded like an ass. I'm just perplexed at the idea that you shouldn't use any gear you can't fix yourself when it's unrealistic to expect anyone to have 3-4 crafts levelled as high as their melee/mage job. Especially now that the speed your party can kill mobs determines how much SP you get in a party. Don't want people gimping the party.

if it really affects your class, of course you can pick a couple gears to seek repairs on or get npc repairs on. i dont think anyone would assume you cant do that. i have the iron chain coif and iron haubergeon as you know. and i keep a stack of iron rings on me for you or someone else with high armorcraft to repair.

unlike FF11, most armor doesnt really affect your class much. take boots for example. sure you can go out and get buffalo leather leggings and pay huge sums of money to keep them repaired, or you can get sheepskin leggings and not worry about it again, and barely miss out on any stats. if you run around with damaged leet gear all the time, youre worse off than if you run around with basic gear.

basically what i'm saying is this really applies MOST of your armor. i think any class can pick one or two pieces of armor they think is really important (like for marauder, only body armor matters, and thats only if youre tanking). marauder has no need to care about head, neck, ear, hands, waist, legs, boots, rings, wrists, those dont make much difference and can save you half a million gil a week.

weapons are kinda a different story, as you really need the best weapon you can get. i HIGHLY suggest you be able to repair your own weapon, as its a pain to track down people to repair it and its usually too expensive to carry around multiple weapons. being able to repair your own weapon during exp is huge, for me at least. one 6-hour exp session will drop my weapon below 50% durability at which point i do crappy damage. so i just repair it.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but if you're spending "half a million gil a week" on NPC repairs then you're doing something wrong. There's no reason to get the NPC to repair your stuff that often. Items that are damaged don't take huge penalties and it's not such a big deal to get LS friends to repair them as and when you see them. Especially when it comes to combat armor because that stuff doesn't break very fast at all. It'll probably take a week for an Iron Haubergeon to go from 50% to 0%. You're going to run into me in town at least once or twice a week.

When an item gets low on durability it's not going to miraculously stop working, they take a minor penalty at best. I'm willing to bet a low durability high rank item still has better stats than a pristine item 20 ranks below it.

It also seems a bit silly to claim that just because you "only DD" you don't need to care about the majority of your equipment slots. You're going to be soloing stuff occasionally, whether it be leves or quests or farming or grinding, you're going to want defense and evasion, and rings in particular can give you a much welcome accuracy boost.

Due to the new SP system requiring fast kills you can expect to fully break your weapon to 0% after only 2-3 hours, in my experience so far, by the way. This kind of sucks and I hope they change it. Weapons already broke way too fast and now they break even faster.

All i'm saying is this:

You can have it both ways! You can use optimal rank gear AND save lots of money. All you have to do is not use the NPC Repair service. So occasionally your gear might get completely broken without you noticing and might take a day before you get someone to fix it. Well surely being gimp only some of the time is better than being gimp ALL of the time by wearing crappy gear?

i can't stand seeing the damaged gear icon. i'd sooner pay the npc 100k a day than ever have to see it again.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Im with madi on this. I spend 99% with everything but my weapon and tool at 0% on both gold and thaum. I hardly notice a difference compared to fully repaired armor.

Good posts Ket

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[In Yarr we trust.]

well i can say this, now that i've downgraded about 10 pieces of gear, i have seen no decrease whatsoever in my abilities:
- to do damage
- to take damage
- to craft successfully

conversely, sporting a single damaged piece of body armor is the difference between taking 300 and 500 damage per hit. a single damaged weapon is the difference between hitting for 100 and hitting for 60.

so from what i've seen, there is a steep penalty for wearing damaged body armor if youre taking damage, and from using damaged weapons if youre whacking the enemy. the penalty of using damaged inconsequential gear such as gloves is admittedly minimal, but those equips are relatively meaningless anyway aside from looks. if you say adding a few extra evasion or defense stats or even a strength or int from an upgraded pair of gloves makes any meaningful difference, i disagree.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

If you are one to get targeted by attacks from mobs, then 0% durability on gear really increases the damage you receive. With the way parties are heading, tanks won't be tanking, and aggro will bounce around. Better to be safe than sorry.

If your fishing, or crafting, then gear damage (aside from your mainhand/offhand) is useless. I will agree with that.

But I still think going to a party without having your gear in order makes you a burden to others and slows SP down. Especially with how now parties are 100% about efficiency, and 0% about whacking things until 500sp cap. You're either doing less damage than you could be, resulting in slower kills, or you're taking damage more than you should, causing the healer to cure more, resulting in less damage over time and slower kills.

Sort of like partying without using food, or doing the other small common courtesy things you could do to make partying better in FF11. Sure, it's not necessary, but it's sort of like just giving your party the middle finger by saying you don't care enough about their SP to keep your shit repaired.

That being said, I did party with Ket and Kio with a broken weapon last time so.... <3 you two :D

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This is the point I've been trying to make. I agree that broken gear (or under-ranked gear) doesn't make a "big" difference. However you can't say that it makes no difference at all (except with crafting but that's another issue).

But that still means you're not playing at the best of your efficiency. Sure you might only be killing stuff at 80% of the speed (whether by having poor gear or broken gear) but that means making only 80% of the exp. Over a 4 hour party you only made ~30,000 SP instead of ~40,000 SP. That sort of gap adds up over time, especially with the new speed based SP system.

I'm still willing to bet that high level broken gear performs better than something 20+ ranks below it. So if you have a choice between not repairing your gear as often and just using lower ranked gear to save yourself money, you should be going with the first option -- you'll be gimped less often.



Wasn't it also a rank 1 weapon? You're part of the problem! :P

There's a lot of dynamics involved in this, and yes you are right, if you never spend gil on npc repairs you will retain the gil you make elsewhere. Is wearing much lower gear all the time the best strategy over all? I'm not entirely convinced.

You have to consider a lot of things. For instance, having to stall the party while you change jobs and repair gear frequently costs time that sp can be earned. The lower stats from weapons and armor reduce damage which costs sp that can be earned over time. The clogging up of your inventory with various tools and mats for all your gear is space that drops form what you're fighting could be which you could resell for gil, so lost gil.

The reason why youre probably not feeling a big difference is that so little gear, for the time being, has worth while stats.
Who really cares if your level 20 shoes give 15 hp and your level 30 ones give 18. Or your level 20 pants have +5 craftmenship and the level 30 ones give you +6. That's probably the real reason why you dont see an effect of downgrading. The same could be said though for the stat reduction on higher level better gear with damage.

Gimp is always still gimp.

i'd guess its the other way around. easy to test, just gotta red-damage an iron hauby and compare dmg-taken to a fully repaired bronze hauby

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Now now, Ket! It was a decorated silver scepter R31. I can repair all weapons below that rank. Hehe. I should maybe buy a regular silver scepter again now.

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tests for mages: 2 staves with same ele affinity similar lvl (( tho not same staff)) 1 at 1/xxx the other 100% (( a new stave I never used before ))

on same mob (( I let the same mob regen its HP about 10 times to get as many numbers as I could )):

broken staff: 50-80 melee
New staff: 122-177 melee
broken staff Stone II: 235-302 with many 0s
New staff Stone II: 298-358 with few 0s

So....ya for DD, kinda need to repair the wpn :x sucks for me haha

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No sig because 3 sigs in a row people make me change my sig and I refuse to have a pony sig!

I'm curious how the current rank 50 DoW people (who didn't level crafting) dealt with repairs. Did they just ignore their broken weapon? Otherwise it seems they would be broke from constantly paying the npc or seeking repairs way too often to possibly get to 50.

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overwhelmingly, the most common method people employ is to allow their weapon and gears to go to 0 and just ignore it, meanwhile their performance in battle suffers.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

My solution is to carry multiple weapons.

Unlike armor, when weapons break you do suffer a huge penalty. Sometimes losing as much as half of your damage output, and that's before you factor in the loss of accuracy.

Thanks to the new patch repair rules it's a lot easier to get crafters to fix high ranked gear (you only need to be within 10 ranks of the recipe to create it, not the rank of the final item). So finding someone in LS to fix your weapon every couple days isn't a big deal. I find that 1 weapon (of optimal rank) will last through about 2 hours of grinding, so I carry 3 and get about 6 hours exp out of them.

You don't need 3 copies of your 1,000,000 gil +1 weapon. Just carry a couple of cheaper ones. If your weapon is relatively cheap though I definately recommend you get 2-3 of them. Get LS peeps to craft them for you if need be.

Main reason I'm leveling the crap out of my leatherworking. I think I'm just about at the point where I can fix all my gear which will be awesome! Then I simply have to carry the mats to do so.

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-Mesan

I carry around dodo leather spetch, cotton fent, iron rings, and copper/bronze/brass/iron nugs

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Shitty thing I noticed about Pugs the other day is that if I want to get them cool looking wolverine claws I have to level my black smithing unless I want to have a slave with level 40 BS. Lame... Guess I'll just aim for the Pieste Ceisti.

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-Mesan

After reading suggestions in this thread, perhaps you can buy the wolverine claws and keep the peiste ceisti for when they break. Lim Limit is a 39 (maybe 40 now) blacksmith in the LS and he is friendly and helpful. He can repair your wolverine claws when needed.

I don't feel like leveling carpenter to 40 just to support lancer.

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Yeah or alchemist because then I could have the disabling or smothering claws that do debuffs. It's just a pain in the arse to have to track down people at times if you're lazy like me. Chances are that I'll simply try to max out my LW and GS first then work on Alchemist full time. I think at that point it would be easy as hell because in theory I'd be rich and could buy whatever mats I need to grind out on. This is all in theory of course :p

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-Mesan

Here's the thing with all of this. For EXP purposes, I don't think you need to worry about all of this. Get a weapon or two that will serve your duration during an SP party. Hopefully you can repair it, but if not, then just do like Ket suggested and carry multiple.

When we start doing end-game things, NMs and such, then we can carry all the fancy special gear, and we'll probably have the right people grouped up to repair things, anyway.

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Good point. I didn't think about that which is how it will be once we're all rank 50.

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-Mesan