Eorzean Evening Post: How to Spend Your Gil with Style and Class

Money sinks. They exist in every MMORPG since the very beginning. They serve a very important role in the game economy, which is to keep too much money from circulating within the auction house and exchange systems of the game. If said money can be spent in ways that keep it from accumulating too much in the hands of the players, then it keeps prices lower and generally makes life just a bit easier for everyone involved. However, FFXIV has a particularly odd economy. Most of its money is centralized in the expansive crafting system of the game. The economy runs almost entirely on crafted items and the materials used to craft them. Therefore, what’s the best use of your money? Today, we’re gonna take a look at my favorite ways to spend a bit of change.

 

Leveling Crafting/Gathering

This is by and large the best way to spend your money, solely because of the crafting system’s importance in the economy. Final Fantasy XIV has as many crafting classes as combat ones, and adding gathering classes to the mix vastly outstrips it. Unfortunately, leveling crafting has been a pricy and time-consuming venture. To give an example of how difficult it’s been, I’ve put nearly 900 hours into Final Fantasy XIV. This is my current class layout.

Might actually be one of those elusive tank types, guys.

Note that for crafting pretty much anything, the first objective is to get every Disciple of the Hand class to at least 15, in order to get cross-class skills from all of them. This is relatively cheap, but acquiring crafting items to level the others is very, very expensive – and honestly, more expensive than I can afford at the time. I’m currently working on leveling up Leatherworker, but that will take a little bit more funding than I have easily available. Therefore, leveling a gathering class alongside this project can ease your financial concerns somewhat. The reason this is such a good way to spend your cash is because the return on investment is absolutely fantastic. The friends of mine who loan me money are the ones with one combat class and every crafting class maxed out. They’re the ones who start every new combat class with a set of i90 gear waiting on them and still have cash to spare. If you’re looking for a fantastic return on your money used, this is the way to go.

 

Custom Armor and Appearance

This is something that I have a personal fondness for. I’ve worked hard to keep my character’s appearance pretty solid, and I will happily spend for what amounts to cosmetics. I’m slowly but surely making my way through raid content, but already my appearance is pretty much set. This comes at a cost though, especially on a roleplaying server. The newest hotness for appearance is the metallic dyes, which are entirely randomly generated by your retainers if they’re high enough level to do so. These are the pure white and pure black dyes, as well as metallic silver and metallic gold, and as of this article a single dye is priced at 200K on average.

That’s a lot of cash for colors.

If you’re instead looking for a custom version of your class armor, the game has that as well, but it’ll come at a serious price. I recently completed my augmented class armor, which allows it to be dyed, and shifted it over to the snow white colors.

And you bet your ass I’ll show it off.

This armor combination ended up costing me over a million of my hard-earned gil. For someone who generally wanders around with just over a hundred thousand, that’s a lot of cash. I ended up liquidating most of my non-high-quality items and a fair amount of gear just to make the cost match.

I don’t regret it at all, to be honest. It was money well spent. I have never seen so much as a million gil on my account at once, and part of me doubts I ever will. However, if you find yourself with that kind of cash and nothing to spend it on, only one item remains that will completely empty your coffers – and that of everyone you know.

 

Housing

You wanted to lose money? This is how you do it.

Housing is the most expensive thing one can do on FFXIV. Small houses, basically one room shacks with a basement, will run people in the tens of millions. Large houses, mansions? Hundreds of millions.

And then you can take your giant house and paint it canary yellow, because the hell with what anyone thinks, you just bought a mansion.

Housing was originally intended as a free company venture, where an entire group throws together on getting one piece of property. In 2.3 more housing was added, and summarily was taken almost instantly. The biggest problem one would have with getting into the housing game right now is that there’s no houses left over to buy. All the plots in the Balmung server are taken. That being said, Square Enix has expressed interest in allowing more wards to open up, all with a new set of plots, but have not done so yet.

Now, this doesn’t mean people are completely out of the game for housing. For a measly three hundred thousand gil, one can buy a private chamber in your free company’s house. This private room can be decorated how you’d like, placed into whatever environment you want it to be in and is for all intents and purposes your home. Now, the environment is entirely cosmetic – you’re not actually erecting a house in Coerthas. However, for a great number of people, that cosmetic change is a nice option they didn’t otherwise have. The private chamber is also slightly larger than the small house, so it can be used to save a bit of money on getting your own place. Regardless, you’re not saving too much. The furniture also costs cash, and if you decide to leave your free company and wander on, you lose everything you put work into. It is a good replacement until more housing comes along, though.

It’s good to have a few money sinks like FFXIV has, it helps to keep things stable. The economy of FFXI was pretty badly wrecked by real money trading, and so far the few money sinks that Square Enix has put into place have managed to keep the amount of gil floating around in the game high in value – and as such, has kept a lot of the traders out of the game. As long as the economy can remain stable and those who want to do something can do it, everyone should stay happy with the financial side of the game.

So, how do you spend your money? It’s hard enough to earn, do you have anything in particular you like to drop your cash on? Leave us a comment with ideas for liquidating gil in FFXIV, and let’s get a discussion going! Until next time!