Over the weekend I was able to max out my first crafter class in FF14, Goldsmith. I chose this because I had to start somewhere, and I figured being able to make (or at least repair) my own jewelry would be useful down the line. Plus for one class (aside from like Weaver maybe) it allows me to meld materia to the most sockets. I’d thought I’d mention a couple things I learned while leveling it:

Trying to make money was, at least for me, an exercise in futility, market is flooded with normal mats, and most HQ stuff I needed myself to level up! Now that I’m maxed I think I might understand things better and go back and try to sell stuff that I was most interested in in trying to level my goldsmith up (for instance: lots of HQ silver ingots!).

While I spent the first 30 levels or so patiently grinding on stuff like ingots, or filling out my crafting log (because I kept seeing “that’s a great way to level”) but to be honest after you get to the 25~30 stuff being able to craft everything starts to dip into being either a time sink (taking my Monk out to farm stuff), or a gil sink (having to buy mats from gathers/other crafters). Luckily though around level 30 you get some really awesome leves you can use. For myself, I spent basically 30-50 between two different leves, mostly because I had an almost maxed out leve allowance (I burned through about 60 leves). I wasted about a dozen or so on other leves, I thought might be worth it (higher levels, or because I thought they might be easier, etc…) but really with mats being as easy to come buy as they were for the two I singled out they seemed to be the best.

Found in Ul’Dah, turn in at Costa Del Sol.

Both leves I did are available in Ul’dah, one sends you to Costa del Sol (tip: for this one, set both Ul’dah and Costa Del Sol to favorite locations for teleporting purposes). The first leve is “He Has His Quartz”, which requires you to turn in a Silver Circlet (Goshenite) — a High Quality turn in returns back 71000 experience, and about 1000-1200 gil (and usually 6 fire shards). I used this one most often, because after I got to about 31-32, it wasn’t too difficult to HQ the circlets, as long as I started from HQ mats (which wasn’t too bad to acquire). The other leve I used about 7~ times was also in Ul’dah and was called “A Little Bird Told Me” that wants 3 malachite bracelets, this one is one of the leves that allows to you turn in 3 times, if you turn in 9 HQ malachite bracelets you get about 150k experience. It’s decent, but man it gets really boring. While I did do a couple other leves at 48 or 49 (electrum circle one for instance), it didn’t seem as rewarding because the mats were more expensive, and I couldn’t always guarantee I could HQ the turn ins.

Found in Ul’dah

I’m not sure if this will help anyone, but thought I’d post about my experience. For now I’m planning to spend some time leveling up a Thaumaturge for Swiftcast, and then decide on a Scholar or Whitemage (I’m leaning towards Scholar). That or I might detour into finishing up my miner, but honestly mining is extremely boring. Mining is very useful to have as a GSM, my miner is only 21, but at that level I was able to be self-sufficient up around 32~ GSM, and when I ran out of shards later on I spent an hour or so farming up some myself so save some Gil.

In total, level GSM to 50 didn’t cost me too much Gil, I started with about 180k, and ended with 140k; but now that I’m maxed I can go back and maybe make money off leveling GSMs 😉