Future Preparation – Things You Can Do Now to Get Ready for Final Fantasy XIV Patches 6.25 and 6.3

It’s time for another predictive patch prep guide!

With an announced Live Letter set for today, it seems quite likely that within a week or two, we’ll be seeing patch 6.25, which will drop the remaining scheduled content for the Buried Memory patch cycle – the Variant/Criterion dungeon system, Manderville Weapons, and the Omicron tribal quests. So by either the 11th or 18th of October (my guess), that will be on the plate and ready for us. Meanwhile, I expect that we’ll be seeing 6.3 in either late December or early January, depending on how the scheduled holiday break for the development team works out.

So that leaves us with a specific moment in time where we can begin planning and understanding the long-tail of this content and what we can do to have a leg up, based on prior patches and expansions! To break this down, I want to first focus on the Manderville Weapons for the small patch, and then we’ll go big on 6.3.

A Manderville Man Can

Patch 6.25 will see the introduction of Endwalker’s version of the Relic Weapon questline, the Manderville weapons. For those new to FFXIV, the basic gist is this – the Relic Weapon for each expansion is a long-term chase goal that will give you a weapon that is constantly upgraded and has some real upsides to it. They have the flashiest appearances outside of Ultimate weapons or crafted EX Trial weapons, with an abundance of glow effects and cool stuff, and they remain stat-competitive with even Savage raid weapons as the expansion progresses, yet can be gained almost entirely outside of raiding (depending on the expansion, you may need to farm some older raids, but that’s typically it). On each 6.x5 patch for the remainder of Endwalker, we’ll be given a new step to upgrade the weapon, with the 6.45 patch version likely having two steps for upgrade (if they follow the Shadowbringers model).

The weapon will likely start at item level 615 in patch 6.25, offering an equivalent value to the weapon drops from Endwalker EX Trial #4, but will likely come with some bonuses that will make them slightly better. In Shadowbringers, this bonus was a baseline 5 Materia slots, meaning that you could meld a full set of max rank Materia for a big substat boost.

But what can you do to prepare? Well, there are a few things we can anticipate based on the overall design paradigm for Relic Weapons in the past and by leaning on Shadowbringers specifically, coupled with the stuff we have already been told via Live Letters and developer interviews.

Firstly, it is wise to have a stockpile of Allagan Tomestones of Poetics (yep, just Poetics) going into the mini-patch. In Shadowbringers, the cost per job for the starting weapon was 500 Poetics, used to buy some pointless trinkets that get turned into the weapon. Relic Weapon quests lean heavily on the game’s level sync systems and are used to fill old content with players, so nearly every step is likely to involve some manner of either Poetic farming or running old FATEs, dungeons, and raids, with the higher-tier steps pushing further forward in the game’s timeline. Secondly, you need to have completed the full Hildibrand questlines through Endwalker. Each expansion except for Shadowbringers has a full arc of these quests, and while opinions about slapstick and bizarre humor will certainly vary, I find the Hildibrand quests to be some of the most fun content in the game. There are a lot of quests including a couple of trials on that path, and this page at Console Games Wiki will get you on the path!

What to expect on patch day? Well, we should see a blue plus quest in one of the Endwalker hubs directing us towards the Manderville weapons – likely, based on the current quests, Radz-at-Han. This is where it is hard to predict – in Shadowbringers, getting the first weapon on a character involved a couple of hours of questing with cutscenes, a solo instance, and an 8-player trial. I would speculate that we will see something quite similar here. Long-term, the Manderville weapons will deviate from Shadowbringers’ Resistance Weapon questing in that there will be no world zone like Bozja for them, but what replaces that remains to be seen. In the past, even as an alternate track in Shadowbringers, you had the option of world and instanced content farming, with some steps needing FATEs in certain zones and other steps needing completion of specific tiers of dungeon or raid content from prior expansions. I expect the non-zone methodology will remain, as Relic Weapons are long-tail grinds for players to have a non-raid means of acquiring an upgraded weapon, the slot that most falls behind for casual players.

But the short answer for patch day? Be capped on Poetics, be ready to run old content for more as you flesh out your alt jobs, and have a couple hours of quest time set aside.

The Rest of 6.25

This section is simple, but I wanted to call it out – there’s not much else to prep for here. Variant and Criterion dungeons will likely have a basic unlock quest without severe prerequisites, and the Omicron tribe will be gathering content, so you’ll need at least one of Miner, Botanist, or Fisher leveled to at least 80 to do them. I would expect to have decent gear for Criterion Savage dungeons if that is on your agenda, as Live Letter 72 established them as something the team expects you to do in raid BIS gear. The FFXIV dev team does often oversell the difficulty of their content by a lot, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect a full 630 loadout as mandatory, but we’ll see how the tuning is!

Patch 6.3

Far into the future of the winter, we have the next major patch for FFXIV. Now, all of this is obviously extrapolation of what little we have been told, but FFXIV has a pretty good formula it adheres to for content delivery and so we can reasonably expect most of this to hold up as the patch comes out.

New Alliance Raid

6.3 will bring the second raid in the Myths of the Realm series that started with Aglaia in patch 6.1. This is the most predictable aspect of the content based on trends – 4 loot-bearing encounters, left-side armor only dropping at item level 620, limits of one drop per week, with your first weekly clear giving you a Materia-purchasing currency and a raid coin named for this new raid. No real prep is needed here – this is pure catchup to get more players geared to tackle Abyssos Savage if they so desire. However, what is worth noting and preparing for is upgrading tomestone gear – you’ll be able to use the raid coin here to buy Moonshine upgrade items for Lunar Envoy tomestone gear, moving it from 620 to 630. However, this tier will likely require two coins per upgrade item – one from this new Alliance Raid and the second coin being an Aglaia coin from the current Alliance Raid. Thus, if you have Lunar Envoy gear you’d like to upgrade, I would stockpile at least one Aglaia coin per piece you intend on upgrading!

New Dungeon

A new MSQ dungeon should come with 6.3, and this will drop full armor and accessory loadouts (no weapons) at a higher item level. They have curved us slightly with a higher item level increase for the 6.2 dungeon. If everything had followed Shadowbringers on item level, Fell Court of Troia in 6.2 would have dropped 585 items with the 6.3 dungeon dropping 605 items as a means of keeping the Normal raid relevant. If they increase item level with that in mind, then I would expect to see 605 items drop in this dungeon. If they make the amount of the increase match prior expansion item level increases, then it would be a +20 item level bump to 615, which would kind of trivialize the Normal raid that will still be considered current content at that time. I kind of expect 605 based on that, but with the curve already switched on us, it’s hard to say! Either way, some likely small upgrades or catchup for returning players here!

Crafted Gear Upgrades

The current Rinascita gear at item level 610 will be exchangeable in Radz-at-Han for upgraded item level 620 versions. The gear will look the same and have the same substats, but will just be scaled up the 10 item levels, with the only change besides that being that you cannot overmeld Materia to the augmented versions of the gear. Upgrades require turning in a High Quality version of the base 610 item for Certificates of Import, trading in 300-700 Allagan Tomestones of Astronomy to buy a stack of new Rain upgrade items, and then trading the certificates and the rain together to the vendor for the upgraded item. Costs on Astronomy vary by slot, with accessories at 300 and weapons at 700, with everything else somewhere in-between.

Tomestone Gear Upgrades for Causality (Lunar Envoy Sets)

Like mentioned in the Alliance Raid section above, 6.3 will open upgrades for Causality tomestone gear to those not doing Savage. The Alliance Raid will have options to buy upgrade items for armor and accessories at 2 coins a pop (1 from each Endwalker Alliance Raid), but you will also have the option to buy the upgrade tokens for armor and accessories here via Hunt currency. The likely cost will still end up at 3,000 Sacks of Nuts for armor and 2,000 for accessories. Weapon upgrades are going to be sequestered until much later – expect either a 6.38 patch or even 6.4 to unlock the ability to finally upgrade Lunar Envoy weapons via Alliance Raid coins. These upgrades move the Lunar Envoy gear from item level 620 to 630, and several of the augmented pieces per job are usually best-in-slot over even the Abyssos Savage raid drops. Make sure to pull out your Materia before trading in the base item, if you can!

New Extreme Trial

6.3 will have a new trial with Normal and Extreme modes. The normal version will have nothing but story and vibes to offer, while the Extreme will drop weapons, a new mount in the Endwalker Lynxes, and 1 or 2 totems, which can be pooled to buy weapons (10 per weapon, 7 for Paladin sword and 3 for the Paladin shield) and can eventually be used in a stack of 99 to buy the mount. The weapons that drop on EX are likely to be 625 item level, so a good in-between of the current options.

Deep Dungeon

Confirmed in multiple interviews and Live Letters, a new Deep Dungeon is planned for patch 6.3. What is a deep dungeon? In FFXIV’s past, deep dungeons are a dungeon mode with randomized floor layouts and scaling difficulty intended to be a fun challenge and viable alt-job experience source. Inside the deep dungeon, your character level is scaled and you level fully within the dungeon, gaining your normal skills for each level as you do. Gear is generally locked to a deep-dungeon specific stat loadout that gains levels through looted chests in the dungeon. There are traps, special items usable to remove traps or blunt the challenge, and you can go in with any configuration of light party, from solo to four players, with the game using a save slot system akin to an old-school console JRPG to register progress. You move through the dungeon in 10-floor increments, with the difficulty scaling a smidge higher each floor, and the final floor being a boss floor.

Why do these? Well, they traditionally offer a couple of neat benefits. Firstly, they are a great way to level alt jobs – while your level in the deep dungeon is separate from your actual job level, completing a segment of deep dungeon rewards a substantial amount of normal job experience for the time spent. Secondly, there are usually special looking item rewards tied to the deep dungeon gearing system, allowing you to siphon the levels from your in-dungeon weapon to create a replica that you can glamour on for elsewhere. Thirdly, there are distinct titles and rewards for progressing through them – if you can make it to the top floor without a run-ending KO, you can gain a special title, and there is typically such a reward for doing this solo as well!

Depending on how they make this new one, you may need to unlock the prior two deep dungeons first. I’d recommend doing the unlock quests for Palace of the Dead and Heaven-on-High prior to patch 6.3 and trying to reach the “save” floor in both deep dungeons (50 for PotD and 30 for HoH). You’ll probably need to be level 80 on a job to enter the newest deep dungeon, although it’s hard to predict at the moment as there was no Shadowbringers equivalent (Bozja sorta served the grinding jobs up role, but only in terms of EXP gain).

A Crafting Tribe

If we follow the Shadowbringers Tribal Quest model, we can reasonably expect 6.3 to have our last Tribe of Endwalker, and it will almost certainly be a crafting tribe, with a reasonable expectation from pre-expansion unveils that it will be the Loporrits on the moon. If this is something you want to do (and mount rewards are likely to be a hell of a hook!), then you’ll need at least one crafter leveled to 80 by 6.3. Crafting tribes, going off the Dwarves in Shadowbringers, are pretty straightforward – your quest will give you the materials needed for crafting and you’ll simply make an item with any of the crafting jobs, spending just the crystals needed to start the craft. They’re a good way to level crafting jobs you might have stuck at 80, but mostly they’re a good way to get a fun mount and crafting Materia for pesky overmelds you haven’t finished yet. Speaking of…

New Crafter/Gatherer Sets

Patch 6.3 should, by the Shadowbringers example, bring us our green DoH/DoL gear, with new items for both left and right side and new tools. This will be the last crafter/gatherer sets for Endwalker that we can make – a capstone set for those buying gear with scrip should come out in 6.4, but this gear is typically worse than what we can make in the x.3 patch, due to Materia melding restrictions.

The example we have from Shadowbringers is this: the new gear will require existing timed node materials from 6.2 and the resulting intermediate crafts (meaning Astronomy tome mats), alongside a new Scrip-purchasable additional material and a couple of added items that will require gathering, one each from Mining and Botany. In Shadowbringers, this also required that expansion’s Sublime Solution, but it’s anyone’s guess if Immutable Solutions will be used the same way here (based on the 6.2 gear, maybe not, but I’d hesitate to say for sure). You can start banking the Astronomy refining agents now, using the Aesthete’s gear from Shadowbringers as a baseline of how many of each you’ll need, and likewise you can start banking the timed 6.2 nodes now as well – they’re a great way to get spiritbond with your gathering set and you’ll need as much gathering Materia as you can get your hands on to pentameld the new sets! Crafting-wise, you’ll want to probably start banking some HQ intermediate crafts from the 6.2 recipes, getting an amount in-line with the Aesthete’s sets from 5.3. You’ll also want to come into 6.3 patch day, when it is announced, as close to capped on Purple Crafter Scrip as possible – you can use them to buy crafting Materia in the meantime, but I’d make sure around the start of December that you taper off using them for new purchases to start banking them, and using Custom Deliveries should help you stockpile them quickly.

At this point, you’ll also likely want to ensure your gathering set is fully melded, including pentamelds where possible, because the requirements for the new stuff in 6.3 you’ll need for these sets are likely to be quite high compared to the already-high requirements for the 6.2 materials. Stockpiling gathering food like Kalamarkia Tiganita and Sidderitis Cookies could be a boon as well.

And with that, that is about all the prep you can do for now!

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