Critical Break: Guild Points and Items Part 1.

Critical Break is our crafting and economics column written by Qtipus. Q is an experienced crafter and also well versed in using the Auction House to turn a decent profit. Enough so that he was able to fund his own relic, Gungnir. Every Tuesday you will find Q's rants, raves and good crafting practices here. Today Qtipus starts looking at the Guild Items and how to get them most out of your Guild Points.

Guild Points and Guild Items are a pain in the ass to get. Not necessarily because they're expensive at times, but mostly because they're insanely time consuming to get. Picking up all your Guild Gear/Guild Furnishings will generally cost you around 600,000 Guild Points. That's a ton of points and a ton of time that's well worth the investment, but really sucks if you're impatient like me or don't really have the desire to log in every day to do these things.

So what's the best way to build up your points in a cost effective manner?

First you need to understand the concept of a simple ratio. This ratio is known as Gil/Point or how much gil you're spending against how many points you're earning. The lower this ratio is, the better.

FFXIAH.com is nice enough to show us this ratio. You can view it in their Guild Pattern section. As with anything that's shown on FFXIAH aside from the sales history, this should only be used as a reference point if you're just going to buy the mats off the AH.

Second, you need to understand that sometimes it's really easy to simply farm up the materials you need for your item that particular day. There's also the option to buy your mats from an NPC to lower this ratio. I realize time isn't always available to put the farming time in, but then again, neither are the materials for some of these things since the AH generally gets cleared out very early in the day.

A good example of ratio manipulation would be the Hornet Fleuret. FFXIAH has it listed with a ratio of 5+ gil for every point you've earned. That's not as high as some, but when you consider that 3 of the 5 materials are easily farmable/NPC Buyable (giant stinger, brass ingot and giant femur), you're looking at a cost of 3k/synth. Since you need 2 of them to max your points that day, your ratio is actually looking more like 1.1 gil/point as opposed to 5.21 gil/point. Even if you buy all the mats off the AH, your gil/point ratio is still half of just buying the finished product off the AH.

Lastly, try to set yourself up on a budget for these items. Typically speaking, I try not to spend more than 10-15k per set of points. This is a number I set based on the fact I can spend 30 minutes farming whatever and make this amount of gil w/o even trying. There will be some items that have an obvious price tag of "Yeah I'll pass", but there will be some that are right on the border of comfortable spending.

Next week...which GP Gear, Furnishings and Key Items should you target?