You Are Not Your Walahra Turban.

You are not your... is a series of articles dedicated to profiling a variety of equipment. Brought to you every Monday, this series will discuss why it is a good piece of gear, why it fills your needs, why you should get it or any other reason it could be useful. It could be something obvious, or it could be something off the beaten path, but it will always be useful in some way or another. Today's column is a history lesson in FFXI gearing, the Walahra Turban helped to start the time of the cheap haste builds and fundamental changed melee builds forever after.

Ahh, old reliable. The Walahra Turban was the most exciting find the day of the Treasures of Aht Urhgan release. It helped to ring in for all an era that had already begun with certain jobs, the era of the haste build. Once introduced it was possible for pretty much all jobs to have access to a decent haste build from one source or another.

The Stats: In appearance the Walahra Turban was nothing more than a plain looking dark gray/black turban with a white feather, modeled after the Nashira Turban from Limbus. The stats were quite remarkable for the time and are still quite good for some jobs and builds today. The HP and MP bonuses made it viable for both melee and mage classes and the +5% Haste is still the most you can get in the head slot, thought you can build a +5% Haste head piece from the final reward from A Moogle Kupo d’Etat.

The quality of the Walahra Turban is largely dependent on how many other Haste buffs you are getting and your other stats. In high accuracy, high Haste situations, the Walahra Turban is still more effective than almost any other head piece available. As those conditions decrease other items like the Askar Zuchetto come into play with there increase in STR and DEX. Now of course there will be people on both sides that demand that one is better than the other and say you are stupid for picking one over the other, but in like so many places in FFXI it’s just not that cut and dry. The Ace’s Helm is considered to be more effective than the Walahra Turban in almost any circumstance because of the added stats on it.

If we have learned anything from FFXI it is that people that scream and yell about gear are almost always exaggerating to make people believe that their gear selection is the only possible gear selection, and that they are almost never correct. The corollary to that and probably the only iron law of FFXI is that “shit is situational”, a meme created from the Blue Gartr forums that pretty much describes any gear choice in the game. What you can know that is the Walahra turban does you good for a whole lot of jobs and you should have one when you get to 75 because almost every job can get use out of it at some time or another.

The Get: This one is definitely more interesting than most gear quests in the game. And if it wasn’t for .dat mining it might have been a lot longer before people actually found out how to get one. There is an NPC in Al Zhabi that you can give Imperial Bronze Pieces to that will use the funds to increase the defenses of Al Zhabi against Beastmen attacks. If you give 1000 of the Imperial Bronze Pieces to Gajaad he will give you a turban all for your own and before that for every 100 coins you give him he will give you an additional Walahra Water which is a decent little bonus.