cashew | FF14 - Glamour prisms, glamour plates, dyes, oh my!

I have finally unlocked Chief Flame Sergeant rank in my grand company and now have access to as many glamour prisms as I can afford with company seals! It required way too many runs through dungeons that I hate, but I did it. Somehow, I did it. It was a bit traumatizing grinding it so fast (and my muscles are definitely sore from running all those dungeons), but here are my feelings now that I've spent the better part of a day messing around with looks (even though I have very limited glamour items at the moment).

Glamour Prisms Part 1:

Glamour Prisms are consumable items needed to change the look of your equipment (armor, weapons, accessories). I'll go into detail on usage later, but for now, know that you will be using tons of these if you mess around with looks, so you want easy access as much as possible. The easiest access is to buy it from the grand company officer for 200 seals a pop, and that leads me to...

Grand Company

As I've mentioned before, Grand Company is probably the preferred way of getting glamour prisms. It's not without it's own grind, but it's still significantly faster than grinding your crafting jobs to 30. (Note: These are free account thoughts, so the lack of access to the auction house makes crafting a PITA.) Technically, you can craft glamour prisms at level 15, but one of the materials needed to craft the prism is a level 30 recipe, which you can't buy off of the auction house as a free player, so you'll need to get to level 30 to craft your own material, and that's just...way, way too long to be waiting on glamours.

In order to buy the glamour prisms from the grand company officer, you'll first need to level up in the grand company ranks. It's a pointless time sink, but if you want the pretties, you gotta pay up.

There's a total of 15 ranks as of patch 6.1 (with more coming soon). And you don't get access to the prisms until rank 12 (Chief Sergeant). I joined the Immortal Flames, so my rank is titled "Chief Flame Sergeant", but it actually doesn't matter which of the three companies you join, although there are some slight advantages to each, which I'll get to soon.

But first! What you'll need to get to rank Chief Sergeant:

35,000 company seals.
Don't worry, you don't have to collect all of them at once. You pay 2000 seals for the first promotion, and then an additional 1000 seals for every rank there after. The last promotion (to Chief Sergeant) requires 8000 seals. In total, you'll need to grind 35,000 seals. (And then you can spend everything else you earn after that on prisms!)
Rank 1 in your company hunting log.
There's a total of 3 ranks, but you only need to finish the first rank on your way to Chief Sergeant. The log involves hunting down specific monsters (some of which are dungeon monsters, but you should be able to easily complete those when you start grinding roulette...more on this later).
Complete Shadows Uncast company quest, unlock and clear the Dzemael Darkhold dungeon.
The unlock quest actually overlaps with Fort of Fear, which you can pick up near the dungeon at Dragon Head, so grab both and get credit simultaneously with one trip. As for clearing the dungeon, you can either queue up in the duty finder, or do daily roulette and hope you get it. I got this dungeon in my daily roulette, thus earning me both extra seals and dungeon clear in one go.

OK, so I've talked a lot about this roulette thing, lemme explain.

Daily Roulette is a duty finder mission (accessed via the Menu or command hotkey, don't worry, MSQ will teach you). The daily roulette, as implied by the name, is a RNG assignment that you can complete daily for rewards. The mission of interest is Daily Roulette: Leveling. This option opens up at job level 16. (Important to note, this is job level, not MSQ level. So if you start a new job, you'll need to grind to level 16 to gain access to the Leveling roulette.)

When you complete the daily roulette, you'll get something like 600-800 seals. That's nice, but that's not the reason you want to grind this thing. See, to encourage players to play less popular classes, the game has a bonus for "adventurer in need". Since this game works on a trinity system (tank, healer, DPS), the most needed role in the queue gets an extra bonus, which scales with your job level. DPS is almost never called on, but healers and tanks are always in demand. And the "adventurer in need" bonus is given every time you run as one of the lesser played roles. I've been earning ~2k seals per run as a level 44 paladin and about ~1.8k seals as a level 33 white mage.

I also got my white mage from level 16 to level 33 in three runs of daily roulette (average ~10 minutes each run). So if you ever worry about needing to level a healer, yeah, no worries there.

And daily roulette only puts you into dungeons for which you meet the minimum level, so no worries about accidentally going into a high level dungeon you're not prepared for.

In three days and about 10 runs, I managed to gain all the seals I needed and then some.

Now, you're probably doing the math and going "wait, that doesn't add up". And you're right, but that's because you'll also get a good chunk of seals from clearing the hunting log and doing FATEs (field active timed events, basically open world events that's on a timer). Between running around and getting caught up in FATEs, clearing the grand company missions, and taking on a few company leves (all terrible ways of earning seals early on), I managed to scrounge together a hefty sum of seals. But the majority of it came from running healer and tanks through the daily roulette.

Which Grand Company to join?

As I noted earlier, the three grand companies are about the same. However, there's some slight advantages here and there when you're grinding the daily roulette.

As a paladin, your job's quest giver is located in the same city as the Immortal Flames. So you'll save some teleportation costs and complications if you also register with the Immortal Flames.
As a white mage (the only healer available pre-level 30), you'll constantly be traveling in the Black Shroud for job quests, so you'll be picking up a lot of FATEs here. If your company matches the region, you'll earn bonus seals when completing FATEs, which means you may want to join the Twin Adder to make the grind go faster as you simultaneously level up the white mage job.
As a warrior (the other beginner tank class), you'll be traveling a lot in La Noscea, so join the Maelstrom for the same reason the white mage joins Twin Adder.
Each company has a company specific set of armor, which, if you're looking for a specific look, well, join that specific company to buy their specific armor. Of course, you'll need to grind even more ranks before you can get the armor, so it's a bit of a toss up if it's worth the effort or if you're better off looking for other gear for glamour.

Other than those slight differences, there's no real benefit/costs for joining either one of these companies. However, do note that the company seals don't transfer over to other companies, so you'll need to grind from rank 1 if you ever decide to switch.

Glamour Prisms Part 2:

OK, so you've put in the work and you ground up your ranks and you bought a stack of glamour prisms. Now what?

First: consult the glamour guide.

Here's the TL;DR. There's two ways to consume glamour prisms:

Change one piece of gear to look like another piece of gear and consume one prism.
Store a piece of gear in the dresser and consume one prism.

You're probably wondering why you'll ever need to change one piece of gear when there's the glamour plate system. That's because a) the dresser only contains 400 pieces and b) the glamour plates can only be used in cities. If you're trying to change some stuff on the fly, you'll have to consume prisms to do it.

NOTE: You need two pieces of gear for this to work. So if you like the looks of a piece of gear, you'll need to carry it in your inventory unless you stored it away in the dresser.

Which brings me to...

The Dresser and Glamour Plates

Constantly carrying two sets of gear (one to wear and one for looks) is pretty obnoxious. So in comes the dresser and glamour plates system. It costs 1 glamour prism to store a piece of gear in a dresser. Once stored, the look/skin can be assigned to glamour plates which can be reused infinitely.

So about this Glamour Plate thing:

The glamour plate consists of slots for every piece of equipment (weapons, armor, accessories). The plate applies the look all at once. Any slot left open will leave the equipment piece unaltered. Thus, you can make entire outfits with plates and switch them on the fly. You can also make partial plates to swap in whatever armor piece around if you like the rest of what you're wearing. You can also preview the entire outfit with all the different pieces put together, because none of the changes get applied (and your dyes are returned) if you don't save the plate. (We'll get to dyes in a bit.)

Oh, you'll need to save the plate and apply the plate in order to have the outfit's looks changed. This might seem weirdly redundant, but the idea is that plates can serve as both full outfits, or quick one-piece changes.

For example, if you set only the shoes and gloves piece on a plate, every time you apply the plate, it'll only change the look of the shoes and gloves of what you're wearing. This is a great way to check out new gear you picked up without having to run back to the dresser each time to put everything on. Just put on the new stuff, see if you like it, if not, apply a glamour plate and get the old look back!

Tips and Tricks:

You can link a glamour plate to a job's equipment set. This way, every time you swap to the equipment set, the look is auto applied. I find this less useful in combat jobs, since combat jobs very rarely share EQ. However, this can be very useful for crafting/gathering jobs that share similar stat requirements (especially in terms of accessories). So you can use one set of gear to swap crafting/gathering job, and another set to swap to shared accessory and a shared outfit.
You must be at the inn when editing glamour plates. This is why having partial plates is so useful. If you want to keep the looks of parts of your outfit while having the other pieces swap as you level up, having partial glamour plates can quickly swap in the gear you're interested in without having to run back to the inn. For example: I keep a plate with only glasses, so that the headgear of every job I level up will have the glasses headpiece without having to turn off the ugly hats for many, many jobs. I also have one for boots, because I did not spend hours farming the Gold Saucer for those boots just for them to get swapped out by whatever new boots that come along.
Carry some glamour dispeller with you in case you screw up your glamour projections and only one or two pieces needed a change. Unlike glamour prisms, the dispeller is cheap and easily accessible.
You can test out dyes in the glamour plates without consuming the dye as long as you don't save. I'll get more into the dye mechanics later. For now, just know that until you save, everything in the glamour plate editor is reversible and won't consume your super rare dyes when you're just testing things out. So use glamour plates as a way to test out how pieces and dyes fit together before committing to a look!

Glamour limitations:

In terms of armor and weapons, the glamour of the item must match your race, gender, job and level. If you're level 10, you can't apply a level 20 glamour. There are a lot of glamour items that are "all class, level 1" to make your life easier. Then there are items that are gender or race restricted (aka the 2B's outfit is gender locked to female models, racial gear is race locked).

A lot of lower level gear (under 30) tend to be split along fighter vs caster (Disciples of War vs Disciples of Magic). Then there's gear that's limited to a single job, such as certain shields that are limited to only Paladins, even though White Mage and Black Mage also wield shields. You can't apply a Paladin only shield glamour to a White Mage's shield (unless it's a Paladin wielding that shield...which they can't). However, there are shields that can be wielded by Paladin, White and Black Mage, and that glamour is applicable to all three jobs.

The point is, glamouring of items is still restricted to class and level. Obviously, once you get to max level, you don't have to worry about the level restriction, but the class restriction is still very much there, and that's what "all class" gear is for. (Side note: a low level glasses headpiece is an "all class" gear. LOL. So if you hate the way the helmet looks, you can put glasses on your paladin.)

Dyes:

Oh man, dyes. Dyes confuses so many people. In short, you can directly dye the item or you can dye the plate. Dyeing an item is permanent. Dyeing a plate is temporary. Also, some stuff can't be dyed. Because...I don't know why, this game has weird limitations. Anyhoo, let's get going.

To dye or not to dye

As a general rule of thumb, if something is a dungeon drop or special gear (green, blue, pink), it can't be dyed. If the item is regular gear (white), it can be dyed. In game, the dye-ability of a piece of gear is indicated by a little circle in the upper right hand corner of the item icon. If there's a dot, that indicates it can be dyed. If there isn't anything there, then you can't dye the gear.

Dye the item or the plate?

This is the thing that trips people up. When you dye the item, that item will be that color. I.e., if you dyed the boots black, they will always be black when projecting the item with a glamour prism and they will be black by default when added to a glamour plate.

When you dye the plate, that's the color that's projected only for that plate. I.e., if you put the black boots from the previous example into the dresser and added it to a glamour plate, then dyed the boots pink in the plate editor and projected the plate, then the boots will appear pink. When you add those same boots to a second plate, they will turn back to being black again until you dye the second plate another color.

So, the best way to think of this is: dyed item is permanent (until you apply another dye), dyed plate temporary (and the color is lost if you ever remove the item from the plate).

Why do this?

There's rare dye and there's rare armor. Sometimes, you want to put the rare dye and rare armor together. Other times, you want cheap dye on rare armor or test out rare dye on cheap armor.

So it's advised to test rare dyes in the glamour plate editor to make sure that it's something you'll want. Discard the change so you get the dyes back. Then apply the rare dye to the item itself (via inventory window) so that it will project the rare dye by default. Then, if you ever want to change the color to a cheaper dye, you can always use the plate to apply a cheap dye, thus preserving the rare dye base color in case you ever want to switch back to the rarer color. (As long as you never remove the item from the plate it's attached to, the color won't change when you project that plate. So if you did end up using a rare dye on the plate...just make sure the leave the item in the plate to preserve the dye. You have 20 plates, so hopefully that's enough.)

Or perhaps you want to use the same rare piece of armor with two different colors. You can use the same piece in two glamour plates and dye the plates different colors. This way you won't have to get a second piece of armor just because you want to switch colors or constantly buy new dyes as you swap between two colors.

Thus ends the every long glamour summary. Now, time to go farm some more items to throw in my dresser. 😆