Currently the top-tier Main Hand tools for DoH are the Supras - upgrades of the 'relics' you get for completing the level 50 class quest.

To upgrade, each Supra requires 3x Mastercraft Demimateria and 5x iLv75 crafted NQ components.

Mastercraft Demimateria are obtained exclusively through Desynthesis of iLv70 DoH/DoL items that are gained from trading certain items to an NPC in Mor Dhona. Having Desynthesis at dLv70 nets you a 55% chance of successful desynth - if you want a guaranteed desynth you must have dLv100 (I'll not talk about that grind here, but here's a comprehensive post on Desynthesis). Of course, Mastercraft Demimateria are also readily available on the Market Boards. Today on Gilgamesh, they'll set you back 250,000 apiece.

So in order to avoid a potentially huge grind, that's 750k needed so far.

On to the 5x iLv75 crafted NQ components. These are three-star crafts and can't be purchased on the Market Board. Three of the HQ versions of these items are required to unlock the Master Recipe II book for each class (which are the recipes the Supras are used for), so in essence you'll want to aim for the three HQ, but getting any at this point is just good fortune and you shouldn't worry about them until you have your Supra. With max-melded gear (not inc the 2.4 stuff, which we're aiming for, or forbidden melds on the off-hand, which are expensive enough to warrant preclusion) and Control II GC buff, you can only hit 15% on the HQ rate, but we'll worry about that later.

The components of this craft are 23x shards, 2x Fieldcraft Demimateria III and the two-star component from the associated craft.

Shard prices fluctuate, and the particular shards you'll need depend on the craft, so I'm going to use an average of 80gil per shard, meaning this portion of the craft adds 80x23x5 = 9,200gil value to the proceedings.

Currently on Gilgamesh, the FD3s are 45k each. They are actually gained from the same Desynthesis as the Mastercraft Demimateria (above). Later on in the post, I'll qualify cost vs purchase re these desyntheses. As you will need 10x FD3s per tool, that's another 450k.

The two-star components are a cinch to HQ yourself and they're also quite cheap to make. They use 21x shards (21x80=1680), and HQ materials that will cost to buy or craft (depending on the synth) between 2k and 4k. Naturally though, as we drill down to this level, the real cost becomes time. You will likely be synthing 15-20 times in two tiers which you should be able to complete in 20mins, if you're not distracted by chatting… Anyhow, let's say these materials' max cost is 30k.

Overall this means you have a time-sink of about 30-40 mins and a cost of 1,239,000gil.

For eight Supras, that's 9,912,000gil and over 5 hours.

Now I can see that you might not be willing or able to sink that much ready cash into your top-tier tools, but there's only one way to mitigate this cost: Desynthesis.

I'll get into that next. <cont'd…>

If you're considering Desynthesis, a good enough guide to follow to increase your dLv is in the link I posted above.

For the purposes of the Mastercraft and Fieldcraft III Demimateria that we need, we have to aim for being able to desynth the iLv70 Artisan's tools, which are only available by trading items to an NPC in Mor Dhona. In 2.45, the number of items required to trade in to receive these tools was drastically reduced, making this thoroughly viable, if VERY time-consuming. However, you will need BSM, GSM or ARM dLv70+ to begin.

From a reasonably small dataset (of 90 so far - so please take with a pinch of salt), these desynths have been found to deliver the following results:

10% - 1x Mastercraft Demimateria
15% - 2x Mastercraft Demimateria
15% - 3x Mastercraft Demimateria
15% - 1x Fieldcraft Demimateria III
45% - (base materials dependent on desynth)

I'm going to discount the base materials gain here because although it's not insignificant gil, it does vary wildly depending on the tool desynthed.

So, on average, after desynthing 7x tools, you will have about 5x MD and 1x FD3. That's more than enough MD, so you can sell the two spare for 500k and buy the remaining 9x FD3s you need from the MB with 100k plus the value of the desynthed mats for your trouble.

This is considering dLv100. Desynthing the NPC-purchased 'Aged' items is a cheap way to get you nicely to dLv70-75 wherein you'll have a 60% chance to achieve the above result. That'd mean you'd need to get 12x tools for the same outcome. We have to judge now whether it's better to push dLv100 or take the breaks, based on the time and cost it takes to get one tool…

The tool you choose to desynth will depend on whether you've levelled desynth for BSM, GSM or ARM. BSM and GSM are the cheaper options due to lower number of hand-ins required for the CRP and WVR tools. I'm going to look at the GSM route here, but transplant your own choice into this procedure to get your own figures.

So I need 12x Artisan's Needles, for which I'll need to craft a total of 96x HQ Silver Brocade (two-star). The Silver Brocade itself is made from 21x shards, 2x Twinthread and 1x Silver Ingot. You'll want HQ materials to guarantee an HQ result (the NQ being essentially useless) and the cost of those on the MB is very high in comparison to the crafted cost.

The Silver Ingot HQ will cost 1,060 to craft apiece - 96x is 101,760gil and about 2hrs of your time.

The Twinthread HQ will cost 3,500 each - you should have no issue HQing this on-star synth from NQ materials. Of course, you will have to do it 192x, likely over the course of 4hrs. This may seem awful, but it's not so bad if you consider that there is an achievement for crafting 3,000 lv41-50 items and for crafting 3,000 HQ WVR items overall. It's a nice block towards those. Of course, if you don't give a crap about those achievements, then yes, this is heinous. Also, that's 672,000gil.

The 96x Silver Brocade craft with these items will take another two hours and cost an additional (80*21*96) 161,280gil in shards. I'd recommend making a full i30-34GSM set to spiritbind during this process and hopefully you can make some money back of Tier II materia

That leaves you on 8x hours of crafting and 935,000gil. If you don't have the ready cash, you can mitigate a large portion of it (537,600) by harvesting 384x Crawler Cocoons from the unspoiled nodes over at Little Solace (you should get 12-18 per hourly spawn), but this is just adding more time to the process. Getting help from your FC for a couple of days if possible is recommended! Also, being able to gather for 30secs once every 57mins during your working day can be a painless way of building this up.

In conclusion…

Purchase method PER SUPRA:
30-40 mins and a cost of 1,239,000gil.

Desynthesis method PER SUPRA:
8 hrs and a cost of 935,000gil.
plus excess desynthed materials
plus a set of T2 materia from spiritbond
plus progress toward achievements
plus dLvl increase of about +3
about 66% of the cost can be mitigated by gathering materials from unspoiled nodes, though obv that increases time.
or
if you are already dLv100, halve the above costs and time.

So if you want your Supras in a few days, you're going to have to spend a lot of gil on Demimateria. If you're happy to resolve yourself to a couple of months repetetive grind (unless you're one of these crazies that sees this method as taking one day per Supra - 8hrs to me is one week, what with all the other content going on), then choose the Desynth path.

Of course, you might look at the Desynth path and decide the 'bonuses' aren't worth it (ie higher desynth level, achivement progress). You can likely make the money you need to take the Purchase path through crafting, spiritbonding or selling runs in a fraction of the time - I guess this is the middle-ground.

As for me? Well you can find me at Little Solace farming Crawler Cocoons…

Thanks for reading!

Great shit here, Mojo. Gold star.