Job unlocks, class starting locations, spiritbonds, and more discussed as Ragar goes through what you'll need to know for Open Beta and Early Access

What The Heck Does "Spiritbond" Mean?

There is one last thing I want to cover because this kept coming up while I was playing and the game didn't get around to explaining it to me for ages: Spiritbond. On each piece of equipment your character wears, you'll notice another bar along the side of the durability gauge on the left. As you fight/gather/craft while wearing these pieces, this gauge will slowly fill up. When it finally hits 100%, you'll get a message telling you that your equipment is now 100% Spiritbound and is eligible for conversion. No other information beyond that like what Spiritbound means or what you're converting to - that's it. You'll keep seeing this and wondering what it means. Everything will become clear once you hit level 19 and talk to some NPCs at Mutamix's camp. If you've been keeping up with your story quests, you'll get the breadcrumbs to come out here; otherwise it's north of Ul'Dah.

When you get there and make your way through all of the quest dialog, you'll find out that Spiritbond is related to Materia, another system in FFXIV. The conversion the Spiritbound message kept mentioning is the process of turning equipment into Materia to socket in other pieces of gear. Think of it like Disenchanting in other games, but you're getting a gem out of it with stats related to the piece you're destroying.

Now that you've burned some old gear for Materia, the question is: what do you do with it? Having Materia and a piece with open sockets isn't enough - you need the proper training to socket an item and that means crafting classes. Want to socket a sword? You'll need a Blacksmith. Trying to put Materia in your cloth robes? Time to find a Weaver. You can do this all yourself of course, provided you have the appropriate level in the crafting class. Another thing to note is the level of the item you're dickering and the Materia being used. Try putting a higher level Materia in a lower level item and the stats will drop. This can be kind of annoying at first, especially since many of the pieces you'll have around that level will drop Materia stats to 0, but I'd imagine things get better with higher level drops than the mishmash of dungeon drops and crafted gear I was using.

Conclusion

There's so much more I could talk about with Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, but I think this should be enough to get everyone through Open Beta and ready for Early Access (have to save something for the review, after all). If anyone has any questions about a system I forgot about or more details about some of the classes and systems, let us know in the comments below.

Michael "Ragar" Branham