As people have said, money and achievements... they also have a chance to give items, some of which are used to craft the base relic weapons (can be worth a lil chunk of gil on the market).
Wow, this thread has been necro'ed hard.
But yeah, I usually use the leves for quick turn-ins of buyable mats now. With the price of crystals the way they are it's actually a decent source of income.
Sorry for bumping this yet again, but I feel like this would be a good place to ask:
Does anyone know of a good leve (preferably crafting, something similar to the "For Crumb's Sake" Honey Muffin one posted earlier) that offers Wind Shards? I make most of my income through goldsmithing, and I eat through these like candy.
I remember finding one in Quarrymill when I was doing the Honey Muffin one, think it was called "Wall Not Found," where you turn in 3 Walnut Lumber. Now, thanks to the Ixal quests, you can buy Walnut Lumber for 219 gil apiece, but often times you end up getting Ice Shards or Yew Logs instead, and I'm not sure if it's very profitable at that point.
The rewards change constantly, you won't find one that always gives you a decent amount of a particular shard.
I would just keep doing the old CUL and possibly ALC leves and just check the CRP or WVR ones for wind shards as you turn them in. You can also try this for leves at Saint Coinach's and use Raptor Leather or Cobalt Ingots as the "turn-in, reset leves" button.
But if there's one easy leve like the Honey Muffin one, I haven't found it.
The CUL ones are pretty easy. Not as good as the Honey Muffins one, but not terrible either. On my server you can get Cornmeal and some of the other 25-30 materials for under the gil cost of the leve, so it's a pure profit in terms of shards. Not sure if they give Wind though.
Leves give shards of the craft they use. Wind would be GSM WVR LTW CRP I believe, and CRP/GSM have it as the "primary" shard.
CRP: Wind Ice
BSM: Fire Earth
ARM: Ice Earth
GSM: Wind Fire
LTW: Earth Wind
WVR: Lightning Wind
ALC: Water Lightning
CUL: Fire Water
Thanks for the replies so far.
I guess I would need to look into GSM leves where the turn-in items are something that can be bought for cheap from an NPC somewhere, or possibly the market wards... maybe something like Copper Ingots, something low-tier. I'll have to do some research later.
Shortcut for research: http://ffxivcrafting.com/levequests
The shard payouts don't look right, but just for overall "what looks good".
Beautiful, thank you.
After a quick glance, it looks like this "Coppers and Robbers" one in Ul'dah might fit the bill, since Copper Ingots are dirt-cheap, but it might take a while to get the shard quantities I need. I'll give it a shot here later.
Well, I tried the "Coppers and Robbers" leve a few times, and only got about 3 wind/fire shards and a 2-digit amount of gil, which I guess I should've expected, since it was so low-level. Profitable for the NPC cost of the ingots, I guess, but I spent more on the airship ride to Ul'dah, lol.
I just wish there were a few more viable ways of making money than having to rely on the market boards, because the game's kinda dead right now and everyone's waiting for the 2.4 patch, so it's taking longer for me to sell items and everyone's undercutting them to near-worthless prices. I've been doing as much of my weekly challenge log as possible. I know I could do roulettes on my PLD, but I'd rather not have to deal with random bad PUG's, and I don't like the idea of mercing for various reasons. I know there's money in spiritbonding too, but I don't like relying on the RNG of it, especially since there are more worthless materia than valuable ones, though I guess I could always try fusing the shitty ones at Mutamix's place.
The past few days, I've been making roughly 500-600K a day crafting, which is nothing to scoff at, of course, but I'm trying to save up for one of the remaining large house plots on my server, and I'm only about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way there. That, and it also doesn't help that I have to drop several 100K's on shards when I start running out, since it takes fucking forever to farm thousands of them. I'm sure I could make money faster AFTER 2.4 comes out (rogue/ninja gear, new recipes and what-not), but I'm assuming the houses in the new wards they release will also start at around 80 million and take another month to devalue, and people will naturally go after the cheapest ones first, so I'm not sure what exactly to do other than what I've been doing.
Unless your server is devoid of crafters, even shitty T1 materia sells extremely fast, binds extremely fast, and can be generated at a profit. Good to do while doing anything else like atma farming in lowbie zones.
I generally dislike town leves because of the walk between mete and delivery. The only way I justified it was doing multiple leves in one trip (for example, Distilled Water + Hempen Underpants + Copper Ingot) to shave time off of going back and forth.