I was somewhat dreading booting up Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) Patch 5.25 this evening. I expected to throw myself into another several month-long venture through the Shadowbringers equivalent of Eureka to unlock the fancy new Resistance Weapons featured as part of the new sub-patch. While Eureka saw much interest and success, personally its grindiness just wasn’t for me.
Resistance Weapons are being made available through the Save the Queen: Blades of Gunnhildr questline, which can be unlocked in Kugane through the quest Hail to the Queen (X:12.2 Y:12.3). This hour-ish long chain of events involves arguably one of the nicest-looking and well thought out instanced missions to date, and on more than one occasion, I halted progression to take a sneaky snap or three.
Upon completing the chain of quests, you are immediately granted access to a Resistance Weapon for a class of your choosing. Three examples (the ones I picked up) of them can be found below. These weapons will be upgradable in later patches, with the developers indicating that while the initial weapon is easy to unlock, enhancing them “may require players to invest a significant amount of time”. What that entails is unknown.
Unlocking additional weapons doesn’t require you to defeat a Pazuzu-esque enemy either! Instead, you can trade in four ‘Thavnairian Scalepowder’ (Available from Auriana at Revenant’s Toll for 250 Tomestones of Poetics apiece) for another weapon of your choosing. If you are like me and capped out your poetics a long time ago, you can potentially have three weapons at your disposal very quickly.
Each Resistance Weapon is currently at Item Level 485, putting them on par with Hades EX’s weapons albeit a lot easier to acquire. From the three DPS weapons I picked up, all had Critical Hit and Determination offensive properties on them, in addition to five materia slots. As a main White Mage, it is arguably the best weapon to work with until unlocking the ilvl 490-505 weapons through tomestones and savage content.
