Once you join the Scions in Final Fantasy XIV, you can hire a retainer, which is a special kind of NPC that will keep your items and Gil for you.
Retainers can also sell items for you, go on quests with you, bring back items, and are just pretty helpful in general.
And retainers aren’t just useful, you can also change everything about them.
You get to choose what they look like and what class they belong to.
You can give them names, level them up through ventures, and get some cool rewards if you have venture tokens.
And venture tokens aren’t hard to get, I promise!
You can buy 5 of them at a time from your grand company. Only 1000 Grand Company Seals are needed to buy them.
All you have to do to call your retainer is going to the nearest calling bell.
They can be found all over Eorzea. And as soon as you ring one, your retainer will run over.
You can get up to two free retainers.
After that, if you want to keep someone on retainer, you’ll have to pay them. The kind in the real world, not the kind in Gil.
What Do Retainers Do?
I know the idea seems hard to understand, but it’s not.
Rather than thinking of your retainers as “people,” think of them as storage.
They have a lot of extra inventory slots, so you can use them to store all your extra items. You can store almost anything and get to it from anywhere with a calling bell.
If you don’t want to go outside to call them, you can even put a calling bell in your own home.
That is if you are lucky enough to get one.
You can also sell things on the market board by using your retainers.
You can give each retainer up to 20 items to sell at a time from the summoning bell. The Gil will be added to whatever the retainer is holding as soon as something sells.
Then it’s easy to take that gold from your retainer and put it in your account. It only takes a few clicks in the Retainer menu.
The main things you’ll use retainers for are storing items and selling them. These are also the easiest things you’ll do with them.
If you play FFXIV for any length of time, you will need your retainers to hold items at some point. Their extra 175 slots will be very helpful.
How Does Your Retainer Get You Free Stuff?
Ah, yes! I wouldn’t say it was “free,” though.
You will need to use Venture Tokens, as I said above.
Your Grand Company vendors are the best place to get them.
Most of what you do in Final Fantasy XIV will get you Grand Company seals. You can trade a thousand of these for five Venture Tokens. Bada-bing, bada-boom, Venture Tokens.
If you take your retainer to a calling bell and give them one of these tokens, they will go on an exploration.
This means that they will go out for different amounts of time and bring back a variety of strange things. You could get things for your house, gear, and even Chocobo Barding or minions.
There are different levels of difficulty for the explorations, and the harder ones give more experience than the easier ones.
Classes come into play here.
Retainer Classes
The level and class of your retainer determine what kinds of items he or she can bring back.
Choose carefully which class to give your retainer to because each class can bring back different rare items.
Note: Once their class or job is set, you can’t change it.
You’d have to fire that retainer, find a new one, and start over.
Lucky for us, the same isn’t true about how they look.
You can use a Retainer Fantasia if you get tired of seeing their stupid face.
These are, ironically, being sold on the market board by the retainer of another player.
