If you are a long-time on and off the player and finally decided to try the first end game raid to truly get the full FFXIV experience and wanted to make sure you're doing your due diligence and not dragging others down. But is there any advice or things you're overlooking before thing to join a group? Yes, please check our FFXIV First Time Raid Advice. Make sure to get the appropriate food and pots for your job. Food should always be used. You won't need pots right away but the expectation is to use them when you're ready to clear.580 is good enough for the tier, but if you can easily get better gear then you should go for it. 580 crafted gear can be augmented to 590 easily now if you have extra tomes. Alliance raid gives you 590 gear too. Your weekly tomes should go toward 590 tome gear which can be augmented to 600. You'll get 600 gear directly from raids and from raid tokens. Always work toward getting the best available gear. Make sure you have a solid understanding of your job. You don't need to be perfect at everything, but at a minimum you need to know what all your skills do, know your rotation (even if you can't execute perfectly yet), and have good uptime. Review your logs and run them through XIVAnalysis to find your mistakes and learn how you can improve.If you're joining a static, be honest with your experience and just tell them you're brand new. If you're looking for PF parties, make sure you join one at the appropriate experience level (in your case, you should be joining practice parties with "fresh prog" in the description or making the PF listing yourself.Besides, some people are overstating the importance of getting better gear at the start. It will help, but P1S is easily clearable on 580 gear. So I would say if you can easily upgrade anything or buying FFXIV Gil, go for it, but don't stress too much over it. If you are finding that your damage is lacking, look at your rotation and make sure it's good before blaming gear.Some other easy things that will help: 1. Put materia into your gear. You realistically should have some IX and X materia lying around, so slotting them in will boost stats for essentially free. 2. Eat raid food (e.g. pumpkin potage). It will boost a couple stats, including vitality, which means more hp to help survive mechanics.Getting mechanics down will be the first step to clearing the fight, so just join or start a fresh prog party and get some runs in. Don't get discouraged when you die or the whole party wipes, that's part of the process.
