Alahra’s appearance is a huge part of FFXIV to me, and that fact hit me in the face like a brick on the first day of Early Access that I sat down to play the new Main Scenario. As I always do, I began the journey on Ninja, Alahra’s main job, rocking a Jet Black and slightly modified version of my favorite glamour for the class from Stormblood. By the time I had finished the first cutscene on Norvrandt, however, I knew that something was wrong—for the first time I can ever remember, Ninja didn’t look right to me while watching the scenes play out.

But I had gone into Shadowbringers with a backup plan. That glamour for Ninja had always been slightly imperfect, based as it was on a tank glamour that takes the crown for my favorite look across all classes from the last expansion. Over the last several weeks of Stormblood, I played Dark Knight almost exclusively, trying to get used to it again in anticipation of making it my main tank class. With all that time playing Dark Knight, I’d grown…heavily attached to the class, and most importantly to its glamour (which I had swapped to Jet Black from Pure White for Shadowbringers, of course). As I walked down the road to the Crystarium, I switched to Dark Knight from Ninja, and everything felt right.

So, for the first time since Ninja’s launch in Patch 2.4 of A Realm Reborn, I’m going through the Main Scenario on a different job, with there being a high possibility that Dark Knight actually becomes my main for the expansion. Because of all that, my first actual glamour of Shadowbringers has fallen, not to Ninja, but to the tank role, thanks to one of the expansion’s new additions to our glamour catalog, the Voeburtite Jacket of Fending.

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Glamour Components (Required Level: DRK/GNB/PLD/WAR 73)
Weapon: Cronus Lux / Cronus Lux Replica (Metallic Silver)
Head: Reading Glasses
Body: Voeburtite Jacket of Fending
Hands: Dravanian Gauntlets of Fending
Legs: Valentione Skirt (Jet Black)
Feet: Dravanian Greaves of Fending

For a long time, the trend in FFXIV‘s tank gear has been toward heavy armored coats, and that’s made it quite difficult for me to find tank glamours suitable for Alahra. She’s meant as an agile character, more prone to dodging and parrying than taking the brunt force of attacks against her, and so she looks best to me in lighter armor, but new examples of that have become exceedingly rare. The Voeburtite Jacket is one of the first examples in a long time of a piece of tank gear featuring leather prominently, and with primary colors of black, red, and silver, it seems almost tailor made for Alahra and my aesthetic tastes.

Given those colors, I naturally turned first to the Scion Healer’s Highboots for a companion piece, believing I could pair them quite naturally with the Storm Elite’s Skirt and the new Jacket. That didn’t work out quite as I imagined it, however. The Jacket’s one flaw is its slightly puffy sleeves, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to finish any glamour for it that used shorter gloves or bracers, which would have been necessary to pair up with the leather of the Scion Healer’s Highboots. Realizing that, I moved instead toward figuring out a pair of gauntlets, first, and given the red and silver featuring on the Jacket, the Dravanian Gauntlets ended up being the only choice.

Of course, the Dravanian Greaves followed soon after, since I like to pair hand and leg pieces in terms of style and colors. Tall as they are, they mostly ruled out using the Storm Elite’s Skirt, which is a bit too long for thigh-high footwear. I considered both the Miqo’te Loincloth and Faire Kohakama before settling on the Valentione Skirt, the fabric of which blended into the look far better than the others. The glasses don’t need much introduction at this point, since they’re more or less canonical for Alahra and she looks strange to me without them, especially for the Main Scenario.

As of writing, I’m about halfway through level 75, and I’ve already seen a ton of pieces I want to play around with for other glamours. For various reasons, I’ve been taking Shadowbringers fairly slow, but I do have Ninja a little ways into the 70s as well. I’ve been working to collect the various new dungeon sets (with the hope of eventually having screenshot galleries for all of them!), and so far I think almost every body piece from the level 73 dungeon has my eye, as well as plenty of other things I’ve seen that I haven’t had an opportunity to collect yet. I’ll likely be bouncing back and forth between new glamours and armor set galleries for awhile, as I steadily work myself through the Main Scenario.

But I definitely want to get back to playing, so that’s going to be all for this one!