I finally hit 80 and finished the Main Scenario Quest for Shadowbringers earlier this week. I’m still working through everything I want to say about that (which could very well be a lot), but in the meantime, it was time to iterate on my Dark Knight glamour since I always like to do so after hitting the level cap with a new job (and most especially my first one!). After I put together my first glamour of the expansion, I experimented with several other items on my way up to 80, since there are a lot of great pieces to work with in the expansion.

Along the way, I experimented with the Ravel Keeper’s Vest of Fending and the Zonureskin Coat of Fending in the hopes of building a glamour around the Ravel Keeper’s Guillotine, which someone linked to me early on and I instantly fell in love with. It took me so long to actually get the Guillotine, though, that I hit 80 on Dark Knight later that day, and I never got around to figuring out a proper tribal glamour for it. The Greatsword of the Forgiven caught my eye, too, but I couldn’t find a body piece for that one that I liked more than the Voeburtite Jacket of Fending.

Once I hit 80 and picked up the Weathered Shadowbringer, with its imposing black (and just a hint of red), I knew I wouldn’t be getting away from the Jacket anytime soon. After all was said and done, I decided to lean into the Shadowbringer colors more heavily and began searching for solid replacements for the Dravanian pieces I’d been using for most of the expansion.

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Glamour Components (Requirements: DRK/GNB/PLD/WAR 73)
Weapon: Weathered Shadowbringer
Head: Elegant Rimless Glasses
Body: Voeburtite Jacket of Fending
Hands: Dravanian Gauntlets of Fending
Legs: Storm Elite’s Skirt
Feet: Crystarium Greaves (Jet Black)

This proved to be far more troublesome than I might have imagined, though I suppose that should have come as no surprise. Since I avoid much of the game’s heavy armor (and have favored the Orthodox line of models for so long), I had no real sense of how little in the way of solid arm and foot wear we have for tanks. Somewhere in the process of my browsing, I decided to put more serious effort into using the Storm Elite’s Skirt, and that’s what ended up guiding my thought process as I updated my look.

The Storm Elite’s Skirt is much longer than the skirts and shorts I normally work with, which means that it doesn’t pair well with many of my staple thighboots or greaves, with a few options even clipping up into the skirt (though examples of that are thankfully pretty rare!). It also has a fairly unique leather texture, and I needed something that wasn’t going to clash with that, too. Thankfully, the new Crystarium Greaves fit the bill more or less perfectly, having both a good height and the right sort of leather to pair with the Skirt.

The struggle began when it came to finding a pair of gloves or gauntlets to pair with the Greaves in turn, though. With the red sleeves of the Voeburtite Jacket, I needed a piece that ticked off a lot of boxes: elbow-length, some amount of red, some amount of silver, and some amount of black. So far, nothing I could find actually worked! The Crystarium Gauntlets were a natural fit for the Greaves, of course, but they didn’t have the right balance of colors. The closest thing I found were the Doman Steel Gauntlets of Fending, but their accents are bronze rather than silver (and they also lose their secondary colors when dyed black, unfortunately!).

In the end, I decided to stick with the Dravanian Gauntlets. Normally, I’m loathe to have such a mismatch between between gloves and boots, but for now I can’t see any way around it, and red and silver for my gauntlets are far more important for making the Voeburtite Jacket work than black is. I like the rest of the look enough (especially alongside Shadowbringer!) that I’m going to be keeping it for the time being while hoping our next round of gear additions solves my gloves issue!