Using the set searcher

Making your own armor set in Frontier can be quite tricky. Between all the unique armor systems (Gou, Exotic, G, Zenith, etc), the skills unique to this game or even the set searcher heavy interface… There are some obstacles to overcome for sure. This article will show you how to properly make a build from scratch.

  1. Choosing your skills
  2. Configuring the set searcher
  3. Demo of a real search

Choosing your skills

First hurdle, you don’t know Frontier skills. I suggest you use mertna site. In the left menu, the Go-to-skills section will show all the interesting skills for your weapon of choice.

Using this, make your own list of skills while keeping in mind that a G rank set is limited to 12 skills at max, aside from Exotic skills and the Zenith Skills Slots Up skill.

Configuring the set searcher

You can start by excluding armor pieces and decorations from the search. Unless you went to spend long hours of farming, I would advise that you remove Raviente and its subspecies decorations and armor pieces. Ravientes grant powerful composite skills such as the overpowered Solid Determination… But farming only one deco require hundreds of drops, making them quite irrealistic to get if you’re not fully and deeply invested in Frontier.

Filtering with Ravi will show you Raviente and Gravios equipements. Keep the Gravios stuff and remove everything else

Then you’ll need to add filter based on the available armor pieces and decorations according to your rank. You can press the other Edit button.

Example at the start of G rank

Based on your own progression, you can enable more options in the filters:

  • from GR50, in Decorations, Standard Pugi Cuffs > G Cuff
  • from GR100, in Armors, G Armour > GX Exotic (G rank exotic armors)
  • from GR200, in Armors, Zenith Armour > Zenith (Zenith armors)
  • Then the following Zenith categories based on your Zenith quest rank progression

Last thing you might want to change, the search by default assume you’re using a slotless weapon. You can disable this so that the search uses a 3 slots weapon (but using your weapon to slot decorations means you won’t be able to use it to slot Sigils).

Let’s do an actual example. I’m GR100 (I can access GX Exotic armors) and I want to make a paralysis SnS support set. I browsed mertna and came back with this skill list.

Since there are Sigils increasing status and stun damage, I’ll choose to search with a 0 slot weapon.

I’m trying a first search and get nothing in the Results tab. I do more tries, disabling a few skills by checking/unchecking them in the list and end up in this situation.

This message appears when you try to find skills with not a single armor piece available to you providing skill points for said skills (or you do an impossible search such as asking a set using Korinyi armors pieces aka Zenih event armor pieces while having Zenith event armor pieces disabled). Investigating further, Skilled and Abnormality are skills tied to Raviente equipements or higher ranked armor pieces such as Zenith ones. The best way to identify such situation is to do searches with only one composite skill at a time. If this message appears, you can forget this skill for the time being.

How can we circumvent this issue? The best solution is to break down the composite skills to its base components. For instance, Abnormality is made of Status Attack Up (more status damage), Status Pursuit (more damage on poisoned/paralysed monster) and Drug Pursuit (guaranteed status damage but reduced). Since I’m planning on spamming status instead of doing damage, I’ll remove Status Pursuit.

The updated list (Skilled has become Wide-Area +3 and Speed Eater, Abnormality Status Attack Up and Drug Knowledge)

Still no results, I’ll disable the less important skills. I remove Stylish (sharpness restoration on perfect dodges) and Thunder Clad and the set searcher finally give me some results in the Results tab!

And it even shows the required mats!

Some of the results are greyed out. These are sets where at least one of the skills I asked for is disabled by the 12 skills limit. Digging a little, I selected the one displayed above. The yellow skills are exotic skills (so outside of the 12 skills limit) and I noticed Expert +5 so +50% affinity. The set also grants me Unaffected +1 (protection from tremors, winds and roars) and Encourage +1 (a support skill).

I’ll add another filter to the search under Other Criteria. This section allows you to specify exotic or Zenith skills you want to add to your set. Since I know it can work, I’ll add a filter for Expert +5 as an exotic skill.

I also add Encourage +2 to the skill list, hoping for the set searcher to find a valid combination…

Ultimate step, check where to get the components of the set using ferias. Indeed, looking in the Equipment Index section, I find out that the Melan GX Greaves seem to use components not easily available on the server I’m playing on. And looking at the other options…

And there it is, my base set minus 2 skills replaced by an immunity to interruption effects allowing me to heal my allies no matter what and Encourage +2 granting me stun immunity and Evasion +2 (while also improving my flutes). And Unaffected +2 has been upgraded to +3, the full set being craftable on my server.