Arrows & Bullets

[Goshujin-sama]

I have been reading a lot of posts saying that the Ranger is the most expensive job in FF XI. All of these also claim that the reason is because of the constant need to buy arrows and/or bullets.

Sounds reasonable.

My question then is: can not a person join a couple guilds, say Carpentry and Black Smith, and make their own ammo?

I would think that making your own ammunition would be considerably cheaper than having to buy from an NPC.

Or is it not possible for a character to make arrows & bullets?

[Maxim]

When I raised Ranger, I made almost all the arrows I used. If you use the Ranger's scavenger ability to find items in the ground, you can find the majority of the necessary items to make arrows. The crystals for synthesizing can be obtained from monsters for free as well. With the Ranger's scavenger ability and the abundance of crystals, making low leveled arrows is extremely inexpensive.

The only problem is that after your Ranger gets to a high level, the items needed for making high leveled arrows get exponentially more expensive. Not to mention, you will need a really high guild level in order to synthesize the arrows correctly, otherwise you'll risk breaking crystals and synthesizing items which can end up costing more than buying the arrows from stores. The only way to level up your guild skill is by making items over and over, and in the end you wind up spending a lot of money raising your guild skill so you lose money either way.

Of course, you can stick with level 1 arrows throughout the entire game as a Ranger, but the amount of damage you'll be doing will be significantly lower than using up to date arrows.