You can safely entrust your own gil with a retainer for as much time as you want, but it doesn’t serve any obvious purpose in the current game. Before ARR launched, your retainer used to be able to purchase items or repair gear for you by giving them gil – but now in the current game there is no real practical purpose for leaving gil with your retainer.
They act as an assistant to the player, selling items on the Market Board on your behalf. You can send them on adventures of their own, and naturally, you can withdraw the gil they’ve made for you at any time.
One curious retainer feature is that you can deposit your money with them too. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of purpose to this right now.
It’s not like a savings account with interest or anything.
And you can’t set your retainer to automatically buy things on the Market Board for you if they go below a certain price, either.
So Why Can I Deposit My Gil With A Retainer?
Way, way back in time, before A Realm Reborn came along and made XIV what it is today, your retainer played a much more active role in the buying and selling of items.
Back then, you could set your retainer up with orders to purchase items for a price you established ahead of time.
You could also leave gear you wanted to be repaired with your retainer along with a stash of gil, and they could pay other players for carrying out the repair.
These are all long forgotten relics of the Final Fantasy XIV experience now.
And while retainers are still very useful, they can’t carry out these tasks.
Why were they removed?
Lots of features were streamlined when XIV relaunched with A Realm Reborn. There was quite a lot of fat to cut out to get the game closer to greatness.
Is There Any Point In Storing Gil With A Retainer?
There are a couple of uses we can cover here. Neither of them are particularly game-changing, and the second one will not apply to a majority of the player base.
The first use is as a sort of piggy bank.
If your retainer is holding onto the bulk of your wealth, you’re much less likely to impulse buy fancy things from the Market Board. For example, I treat my retainer as a sort of nest egg.
Once I hit a certain amount of gil I’ll entrust half of it to my retainer and try to forget about it.
Once a big cost comes up – like a significant gear upgrade or a desirable minion – I’ll check my retainer and usually have enough to cover it! Failing that, I’ll just rob my Free Company chest (joking!… kind of)
The second use is gil storage.
Your gil storage is capped at 1 billion (gillion?).
Your retainers all have the same amount of gil storage.
So the more retainers you have, the more money you can store. The likelihood of a player actually needing to make use of this is kinda slim in my opinion.
But there are hardcore omni-crafters out there who probably have capped out on gil a couple of times. In the process of buying a house in-game, I once encountered a player who claimed they had enough funds to buy the entire ward of housing estates, but had never been able to overcome the frustrating purchase system.
If you estimate that houses in FFXIV can average between 300-400k gil, and each ward contains 60 plots for purchase, that’s about twenty one million gil on the lower end.
See now how much work you’d have to do to hit that gil cap?
