As part of FFXIV: Dawntrail’s Occult Crescent field operation, players can take on Phantom Jobs, which are mini-jobs that provide unique skills to help you out during combat. These jobs all level individually using EXP gained from the Occult Crescent, and as of patch 7.25, there are 13 of them.
It should be noted that under the “Unlocking Phantom Jobs” section in the tutorial booklet, it does say “Soul shards are obtained from treasure chests, certain critical encounters, and more,” though we have yet to find a soul shard in a treasure chest. This isn’t ruling out the possibility, but we can’t confirm which job shards come from chests as of writing this.
All players will start with the Phantom Freelancer job, but there’s more to unlock. There are a few ways to unlock the various Phantom Jobs in FFXIV, which we’ve detailed below.
Completing Occult Crescent quests
This is the first way you’re going to unlock a chunk of the Phantom Jobs. This job serves more or less as a tutorial, so you shouldn’t really have much difficulty in talking to the nearby NPCs and completing it as part of the Occult Crescent story.
By completing the quest “New Job, Old Tricks,” you unlock three jobs: Knight, Monk, and Bard.
Buying them for silver and gold coins
The merchant at the base camp (“Expedition Antiquarian”) will sell you job shards for a hefty sum, under the “battlecraft items” category of whatever currency you have to use.
Once you have the job shards, you can just use them from your inventory (the same way you would a minion or potion) and they’ll be added to your options.
Completing specific critical encounters
Three critical encounters also have a chance to drop job shards, as marked below on the map.
Note that these are not guaranteed drops from the above encounters. In the times I’ve ran these, a shard has dropped about 50% of the time, but that isn’t to say that 50% is the actual drop rate. Just keep doing them as they pop up and you’ll get the soul shard eventually.
Any extra soul shards you get can be sold back to the “Expedition Trader” NPC at the base camp for a meager 10 silver pieces each.
