Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

I mean, lvl 35 gameplay is pretty limited and you get there stupidly fast if on a preferred server. Still worth doing to get started though since it's free and the restrictions shouldn't matter too much.

What you can do is grab the starter edition, this goes up to 50 it's the original game. Costs 10bucks on 3rd party sites, it's still 20 on Square Enix site for whatever reason.

You'll "lose" xp once you're at 50 and still doing storyquests, but shouldn't be too much so if you don't like it it's whatever and if you do, no big deal, if you're on a Road to 60 server you'll just catch up super fast once you hit Heavensward with double xp rewards anyway. Also if you start on the preferred servers with Road to 60, you get +15free days, so 45 free days and double xp until 60 for 90days or when the server isn't preferred anymore, whichever come last. Can't transfer for 90days though, but can do cross server shit, and around march or april they should have free transfers once they reshuffle the servers in the datacenters.

Because there's so much story shit before the first expansion, having the expansions right away isn't that useful. The things you're missing are, the Dragon race(and by dragon I mean humans with scales and tails) and Palace of the Dead past lvl 40. I think that's it for the pre 50 stuff. At 50 you can unlock Samurai/Red Mage if you own Stormblood but the Heavensward classes are locked with Ishgard access which requires clearing all the ARR story stuff first so that's not super relevant.

You can play everything on one char like before yeah. Alts are actually pretty annoying to make unless you want to spend money, since you have to redo the whole story and unlock every fucking thing, shit's annoying, and on top of that you have to pay for the better subs if you want more than 1 char per server(the cheaper subs gives you 1char per server and 8total). There will be some free transfers sometimes in the future when they reorganize the datacenters, although you'll need a sub then.

You can definitely just pick off where you stopped, there's a bunch of shit that tells you where you can find new shit to do, and top left there should be something telling you where the next MSQ is to keep doing the story from where you left off. You can go to an Inn to view some of the cutscenes in the past or read your completed MSQs in your journal to figure out what happened last, or just go and figure it out as you do more stuff.

I'll relink this too: Progression and Level Locked Content – Gamer Escape

Good for figuring out where to unlock shit, or what's there to unlock.

As per usual with FFXIV, your main goal should be to pick up and clear the MSQ, just follow that, it'll unlock most stuff, gives good xp, is nice and will lead you to the endgame. It also can't be skipped anyway. You can figure out side activities shit later if you get tired of the MSQ or whatever.

Yeah leveling alts is a bit grindy due to mostly spamming stuff, but it goes relatively fast. DRK storyline is great too, all 3 of them, definitely the best of the job stories overall although a couple others are also very good.

There's quite a lot of fillers in the MSQ but the parts that advance the story are pretty interesting. I'm replaying ARR atm on a new account, I'm near the end of 2.4 so almost done and while 2.1 and 2.2 were mostly complete garbage, 2.3 had a few good bits(also some garbage mixed in) and 2.4 is solid as I remembered, there's a lot less bullshit going on and it's starting to ramp up the preparations for Heavenward's story.

I'll be taking a little break until january but very excited about 4.5.

Neuad said:

Have any of you guys used any sort of VPN, like WTFast or Mudfish? I'm trying to break the 90%+ mark on FFLogs for o9s, and while looking over some of my parses on xivanalysis I noticed I consistently clip, especially on double weaves. I know a VPN isn't magically going to make me meet my goal, but every little bit helps.

Click to expand...

I've used a random VPN back when there were routing issues with Telia and I was getting a shitton of packetloss and it was great for that, but for ping the results tend to often be a lot smaller unless playing from australia or whatever.

Might be worth trying but probably won't make miracles, double weaves are pretty tight(well depends on the skills animations it seems). Since you're going for high ranking I assume you've also made sure you have the right amount of SKS for your rotation? Having too much is obviously going to make it harder to double weave.

That said, a ton of people use these gaming VPNs and I haven't really seen people say bad things about them specifically, other than sometimes you can't find a good server to connect to that's also not fucked due to routing to them being the same shit, but that happens with any VPN really. I think Mudfish is also bandwith based, so you pay virtually nothing for FFXIV since like most mmos it doesn't consume shit for bandwith which is great. On my VPN service I had, I bought 1gb for 2bucks or whatever, and I ended up only using a small amount of that over 1month of gaming until it got fixed. Bandwith VPNs are REALLY cheap for mmos. Not so much if you want to VPN torrents to hide your shit from the feds or whatever, obviously.