Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Magimaster said:

In the vein of the current conversation, I'm thinking about trying this out on the free trial. As far as soling, how are their tanks for solo leveling? Was thinking of starting with a beefy melee class, but wasn't sure how each of them play out versus levelling as a DPS. And, I see that you can eventually switch jobs and such to level those as well; is there some kind of benefit besides the versatility that brings, such as buffs to your other classes?

Also, are there any resource websites that would be recommended like a version of Wowhead or such? I looked briefly at wiki, but it seemed pretty bare bones.

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Tanks are great for solo leveling, since they take reduced damage so you rarely have to wait for health to come back, and they do very decent damage with their DPS stances(higher than healers, lower than DPS). On top of that as mentionned, they have the fastest dungeon queues, making all the required dungeon runs for the MSQ much easier to go through.

On which tank to pick, Dark Knight being locked behind Heavensward access means you don't get to play it for a fairly long time unless you buy a level boost for it. The gameplay is kinda spammy and a lot of DRK mains are looking forward to the promised rework in the next expansion as the class went from a highly technical class in HW to a fairly boring spammy class in SB. It probably has the most APM to play because of all the Dark Arts spam oGCD.

Paladin is your most straightforward tank. It has a simple rotation(actually really boring one before Heavensward when you start getting other combo parts) to maintain and has the most utility and defensive tools. It can heal if your healer is being shit/dead to a certain extent and has a bunch of tools to help other people like Cover and Intervention. It's also the best soloing class for old content out of the 3 due to the much stronger self healing, and is generally better than RDM(the best solo class) if you need to be tankier, although it does less damage.

Warrior is the most offensive tank. Their personnal DPS is a bit higher(not that much mind you on sustained DPS) and they have way way better burst than other tanks, capable of 2-3shotting quest mobs when their cooldowns are up. They have lower mitigation than the other 2 tanks but more health and get healed for more and have a lot of self healing cooldowns as well as very decent self healing attacks. They'll probably feel the best for soloing overall especially pre Heavensward when PLD is boring and not so strong since they unlock their DPS combos during HW, although WARs also unlock their best DPS ability in Heavensward, so difference won't be that big.

Any of the 3 tanks will do fine in all content and unlike what was mentionned, there's no "main tank off tank" stuff since a while, every tank can and will main tank due to forced tank swaps in most relevant fights, and generally speaking WAR will be the preferred "main tank" on pull due to their higher threat burst, while every tank also have offtank capabilities since their DPS is fairly similar and they all have some group or other tank buff utility(in this regard WAR is actually the worst since DRK get The Blackest Night and PLD get Intervention/Cover).

The good wiki is Main Page – Gamer Escape another good website is Garland Tools Database and then there's plenty of more specific websites. Unlike wow where a lot of stuff was centralized on Wowhead and mmochamp, FFXIV is fairly fragmented. If you want a hunt tracker you have to go to another site, light tracker another site, eureka tracker another site, crafting simulator a bunch of other sites, fishing site is yet another and so on. Google will help with your specific requests, and the FFXIV reddit is pretty useful too.



Also game is on sale again on the Square Enix store, but only on the NA part. Complete edition and Stormblood on sale, starter isn't as usual(if you need starter buy from a 3rd party since they're 10bucks there, while still 20 on the SE site).

Dom said:

It's refreshing to be levelling in this and seeing smart approaches to things that games like WoW don't even attempt, like teaching new players core group combat mechanics. They offer a series of quests/scenarios early on that take you through important stuff like picking up adds, focusing on healers, avoiding AOE etc... and even give you nice rewards in the process. Whereas WoW just tosses you into instances with randoms and you hold down W and press your one attack skill for 15-20 minutes and collect your loot and repeat the process for 120 levels until you're max level where everyone yells at you for not knowing what you're doing.

There's also an actual help channel with people legitimately helping eachother instead of calling eachother faggots and talking about politics.

These things aren't really useful to me, but I can only imagine what a world of difference it would make for a new MMO player.

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I hope they make these necessary in the MSQ at some point though, because so many people still skip them and suck. You get a nice ring for xping too, especially when leveling more chars.

Mentor channel is a mixed bag, really depends on your server. On some it's good, on others it's just dickheads farming cosmetics shit that just call every newb "newb" and don't actually help for shit. There's no real moderation for it for the mentors I think and the mentors aren't even required to actually do mentor shit much, it's one of the systems they should rework eventually, the idea is good but the execution is lacking, although on some servers it works out nicely.

Also try to join a rank8 FC asap, any of them. There's no penalty for leaving so just join a big one then leave whenever you feel like, but FCs have some buffs the officers can set, and pretty much every FC runs 15%combat xp bonus along with something else(crafting xp, gathering xp, reduced travel costs, more GC seals etc). I mean if you have Road to 60 it won't make a huge difference but it's still nice.

Also if you have Road to 60, there's enough MSQ xp to level 2 classes to 50(and probably 60), so I'd recommend trying to level them in parallel to reduce the amount of grinding to catch up, if you want more than one. For example what I did was PLD to 25, then SCH/SMN to 30, then PLD to 30, then SCH to 40, then PLD to 40 etc. You don't have to obviously but if you level just the main one you'll hit 50 doing lvl 35 story quests and then the xp scaling is bad so it'll feel like a waste to do them on a 50, but leveling a char all the way to catch up also feels like it'd take longer, but if you alternate, you'll outlevel the MSQ, then once the MSQ reaches your other class level, you can do it on them and outlevel it again and so on. Slap in a leveling roulette here and there and it'll basically be the same amount of time more or less. Especially useful if you're playing a DPS "main", as getting a healer or a tank to 50 will help greatly for all the dungeons and trials you'll have to do as part of the MSQ.

Dom said:

Yeah, I almost missed the teaching scenarios as the game only really sends you to the area rather than directing you to talk to the guy. I knew from my previous experience that the dude was a mechanics teacher of sorts, but thought it was a waste of time to do, but checked him out anyway and was happy to get some nice rewards.

I'm bouncing between leveling monk and gladiator at the same time to not piss away too much XP. Should I try to work side quests into the process or save them for another job at a later time?

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I didn't bother with a single sidequest and still have more than enough xp on my other account. I think I hit 50 on both chars and I was still on like lvl 44MSQ or something like that. Only sidequests I did were the ones in Uldah where I started to get from lvl 1 to 5 to get going, after that didn't touch anything other than obviously shit to unlock features or content(dyes, glamours, dungeons and so on). Even for alts sidequests are pretty bad xp compared to dungeons, squadron command missions or potd, they're really there for a change of pace and some of them help with world building. I'd leave them until you feel bored.

Also avoid the trailer if you don't want a bunch of spoilers, as usual. The content of the MSQ seems VERY exciting, but yeah shit's like spoilers upon spoilers especially if you haven't finished the MSQ up to 4.4.

The BLU stuff they've shown got me really excited for the class again. We'll see how it goes but I loved the idea of collecting the skills and I like that they went with stuff like a tanking stance on a non tanking class and such. I don't mind it's delayed a week either, gives some time to clear all the new stuff, main downside is I assume the BLU info will be in the files, which means everything will be datamined before it's even available. I'll probably stick to not reading the spoilers and try to figure out the hints to find the skill myself though.

Been farming some poetics to buy a full augmented ironworks set too since I threw away all that garbage once I didn't have any lvl 50s anymore and working on leveling my squadron for command missions if those work since it'll make it easier to learn skills in dungeons(at least the ones available). So far these fucks are mostly getting levels in balanced and independant instead of damage but eh.

Nola said:

So I got my pally to 61, war to level 60 and my dark knight is currently level 51. Leveling up as a tank is pretty much easy mode especially queing up for dungeons. I was torn between a war or a dark knight for tanking. I really like the dark knight job especially coming from WoW playing as a DK but I find constantly spamming dark art and managing MP is annoying. So I may just hold on the drk until 5.0 and see what they plan on doing with the class.

I started on my relic quest last night and I realized that I need to be at least level 19 in a crating job to meld materia into a weapon in order to get the warrior's Bravura. I'm someone who really never bothered with crafting and I literally hated it in every MMO I played. I started leatherworking since it was the first guide I came across. I'm not going to lie crafting on FFXIV is really different from any other MMO I tried. I was actually enjoying myself while doing and it didnt feel like a chore in WoW. I got up to level 11 last night before going to sleep and I'll continue tonight.

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You can actually meld stuff with a NPC nowadays, in all major cities there's a materia melder NPC(look for a blue orb icon). You can also get someone else to meld stuff for you via a menu, but with the NPCs it's a waste of time, that's how the quest was done back in the day though. The only thing you "need" crafting for is getting the New Emperor gear(invisible gear) off the vendor for glamours, but you could buy them on the market from someone else I guess too.

Nola said:

That's another thing I need to work on also. A pair of emperors earrings. I never understood why SE didnt put the option in to hide earrings like helms. My character looks retarded wearing dangling earrings. I checked the market several times and I have yet to see a pair that I can glamour to.

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Probably because there's not much money to make selling these. You need craft lvl... 15 I think it was?. It took me like 5mins with Road to 60 to get one high enough to unlock it though, just bought a bunch of materials from the guild vendor there and crafted a bunch of random shit for first time bonus. Even without Road to 60 it's very quick at these levels, just craft one of each of the simplest stuff, don't bother trying to HQ just spam synthesis, the discovery bonus xp will do its job fine. It's tied to the 2nd dye quest in vesper bay.