Good Morning Friends! I thought I would take a bit to cover something that happens in the FFXIV community with its more populated servers. The first block of servers is a screenshot taken from around 7 pm CDT last night, showing that all seven servers were locked for new character creation. This would give someone the impression that they can’t create a character on the same server as their friends. However, the bottom block is from 7 am CDT this morning, and notice that all of the servers but one are back open if I had to guess if you had checked early enough that one also would have been open.
This is the frustration of playing Final Fantasy XIV since they don’t want “dead” servers to be a thing, they are extremely slow to add new ones. This means that if a player is trying to start the game during prime time hours, they are likely not going to be able to roll on the intended server. It is very important that as you sell your friends on this game, that you also warn them about this possibility. As always there is a nifty website that you can check to see if your target server is open for new character creation. However in my personal experience is that if you log in first thing in the morning, you should be able to create new characters without issue.
In other news, I managed to get my Dancer to level 80 on the 10th and have swapped over and started working on Ninja. I have been taking a fairly deliberate path through some of the classes I am working on, and largely it is due to the fact that I am trying to also come along behind the scenes and clean out my vault of gear I no longer need. I had leveled Bard quite some time ago and recently leveled Machinist which meant that in order to do a clean sweep of all “dex” gear I needed to then level Dancer and Ninja as well. This is an interesting class but I have to admit that the whole Ninjutsu thing is a little fiddly for my tastes. It reminds me a bit too much of the old days of memorizing fighting game movies, but I would imagine this is entirely purposeful. I know the button press combinations needed for the few really useful abilities and I am rolling with that.
At the close of the evening, I managed to get my Ninja up to 57. For the moment at least I am living in South Shroud and running Palace of the Dead over and over. It seems to be the best possible way to really push through the leveling up until 61 when Heaven on High opens up. I am of course doing my daily roulettes which help put on a few easy levels, but there is still a good deal of repetition in running “Palace” over and over again. The positive however is that it seems like a lot of people are leveling alts through this method right now, and I have had some pretty great conversations while running the randomized dungeons.
Once again I am constantly amazed at just how generally chill the community is. We had a few runs last night that went horribly wrong. There are just times through randomization that you get a bad streak of events, and there was one point where everyone but one player was laying dead on the ground and that single-player had to run to the shrine and resurrect us all. No one fell into a yelling fit and no one made a big deal about it… we just pushed forward and finished the ten floors thanking the remaining player for rezzing us. Were these other games, it is entirely likely that someone would have rage quit in the middle leaving us down a player. I had a phenomenally awful World of Darkness run the other day and we gave it five attempts on the first boss, trying to steer players towards the mechanics before someone finally quietly voted to abandon duty. There were no screaming, just constant friendly reminders of how the mechanics worked that were ignored.
Lastly, I thought I would give an update on the housing hunt. My fingers were in fact not fastest enough. I had been periodically poking the placard starting around 7 am my time. As I understand it when a house opens up it will actually be available anywhere between 30 minutes and 36 hours from when it is relinquished. So you are fighting this invisible timer that you have no clue when exactly you need to click. When I took this screenshot that I am reusing, there were only a handful of players trying for the house. By the time it actually went up for sale, there were around a dozen people. I went downstairs to use the restroom and by the time I got back upstairs it was sold to someone who had not even been there waiting with us when I last checked. I am hoping that when the lottery system goes into place, that I will be able to get a house in that manner. Once you have a house, any house it is apparently easier to relocate to another property because you are not beholden to the invisible timer. I still eventually want a small plot in The Mists, and if the world were perfect it would be lot 13, or the equivalent on the subdivision.
Good Morning Friends! I come to you with a heavy heart because last night I realized that we veterans of Final Fantasy XIV have been doing a massive disservice to the sprouts. We have been preaching for so long to completely ignore all side quests and focus only on the Main Story Quest or MSQ, that we have likely been sabotaging attempts made by the Square team to ease the player base into group content. In Final Fantasy games there is a construct generically referred to as the Beginner’s Hall, and generally speaking, it is a room somewhere at the start of the game that has a bunch of NPCs you can talk to in order to get some fairly generic tips about playing the game. When this was put into Final Fantasy XIV as the Hall of the Novice, I completely ignored it because I was already deep in the game at that point and had no desire to talk to a bunch of random NPCs.
The game however really wants us to pay attention to this system, even placing the leader of the guild in all of the starting city Inns. However, when you first encounter this system, you can’t really use it because it requires the player to be level 15 in order to register for training. It has a unique icon that looks like a sprout, so in theory that I am guessing was supposed to indicate to new players that they should be talking to this person. I have been spending some time on an alt on the Primal data center, and yesterday was the very first time I actually engaged with this system. The thing is it is shockingly good and we should probably be telling our sprout friends to make sure they don’t miss it.
This is of enough significance that Square now sends the player there as part of the revised Main Story Quest. It doesn’t however go far enough. I think that realistically it should ask the player to complete all of the missions for their class role before progressing forward. The timing and location of this Hall of Novice is extremely specific, given that it is quite literally located around the corner from the first dungeon you will encounter Sastasha. On the main story quest, you have to go in and talk to the Smith, but you don’t actually have to register for any of the training. The thing is, I knew that you could earn a pretty nice set of gear from completing the training so I went through the process of registering and completing it for Tank.
I’ve played a significant number of different MMORPGs and encountered several systems designed to try and ease a player into group roles. However, I have never seen a system that actually gives you a very firm understanding of how these things work while also setting up short scenarios to test out those skills. For example, as a tank, it fully explained what Enmity is, and how one gains it and then proceeded to put me through a series of paces that were specifically tailored for the job that I was tanking on. It covered things like how to build threat on multiple targets, and which targets to focus on first. It also had an entire chapter on how to get out of things on the ground, and given that FFXIV works slightly differently than other games it is probably a solid idea that players go through this even if they are already used to other MMORPGs.
The training is all well and good, but the real reason why you should always complete the Hall of the Novice is that you are rewarded a set of actually nice-looking gear. Early tank gear specifically looks awful, and through running this series of missions you are awarded gear that is going to probably be your main glamour for about fifty levels. Similarly for the Healer and DPS roles you are given the Acolyte and Foestrikers set appearance, which is one of the more iconic looks in the game. More important than all of this however is you are given a ring that is going to greatly boost your experience gain on all jobs going forward up to level 30. Experience boost gear is always welcome and when combined with the expansion earrings, should serve to make leveling those alternate jobs go at least a little bit faster.
Maybe I am wrong and maybe I am the only person who had completely ignored this system. However I think given how much time we have spent trying to tell people to only focus on the MSQ, that there are probably a large number of sprouts that have never engaged with it. I would also say that if you are wanting to go into Final Fantasy XIV and start dabbling with roles you have maybe never done before, this is actually a very good way of teaching you the ropes. If I were to write out a guide on how to tank, a lot of the topics I would cover are things that the series of missions goes over. We would probably all be better players in general if we ran through the missions for each of the roles. Seeing as I am going to be leveling my healers soon, I am likely going to run through the Novice Hall quest series just to see how well it does on that role as well.
Good Morning Friends! I thought I would start out this morning by talking a little bit about the information I posted over the weekend. For those who may not have read it yet, I wrote some of the various options that you have for leveling alternate jobs in Final Fantasy XIV. More specifically I focused on some of the options that I have actually been partaking of while leveling my own alternate battlecraft jobs. I’ve been more or less following the script and completing my beast tribe dailies, daily crystarium hunt logs, and a handful of the most beneficial roulettes. As a result, my Dancer is roughly one-quarter of the way through level 78 and pending everything going as planned should hit level 80 tonight.
Essentially I have been putting on at least two levels every single day and doing so in a pretty reasonable and chill manner. I’ve not really been grinding anything, with the exception of putting on a full third level yesterday doing Bozjan Southern front. If I keep this up I will actually be able to level everything to 80 well before the Endwalker expansion lands. I will likely vary things up significantly for tanking and healing classes because I can very easily do the whole highest dungeon queue method for those. Another side benefit of all of this process however is that I am getting extremely close to having maxed out all of the battlecraft beast tribes, which is a thing I never thought would actually happen. I am more and more convinced that this sort of method, is what the FFXIV team had intended for leveling alts.
More recently I have had plenty of allowances left over to devote some effort to my gathering jobs. So I am spending an awful lot of time in the Namazu camp because Mining, Botany, and Fishing are all within that level range. It seems like another very easy way to cram on a free level every single day. Once I have finished with the battle jobs, I will probably start abusing these alternate leveling systems in order to push up my crafting professions as well. Final Fantasy XIV seems to really reward doing a little bit of a lot of different things every single day, and maybe just maybe I am mature enough to be able to do repeated tasks day after day until I reach a goal. I’ve always struggled with daily quests because I get bored and wander off before I actually reach whatever goal I am seeking.
I’ve talked at length about how awful of an idea it is to start a second character in Final Fantasy XIV. There however is a single exception to this rule, and that is that you want a character located on another data center. As a result, I actually have a handful of alts that I have created sprinkled out through a few different worlds. More recently I have been spending a bit of time on my alternate character on Ultros in the Primal datacenter. When I last left this character I had gotten it to level 20 and was ready for the Marauder quest. On the Main Story Quest side, I was just about to hop on the airship to head to Gridania from Limsa Lominsa and start the world tour that ends in the first handful of dungeons. I think essentially if I reach a point where I can no longer make easy progress on the job that I am actively leveling… I might start hopping over to some of these alts and throw on a few quests as a chill nightcap for the day. I’ve also not seen any of the ARR content since 2013, so it might be fun to see exactly how that early game worked.
Lastly I am in the market for real estate. One of the other side benefits of this whole “do a lot of things every day” aspect of the game is that the money just sort of materializes from out of nowhere. When I came back to the game two months ago, I was sitting on 100,000 Gil to my name. This morning I am staring at just shy of 5,000,000 Gil. I’ve not really done anything out of the ordinary other than selling pretty much anything that has any modicum of value on the market board and doing a wide variety of activities. I have very specific requirements when it comes to housing, namely that I want a Small House in the Mists neighborhood. This means that I am logging in every morning and checking the housing district for Limsa Lominsa and today I happened to see an opening.
The only problem is… we already have a large number of people camped out at the sign post. It is highly unlikely that I win this battle because I don’t plan on macroing my way to victory. However I am still going to periodically try and purchase the house because apparently there is a hidden timer that starts ticking down when a house goes on the market. There is no actual way to know when you can purchase the house, so you just have to sit here and keep trying. Maybe I will be lucky, but I sincerely doubt I manage to purchase this very first house. I think mostly I want a home because I want to feel even more invested in this server community. I love Cactuar and always have and I want to forever be part of the strange group of loveable weirdos that call it home.
Good Morning Friends! This is a rare Saturday post that I decided I am making today partially in honor of Blaugust and partially because I feel like sharing some information. If you follow me on Twitter you probably have noticed that I have been dropping a bunch of information threads about FFXIV, largely targetting brand new players or WoW transplants. One of the things that I keep mentioning is just how bad of an idea it is to roll new characters in order to play a new job. One of the great things that FFXIV has going for it is the ability to play a single character and have it be viable at every single job available in the game. Starting a brand new character effectively means that you are starting the game over from scratch and there is little to no carryover between these characters, meaning you lose all of your hard-earned mounts, titles, minions, and most importantly cosmetics.
This however is a bit of a double-edged sword, because the Main Story Quest of Final Fantasy XIV is designed to rapidly progress a single job in level ensuring that you are always caught up to be able to do the next quest in sequence. Unfortunately, you won’t have access to the MSQ on your alternate jobs and will quickly find that the ocean of side quests available in the game, just is not a great way to level because they reward a pittance of progression. There are of course a number of ways to grind up new jobs if you really want to “no-life” your way to the level cap. However, over the years I have realized that the game prefers a “variety is the spice of life” approach and rewards you for doing a little bit of a lot of different activities. Once I have adopted this methodology, I have found that leveling becomes pretty straightforward and just an application of days of repeated effort rather than a focused grinding session.
There are a number of activities that are rather rewarding, and I thought I would start by prefacing what I do on an alt that I am trying to level every day. Here is a quick bullet point list, and I will explain each of these further down in the post.
Main Story Roulette
Battlecraft Beast Tribe Dailies
Clan Hunt Logs
PVP Roulette
Alliance Raid Roulette (once it opens up)
Trials Roulette
Leveling/50+ Roulette
Generally speaking, I will hop in a queue for activity, and while in that queue I will be working on either Beast Tribe quests or Clan Hunt logs specifically, allowing that time spent in the queue, especially as a DPS to be productive. On another note, this is largely targetting folks who have leveled a single job all of the ways through the main story quest. If you don’t have a character to the level cap, you really should be focusing on that first. You get a bonus to experience for the alternate jobs if you have a single job to whatever the current level cap is.
Main Story Roulette
This friends is the single largest chunk of experience you are going to get from any activity. Main Story Roulette is a way of Square guaranteeing that every player can always get a group for Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. I’ve said before that Square is extremely adept at bribing players to do the right thing, and it starts right here. If you are on an alt, you are going to get roughly 75% of a level for a Praetorium run and 50% of a level for a Castrum run. I greatly prefer Praetorium even though it is significantly longer because you can semi-AFK during the cutscenes and be doing something else on the other monitor. Do not sleep on this XP boost. Sure it becomes boring and sure there is a specific pattern to the way that these mega-dungeons are run, but the single boost that you can get every day is well worth your time investment.
PVP Roulette
This is another big chunk of experience and I think the secret to why I don’t mind doing PVP in this form is that the player is rewarded effectively the same win or lose. You are going to see somewhere in the vicinity of half of the levels worth of experience from running the PVP roulette every single day. This is something that I would suggest queueing for during prime time however as during off-hours the queues might be a little longer and your time could be served better elsewhere. A side benefit is you gain wolf marks which you can then turn in for pets, cool exclusive weapon and armor appearances, and even a magitek mount.
Battlecraft Beast Tribe Dailies
To be completely honest, I ignored these for the longest time to my own detriment. In “A Realm Reborn” the Beast Tribe quests were not worth that much experience. They were something that I did to earn a reputation and eventually unlock unique dyes and the mounts but not really a net positive on the experience gain. However starting with Heavensward, the quests began scaling with your level and this has increased significantly with Stormblood and no Shadowbringers. For example, doing the three Pixie Beast Tribe dailies can be upwards of half of the level of experience for level 70+ characters.
Each expansion seems to reward more experience than the previous expansion. If you are below level 50, it is still worth doing the A Realm Reborn quests largely because the later quests in the series reward better experience gain than the early ones.
Clan Hunt Logs
Scattered throughout Eorzea are Clan Hunt boards. From them, you can gain hunt bills that can be completed each day and reward a decent chunk of experience, Gil, as well as a specific clan hunt currency for each expansion that can be spent on gear. You can also join in “hunt trains” where groups of players go around the world taking out high-rank hunt targets, but I am not going to get into that today. I am largely focusing on the hunt bills that you can work on at your own pace, and between this and the beast tribe dailies, these serve as a thing you can do while waiting in roulette queues. Each bill will ask you to find a specific target mob in a specific zone and kill a specific number of them. Each time you complete a step on the bill you are rewarded experience, Gil, and the hunt currency. You can find the hunt boards for each expansion in the following locations.
A Realm Reborn
Your Grand Company Headquarters – Limsa Lominsa / Gridania / Ul’dah
Heavensward
Ishgard – just outside the Forgotten Knight Tavern
Stormblood
Rhalgr’s Reach – inside the tunnel by the tomestone vendors
Shadowbringers
The Crystarium – just outside the main Aetheryte on the same level
Alliance Roulette
I had been avoiding this one like the plague, but no that I have started to get my feet about me I gave it a spin. I was shocked by just how much experience these are worth. You can’t start running this until you reach level 50 on the character, but in my experience, it is worth roughly 50% of a level each day. The best time to run these is during the 50-60 grind because it means you will get either Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower, or World of Darkness… all of which are extremely safe these days and tend to go fast and by the numbers. Once you cross that 60 threshold, you start being eligible for monsters like Dun Scaithe that can turn into a horrific wipe fest. I still throw myself against this wall but your mileage may vary.
Trials/Leveling/50+ Roulettes
I am lumping the dungeon and trial roulettes in the same bucket because they are reasonably rewarding, but how rewarding varies wildly based on which activity you end up getting. The roulette itself is worth 15-20% of a level and this can scale upwards greatly if the activity you end up getting randomed into is near your level range so that you are getting decent experience off individual monster kills. They are most definitely worth doing, but not at the detriment of any of the other options you have available to you.
The No-Lifer Grind Methods
Are you the kind of player that prefers to find the most efficient method of doing something and then repeat that same process over and over until achieving the desired result? There are absolutely methods for leveling that follow this thought process. Truth is that I do some of each of these along with the above methods in order to keep things flowing smoothly and keep me from bogging down anywhere along the way. While I ascribe to the “variety is the spice of life” method of leveling, there are absolutely points at which I will grind my way over specific humps.
FATE Grinding
This is pretty straightforward… essentially go camp a zone and take out FATEs for the experience. The best possible course of action is to look in the party finder and see if anyone has a FATE grinding group up. There are a number of steps in the artifact weapon quests that involve grinding fates for some sort of a resource. In many cases, you can ride along with one of these groups and they will benefit from a faster time to kill and you will benefit from reaping all of that experience. If you can’t find a party finder group then the best practice is to choose a zone in your level range and just start doing FATEs. It is very rare that you will be in a zone and not have a group already running around and doing them. Mouse over each of the FATEs and then head towards the one that seems to be gaining progress, chances are you will find a fledgling group ready to go doing them that you can follow around.
Max Level Dungeon Queues
This one is pretty straightforward as well and works best if you are leveling a Healer or a Tank for the shorter queue times. Essentially you go into the duty finder, tick the highest level dungeon that you are eligible to queue for, and then do it over and over until you unlock a new dungeon. Repeat until you have achieved the desired level and also gear yourself pretty well in the process. Doing this as a DPS can suck because you end up with a much longer queue time than the Healer/Tanks and their near-instant queues.
Hunt Trains
This is admittedly one of the methods that I know the least about. On every server, there is a sequence of high-level hunt targets that spawn, and there are groups that are dedicated to running through them in sequence for experience and hunt currency. Generally speaking, these groups are organized out of Discord communities now, so I would suggest you do some searching for your Data Center and see what hunt communities might be available for you. I know this is a thing, and it is a great way of gearing alts… but also I have not really had the time or the mental bandwidth to dive into this system. I am telling you that it exists if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but I don’t have the knowledge to pass it along to you directly, unfortunately.
Deep Dungeon
One of my favorite methods for leveling alternate jobs, especially the 1-50 grind is the “Deep Dungeon” system. These are made up of the Palace of the Dead in the South Shroud and Heaven on High in The Ruby Sea. Essentially it is an alternate leveling scheme that allows you to walk in with no gear and be perfectly effective at playing your class, queueing with strangers, and completing a course of dungeon floors that take somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to run. Palace of the Dead can be started by a character at level 1, slows down after 40, and then slows down again after level 50. Heaven on High picks up at level 61 and can take a character easily to level 70, but again slows down significantly in the 70-80 level grind. While doing the dungeons you have a chance of getting specific loot chests to drop that can be decoded into an assortment of minions and cosmetic armor pieces.
I have to be completely honest, that one of the best guides to understanding how this system works was produced by Square themselves. In order to gain access to each of these there is a short quest chain and below are links to the specific quest that starts each.
I am very new to this system, but essentially this is an alternate leveling system that involves doing battle against the forces of the Empire in an attempt to save the Bozjan people. It opens up for characters over level 71 and in my brief experience, the gain is comparable to that of a Deep Dungeon system. Unlocking the system requires you to have completed the level 80 Main Story Quest and have also completed the entire Ivalice Alliance Raid quest series. Since I am still learning the ropes I am going to refer you to another source for information about this system. All in all, I have found this enjoyable so far and I plan on pushing my Dancer into it some more once I hit level 71.
Summary
One of the other important things that you need to probably note is when the daily reset happens on your server. Each reset you get a fresh batch of all of the above bonuses available to you in order to keep working those levels up. Like I said before, I take an approach these days of doing a little bit of all of these things because it keeps things feeling fresh. However, at various other points in my FFXIV history, I was very much a FATE grinder or a Deep Dungeon grinder. The problem for me at least is that I got burned out on this method of play pretty quickly. I could keep my head down up until the point I achieved my first goal, but then found it extremely hard to start over again with the next class. I ground all of the Battlecraft jobs to 50 using a combination of FATEs and Deep Dungeon for example.
I think ultimately you need to find your own groove and what works for you the best. If I happen across a party doing a FATE I tend to pop in and join the fun, because it will ultimately provide a little chunk of experience along the way. If you employ multiple methods of leveling, I think you too will find that grinding up those Alternate Jobs doesn’t feel quite so grindy. As always if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them below. I hope this guide is useful to someone out there because it certainly took a long time to write this morning.
