Started playing via the free method. I'm level 18. It's been probably 10 years since I've played a MMO.
I was doing pretty much every quest I saw, and treating this like Borderlands or some other game, and then I traveled from Ul'dah to Gridania due to some quest (maybe the main one?) and started picking up every quest I saw like usual. And then it hit me this is a MMO and I'm in a starting area. And a lot of the quests are level 1.
So, aside from me realizing I'm old. I also realized I'm probably doing this all wrong. What should I be focusing on as a level? It's a bit intimidating honestly. Do I just do Blue+ quests or something?
Yeah just MSQ(the flame/meteor icon, there's a tracker for it if you didn't hide it in the top left of the screen) and blue quests which unlock content(dungeons, features like ventures/mounts etc or side content like Gold Saucer). Also they're blue but make sure you do your class quests every 5 levels, they give you some weapons for 1-30 but more importantly unlock important skills at 15 and 30 and are required for your job quests for the skills every 5 levels from 35 to 50(plus free AF armor at 45+). Granted the free trial stops a while before that but still.
Sidequests were more relevant back in 2.0 when the xp was kinda shit so you had to do some to get to the next level and so on, but nowadays they should be skipped, you can do them once you decide to lvl an alt class, since this game lets you play everything on one character, which also means you can't reuse the quests you used on your first char, so you can do sidequests or just chain run dungeons(much faster tbh).
Consider sidequests as just xp fillers for the most part, a few have interesting stories or are referenced later on, but it's very rare(and starting Heavensward the interesting one are clearly marked, by having a fancy image on their quest log page).
And yes the main quest will take you to all 3 cities around lvl 15, then it'll merge(if you made a character in Gridania instead for example, you'd have a different storyline for the 1-15 part, you meet different Scions, Uldah's one is the best in terms of overall story though).
