Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)
- Thread starter Guzrog
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Malakriss
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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That's what the developers named the content tiers this expansion. 4.0 was Deltascape, 4.2 was Sigmascape, and 4.4 is Alphascape. Raiders realized that was stupid and would be confusing to newer players who wouldn't understand the progression.
Since Omega is the big bad of the story and it's all "Omegascape" players named it O1S through O12S instead of having D1S-D4S, S1S-S4S, A1S-A4S. FF14 has two difficulty versions, Normal and Savage which is where the "S" comes from.
For a very generic outline
Everything to 15
Culinarian to 37
Carpenter 50
Weaver 50
Everything to 50
is the level order I've been told to optimize cross class skills. Beyond that, I haven't touched crafting at all yet, and only just started leveling my first gatherer.
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Cybsled
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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You'll eventually want them all A lot of the trade skill combines use stuff from other trade skills, and many skills cross over and can be used with other trade skills.
However, if you're looking for low cost of entry, first of all make sure you have mining and botany leveled (or level them along with your trade skills). Being able to supply your own raw materials makes leveling a cinch. Personally I leveled carpentry first since it was pretty easy and the majority of housing furniture is made by them. However, as I leveled carpentry, I also tried to level some of the synergistic skills. For instance, a lot of the furniture also needed stuff armorer, alchemy, and goldsmith could make, so I leveled those around the same time.
There are a bunch of leveling guides I found online. You can get a general idea at high level here.
Crafting - Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn Wiki - FFXIV / FF14 ARR Community Wiki and Guide
edit: Neuad's outline is good, but one thing to keep in mind is those recommended skills are because of the cross skills. Culinarian gets steady hand II at 37, which makes you 30% more likely to succeed at an action (the normal steady hand is 20%) for 5 steps. Awesome skill, but culinarian is a pain in the ass to level once you get past the vendor mats phase (some of the recipes want an absurd about of different materials to make) because it isn't as "single source" as mining and botany fed skills are. Even if you fish, it's going to want all sorts of other shit for recipes as well. When I leveled it, I just bought a ton of cheap food off MB and ran leves with that lol.
A lot of the trade skill combines use stuff from other trade skills, and many skills cross over and can be used with other trade skills. However, if you're looking for low cost of entry, first of all make sure you have mining and botany leveled (or level them along with your trade skills). Being able to supply your own raw materials makes leveling a cinch. Personally I leveled carpentry first since it was pretty easy and the majority of housing furniture is made by them. However, as I leveled carpentry, I also tried to level some of the synergistic skills. For instance, a lot of the furniture also needed stuff armorer, alchemy, and goldsmith could make, so I leveled those around the same time.
There are a bunch of leveling guides I found online. You can get a general idea at high level here.
Crafting - Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn Wiki - FFXIV / FF14 ARR Community Wiki and Guide
edit: Neuad's outline is good, but one thing to keep in mind is those recommended skills are because of the cross skills. Culinarian gets steady hand II at 37, which makes you 30% more likely to succeed at an action (the normal steady hand is 20%) for 5 steps. Awesome skill, but culinarian is a pain in the ass to level once you get past the vendor mats phase (some of the recipes want an absurd about of different materials to make) because it isn't as "single source" as mining and botany fed skills are. Even if you fish, it's going to want all sorts of other shit for recipes as well. When I leveled it, I just bought a ton of cheap food off MB and ran leves with that lol.
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Nola
Trakanon Raider
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How difficult is it to tank normal mode alphascape? Im currently level 68 Drk and my ilvl 277. Pyros made an excellent fresh level 70 gearing post which I will follow. I've done two SB primals on normal and they were both pretty easy. I did Dom castle the other day and I noticed I was taking hits harder than usual and mobs were taking longer to kill. I had to use defensive cooldowns more often on trash packs. I guessing my ilvl is starting to catch up with me. What ilvl should I be when upon hitting 70. I know the final Drk class quest gives the spell Blackest night and some chest full of armor.
dvoraen
Lord Nagafen Raider
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i290 is the "fresh 70" ilvl, because the job chest and related (crafted) accessories are that.
i340 is the "ready for 4.2" threshold (in terms of raiding)
i370 is the "ready for 4.4 and 5.0" threshold
In terms of getting caught up on MSQ, you will want to be i340, as that's the requirement for the 4.4 dungeon running for MSQ. That's relatively painless to get, courtesy of Centurio Seals, but it will probably take a few casual days to get that many to outfit yourself and upgrade (bearing in mind you can do Ishgard and 4.0 daily bills to get 2-3 pieces a day).
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You should always use cooldowns, they're free after all and in dungeons especially, trash mobs are more dangerous than bosses generally speaking. Main issue with leveling dungeons is there's a steep increase in defense between levels, not so much between ilvls after that. For example the difference in defense between i330 and i360 chests of fending is only 76, but the difference between the Violet Shisui chest and the Doma Castle chest(only 4levels and 12ilvls apart) is 259. So the later leveling dungeons if you haven't been lucky with armor drops you'll take a lot of damage, so make sure to cooldown appropriately or your healer will hate you.
For the outline I gave, you could start farming centurio right now by doing the Ishgard daily bounties, as well as whichever ones are unlocked in Kugane. They give xp anyway so it's not bad to do and you'll be able to stockpile some centurio before you hit 70. Also on the centurio step, you probably don't want to waste time getting a full set of 330, you just want to do all the bounties you can at the time, buy as much gear as possible, and keep progressing the MSQ while you unlock the higher dungeons. For example you want to unlock Arboretum (Hard), quest is Secret of the Ooze in Rhalgr's Reach once 70, it requires i340 to do but drops i355, which is basically as good as mendacity gear almost so you can run that and get genesis/mendacity/i355 upgrades and you'll go from 340 to 360super quick. Same for The Burn, however this one is part of the 4.4 MSQ so it won't unlock as soon.
To get to 340, centurio+mendacity should get you there. Do your MSQ, run every 70 dungeons once for bonus mendacity( Progression and Level Locked Content – Gamer Escape for dungeon list, click the SB tab to find all the quests that unlock the dungeons), as well as hard mode primals once for bonus too and it should be easy. My recommendation would be to get a genesis ring or belt asap, they're one of the cheaper piece so you can get it in one reset and they'll be useful basically until next expansion(ring especially due to how rings work and are unique but belt will boost your defense more). Dump mendacity on accessories/belt too for efficiency and centurio on left side. It's not optimal for tanking, but it'll get the job done if you pull small and cooldown and you'll replace left side with dungeon drops quickly anyway. And if you have the money/know a crafter, get a Rakshasa Blade asap.
Once you have enough for alphascape, maybe check a video out of what to expect. If you're at min ilvl you most likely won't be tanking anyway, so you're just a DPS with very high defenses, which makes those fights pretty easy. There's no tank swaps or anything until O12 which requires 2 tanks for the 2nd part of the fight(definitely look up an ability check on this fight, it's actually not that easy to tank if you have no idea what you're doing between the pushes off the platform and the big tank busters). Hopefully by then you have full i355-360 gear so it shouldn't be a big problem anyway.
Also one less recommended way of gearing but depends on your server and your experience with the game, if you've done it before, joining an active Hunt linkshell at cap, you can farm tomes at an incredible speed. It's a bit weird of a system and some servers don't have very good hunt organization so it'll really depend, but if people are actively looking for hunts and killing them efficient, you can generate thousands of mendacity per hour just killing what amounts to slightly harder trash mobs.
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Nola
Trakanon Raider
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Nice that should help me out greatly especially gearing my DRK. Going to try to get to 70 so I can begin my gearing process. Will the new dungeons have a ilvl restriction on them?
There's so much content in this game. The other day I got sidetracked from leveling and spent the whole day crafting and actually liking it!
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You need 360 for the new dungeon(only one) so it's not that great for catchup gearing but it's a lot easier to get gear in it than in alphascape since you can need on everything for your class and not have to roll against 7other people(unless you're DPS and another DPS using the same gear queued). So it'd be kinda preferable, however it's unlock in the current MSQ so it takes a while to get through that, while I believe you can do alphascape right after finishing the 4.0 SB MSQ, although you do need to do every previous raids first, so that might take a while too.
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I feel the endgame suffered a bit this expansion due to having too strong skills. It's just very easy to make macros that 100%HQ. Sure you might need some HQ mats(that you can 100%HQ yourself, reducing the overall costs) but even with fairly cheap melds I can HQ everything, and since I'm a cheap fuck I rewrote every "standard" macro to work with NQ tempuras I buy from the NPC in Kugane instead of having to use Matcha+Tea HQ like most guides recommend.
It's still fun though and the leveling tends to be pretty interesting. Also it's great money, eventually.
Nola
Trakanon Raider
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Where can I get the quests to start farming centurios? I found the centurio NPC vendor and apparently a questgiver besides her but keeps telling me I need complete Elite and Dangerous. I googled it and suppose to be a NPC in Foundation but didnt see the breadcrumb questgiver for it. I'll look around more when I get home from work today. This is the main thing that drives me nuts about this game. Everything is gated behind a damn quest.
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The requirement is having The Hunt unlocked. This is done at your GC for the original ARR hunts, you need Second Lieutenant rank with your GC, then go do Let The Hunt Begin (your GC). Once it's done you should have Let the Clan Hunt Begin in Ishgard, you do that and it should unlock the first rank of bounties and unlock yet another quest, do 2 of these for each rank of the bounties then you're done with Ishgard bounties. There will be a similar questline in Kugane after you're done with 3ranks depending on your lvl(if you're not 70 you can't unlock the 3rd iirc)
The centurio ones are pretty nice because they're quick to do and give decent xp every day, plus the centurio seals obviously. The ARR bounties are shit but you can do the weekly quickly for Allied Seals which buy you mount speed in ARR zones(not SUPER useful especially after they added mount speed from MSQ, but it's still nice and it's like 2mins a week anyway).
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