cashew | FF14 - Free Trial thoughts of an intermediate N00b

So, FF14 free trial is quite entertaining and engaging. Definitely worth a whirl.

At this point, I've leveled Paladin and White Mage to level 50. I'm working on leveling the Bard, but so far, it's been...less than satisfactory. Probably because I didn't have the ease of using duty roulette bonuses to up up up my levels like crazy.

Thus, new thoughts!

Convenience tips and tricks:

Make sure you unlock Grand Company via MSQ first (level 20 MSQ). This way, when you grind the daily roulette with tanks and healers, you'll earn tons of extra seals to help you quickly promote through the ranks.
As soon as you join a Grand Company, you gain the Chocobo quest. Immediately complete this quest chain to not only get a mount, but also to get an extra 70 slots of storage space. (You start off with 140 slots.)
- Chocobo saddle bag is accessible even without summoning Chocobo. However, items in the saddle bag cannot be used and must be placed into inventory first. It's a good place to store stuff you don't want to accidentally sell off.
You will have so much gil from running daily roulette, don't worry about spending it on teleportation costs. Free trial can't buy stuff from the auction house anyway, so you might as well make travel faster.
If you plan to do a lot of Chocobo breeding, add Bentbranch Meadows to your favorite teleportation list. (You can have up to 3 favorite sites.)
- If you use your teleportation skill (not return), a menu of all teleportable places will pop up, ordered by region. Use this judiciously.
- You can select the teleportation node from the map window, too; y'know, for when you forget what outpost is located where.
On the subject of fast travel, once you gain access to Gold Saucer, traveling between Ul'dah and Gold Saucer is free of charge. Travel to Gold Saucer is also free. Therefore, you should set your home city to one of the other starter cities (Limsa Lominsa or Gridania). This way, you can use "Return" for free to go back to the starter city, hop into Gold Saucer then free travel to Ul'dah. Saves you 120 gil each time you need to head to Ul'dah.
- I set my home city to Gridania because I'm doing Chocobo breeding and that requires a lot of time spent running back and forth between Bentbranch Meadows (south of Gridania) and Gold Saucer.
- Talk to every Chocobo porter (called Chocobo keepers) you see. Some of these porters are located in outposts that don't have teleportation, so using Chocobo porter is the fastest way to get to these regions. (Also great for just enjoying the scenery between bouts of combat.) You will be required to backtrack so much, so have these guys unlocked for faster travel.
To increase UI size, you need to go into system configurations and select the option to scale High Definition UI to 150%. Your eyes will thank you.
No, seriously, consider playing with a controller. Enable WCrossbar and double tap to bring up a whole set of skills.
- You can decide which hotbars are shared across jobs. It's a good idea to keep common hotbar keys on shared hotbars (like the chocobo hotkeys, macros, emotes, items, etc.), while keeping job specific skills and such on unshared hotbars. That way you won't have to re-learn the layout every single time.
Speaking of hotbars, it's a good idea to have two sets of bars: one for when you sync down to a lower level (and thus no longer have access to higher level skills/spells), and one for your current level. If you grind the daily roulette, this will be so, so useful.
Change your UI. Seriously, I think everyone hates the default UI. Go into the character menu and move the UI elements around until it feels comfortable. (I'm so happy after I could swap the compass into the bottom-right corner and shift the MSQ tracker over to the upper-right and bring the target bar to the bottom right over my cross hotbars.)
- You can also individually resize each UI element. I set the overall UI to 150%, then resized the party window down to 80% to make everything fit better. If you like the tiny UI by default and only need to scale up a few things, this is another option (scale goes from 60% to 200%). Definitely scale up the target action bar as high as possible so you can easily interrupt skills and stuff.

Gold Saucer MGP grind (from a n00b who has already spent over 300k MGP):

Have you read the Gold Saucer farming guide yet? Do it. The rest of this won't make sense otherwise.
For mini-games weekly, cuff-a-cur is probably the easiest and fastest in terms of speed, although lower in terms of payout. In terms of speeding through weeklies, this is the one to do.
For the Triple Triad weekly, play the lowest ranked NPC (three of spades I believe). It's faster and easier to win, especially if you put in 15k MGP towards Gold Saucer Attendant (5k) and Roland (10k) cards. It'll take like...20 minutes (?) to complete most of the Triple Triad weeklies. (Don't bother with battlehall, not worth it.) The weekly achievement will give you 13k. Mini-game achievement (easily completed with cuff-a-cur) is 2.5k. That'll be enough to buy the two cards.
Guaranteed success GATE is Air Force One (a rail shooter). You basically can't fail, and even my old lady reflexes can score S rank on a controller. That's 3k per completion. (When I'm really sleepy, I get A rank and get 2.5k. When I'm less lazy and use a mouse, I get perfect for 4k a pop.) GATEs happen every 20 minutes and the events are random. Air Force One only has a chance to appear on the hour and again at 40 minutes past. So, I would advise checking in at :45, see if Air Force One is available or not (the event lasts 10 minutes and takes like 2 minutes to complete), then check if Air Force One will appear at :00 once the current GATE ends. If Air Force One isn't coming up, ditch and go do something else until :45 again.
- You can talk to the GATE keeper NPCs to check what the next event is once the previous GATE finished. If you check in at :45 (which gives you 5 minutes to run to Air Force One if it's still going on), you only need to wait a few minutes to check if the :00 event is Air Force One. You can do other Gold Saucer completion when you're waiting for the next event to pop.
- The fastest way to access GATE keeper NPC is use the Aethernet to warp to Round Square. Head left and the GATE keeper (a tiny Lalafell) will be there.
Leap of Faith is a jumping puzzle and one of the most common GATEs. Jumping in this game is literally worse than GW2. I've been avoiding it, because it's not really worth the time. On the other hand, Cliff Hanger is a much easier jumping puzzle despite the bombs knocking you off the platform. The course is short and I succeed about 90% of the time. It's recommended to grab a job with access to Peloton (any ranged physical DPS). Peloton is a movement buff that lasts 20s with a 4s cool down. Very good for rushing to the NPC to retry the course when you get knocked off.
Combine chocobo breeding and racing. I mean, if you have to race anyway, you might as well breed your super racer. Besides, it's honestly very easy to win prior to rank 40 even if your chocobo sucks. Some tricks about racing:
- Don't worry about the "lathered" condition. Just accelerate as much as possible and limp over the finish line.
- Use items before the next item pops on the runway. Pre-rank 40 races don't have a lot of item strategy so just spam them whenever you get 'em.
- Jump. You can jump over a lot of obstacles on the runway. Also you need to jump to get chests (and thus items). Do it.
- Select Tranquil Paths. It's longer and thus less PC players and thus more wins for you.
- Use gil to buy feed to buff speed and stamina. You don't have to worry about maxing stats or anything during the breeding phase. Just buff enough stamina so you're not running out too early and have enough speed to win more than 50%. (I use about 3 stamina feed for my shitty weakling and have been winning around 70% of my races.)
- You may have to face other players when you race. The timer counts down for 30s, and if no other players join, you race against NPCs. Therefore, the race lasts ~2m30s per round, call it 3 minutes between lag and lollygagging. If you can rank consistently in the top 4, the MGP payout is about 350-600 MGP each race. Not bad when you're waiting for the next GATE.
Verminion is a horrible MOBA game. Grind level 2 for quick wins. Puppy minion (from quest) is probably the fastest (high speed, high attack). Split your minions into two groups, send one group to crystal A and one to crystal B. When one crystal falls, send them to crystal C. I usually send about 8 puppies to crystal B, then the rest to Crystal A. It still takes me ~3-4 minutes to clear. I don't know what I'm doing wrong! (Maybe I should start with crystals A and C first, then run everyone to crystal B last...)
Do your daily cactpot. Remember to pick up your weekly jumbo cactpot. It's pure positive net income. Park your character in Gold Saucer and just grab cactpot if you don't have time. It takes like 5 minutes.

I can easily rack up 100k MGP every week. With the Make It Rain event, I was raking in ~200k MGP (with frankly a disgusting amount dedicated chocobo racing because must...breed...chocobo...). Enough that I bought two bunny outfits and a Gigi triple triad card (so now I'm winning triple triad without even thinking). I'm still trying to do fashion competition, but I need to open more of MSQ before I can reliably farm fashion competition items.

Level grinding other jobs:

For your second job, I highly recommend going White Mage. Get White Mage to level 16 and jump into duty roulette: leveling when you see a call for healer (it's about 50-50 whether the needed role is tank or healer). You get to level a second job and earn bonus seals at the same time. Low level dungeons are pretty straight forward so there's very little chance of wiping.
- Tips on White Mage-ing at low levels: Target lock on the tank. Rotate away to throw Stone or Aero on the mobs when tank isn't dying. You'll automatically switch back to the tank after casting damage on the enemy. Don't let the tank go below 50% HP for the PUGs' peace of mind. If doing Aurum Vale (worst dungeon), make sure to a) Esuna your tank frequently and b) eat fruits that's scattered around the boss room after every two to three stacks of debuff. Stake your fruit out early and wait for respawn instead of running for another fruit.
- Another tip: load Swift Cast and Resurrection next to each other. Always click Swift Cast → Resurrection when rezzing the tank. You really shouldn't need to rez tank unless they're really bad at their job in low level dungeons, tho'. Spam Lucid Dreaming if your MP starts dipping to the half way point.
- Level 50 job quest was a PITA. I swapped over to Paladin to clear all the excess mobs before swapping back to White Mage to finish the quest. Don't be afraid to swap to a tankier job when trying to clear quests for other jobs. The only time you're job locked is during instanced events and when turning in the quest. So swap to a more combat heavy job during in-between times.
Lean on your companion chocobo when in open world. Keep a stack of Gyshal Greens with you (easiest to stock up at chocobo NPC when racing at Gold Saucer). You'll have so much gil the cost is barely worth worrying about. Just buy a full stack each time and replenish when you're down to low double digits. Each Gyshal Green gives 30 minutes of summon, maxing out at 1 hour. Use it frequently, don't worry about wasting summon time. Timer also doesn't go down when you're in a city.
- Chocobo can spec into three skill branches. It's recommended to get healer branch first. Once you get healer skills to level 9 (Increased HP), put all the rest of the points into attack branch. Don't go over level 9 on healing, because once chocobo learns Choco Medica, it will preferentially use Choco Medica, which is an inferior heal to Choco Cure. Ignore the defense branch, it's a waste of skill points.
- Chocobo gets 55 skill points at level 10, which is its max level without Thavarian Onions. This is exactly enough to have level 9 in healer and level 4 in attack (nabbing the burst attack skill).
- Setting the chocobo to free stance is fine earlier on, but in higher level regions, you'll want chocobo in heal stance if you're playing DPS/Tank, and attack stance when you play Healer. Swap stances according to whatever it is that you're completing.
I'm only at level 25 on my Bard, my third job, and one of the things I've concluded is strafing is pointless in open world. Move only to get out of warning orange zones. Otherwise, just face tank and cycle through all your damage as quickly as possible. When grinding levels through combat, try to keep up a chain (i.e. hunt down the same monster repeatedly). You get a chain bonus and every little bit of extra experience helps. Also food. Make sure you pop food before you go on a hunting spree.
- On the subject of strafing - I learned that in the tab-target system (which FFXIV uses), as long as you select the target, all of your attacks will hit if within range. Similarly, if you get targeted by the enemy, their hits will also always hit. Thus, strafing is pointless. Just stand there and do your thing and move out of telegraphed AoE zones when appropriate.
- I'm not convinced doing duty roulette is worth it on a DPS. For one, there's the wait time. For two, DPS in dungeons might sound easy, but if you don't get your rotation down, your tanks are going down no matter how much the healer spams heal. And you have to take out additional spawns and be on top of shit, so...yeah, much harder than running as a healer or tank at lower levels. So many buttons...
Buy the correct gear. Just because a piece of gear is "all classes" doesn't mean its stats are what you need. In terms of stat comparison:
- Tanks prioritize Vitality
- Physical DPS prioritize Dexterity
- Magic DPS prioritize Intelligence
- Healer prioritize Mind
Complete logs, FATEs, Grand Company levequests. Farm farm farm. That's pretty much the purpose of your DPS jobs. Also, if you haven't finished your MSQ on your first job due to over leveling too quickly (which I did when my paladin queued for daily roulette and is now level 52 with MSQ barely half finished), use XP from MSQ to level your DPS. Which DPS you want to use to go through the MSQ is up to you. I just recommend finishing MSQ ASAP so you can get extra content unlocked, instead of being distracted by the Gold Saucer like I was. But, y'know, do you.