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@“TarpeianRock”#p82602 Do you recommend prioritizing, delaying or even totally ignoring any of this Extra Stuff? I think I threw in the towel after watching a video where the person was like, “ideally, you’ll want to level-max all of the crafting and gathering jobs as you go through the MSQ.” nno…
Personally, I think it's 100% A-Okay to ignore almost all of it until you've chewed your way through the MSQ. I probably lean in this direction further than Syzygy, though, as always, Syzygy is definitely correct about most of these things. Although, I will offer my own perspective on some of these regardless:
- Crystal Tower is now mandatory by design, but I personally wouldn‘t know at what point they make it mandatory, as I both blew past it before it was made strictly mandatory but also ended up doing it anyway before it was made strictly mandatory… wait, that’s a lie, I had done all of the requisite dungeons, but didn‘t do the concluding story quests until it was absolutely mandatory, so, if it’s still made mandatory at the same spot, it won‘t be mandatory for a good long while. Do it now! It didn’t necessarily bother me, but as I understood it, I waited to do it until the dumbest possible moment.
- I basically skipped the conclusion of Coils of Bahamut, after having unsubbed and stopped playing after doing the first two thirds of it legit when it was being released. I don't think I regret it too much, but it's good stuff, don't do what I did.
- After ARR, the raids end up becoming more removed from the story than Crystal Tower and Binding Coil, but there's some juice that will at least get nodded toward in the main story. Up to you how much time you feel that is worth. I think the encounter design in Omega, the 8-person raid in Stormblood, is particularly fun.
- Definitely agree that Squadrons should be done ASAP, but to not worry about going in to deep. There is a lot of very useful player functionality gated behind it, and it takes time more than effort, so the earlier you can get it going the better. Just do whatever it is that your Grand Company says you need to do to keep applying for promotions, once you're no longer eligible for further promotion, you should have everything that you need/want from that.
- Palace of the Dead is good functionality in terms of an XP source from levels 1 through 60, but it's also very evergreen, as in, you can check them out any time and have a roughly similar experience. At the very least, make sure you're doing it on a Job that will benefit from the XP it gives, so that, eventually, when you end up doing it because you know it's good XP but it has become mind numbingly boring, you won't kick yourself for doing it on a job that didn't benefit that much from the XP.
- Definitely agree with Syzygy about how the older dungeons are more fun, but I think it's also pretty evergreen content as well. The experience won't be drastically different if you're at the appropriate level or not due to how ilvl, level scaling, and queuing works. There are a shitload too at this point so it will take time getting through them all.
- Unlocking Gold Saucer won't take long and it will offer a lot of regular, low impact diversions. Worth it if for nothing else for cruising around it a bit, seeing if there are any items you like ([my favourite mount in the game](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Adamantoise_(Mount)) is a Gold Saucer item), and figuring out how to do the [Mini-Cactpot](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/playguide/contentsguide/goldsaucer/cactpot/#:~:text=The%20Mini%20Cactpot%20is%20a%20lottery%20limited%20to%20three%20ticket%20purchases%20per%20day.%20Before%20purchasing%20a%20ticket%2C%20players%20must%20first%20complete%20the%20following%20quest%3A) once per day. It's a fairly simple way to slowly accrue the Gold Saucer currency without much time or effort. That's how I got my mount!
- If you want a low commitment way to dip your toe into player housing, you can buy an apartment for 500,000gil. There is a separate apartment building in every housing subdivision in all of the current housing districts, and, unless things have changed drastically since Endwalker came out which I doubt, the supply of apartments has always been high. I may have seen a few individual apartment buildings in specific subdivisions that were full, but I've never seen an entire district without any available apartments. Apartments don't have _all_ of the functionality that detached houses on their own grounds do, but they have a lot of useful functionality, plus you can place furniture (and functional furniture as well as Menders and Materia Melder NPCs for your very own use). Plus, if you get said NPCs set up in your apartment, they give you a super convenient Teleport destination for mending, materia melding, accessing your retainers (either right outside the apartment building or you can even buy a bell as a functional furniture piece), and checking the marketboard.
- One thing I will add, make sure you've unlocked and at least roughly understand Materia Melding and Spiritbonding, at least enough to know that what you want to do when any gear you're wearing completes its spiritbond, what you'll want to do is extract a materia out of it. Also, put all your materia in a big pile somewhere, definitely don't vendor it, and just know there _is_ a chance that you _might_ someday wish you were accruing materia instead of running around as a noob with 100% spiritbond on half of your gear because you forgot to read the tooltips for it when they first came up, and that you _may_ wish you had a big mountain of junk materia for mysterious reasons that you don't currently understand. Just trust me on this one.
- Leveling every crafting and gathering job as you progress through the MSQ is _borderline insane._ That being said, I _really_ liked leveling all of them at once it when I did it which was NOT while I was doing the MSQ, but I did focus on it like that. There are a good handful of reasons why you would want to have them all leveled and to level all of them at once, no crafting job is truly independent for instance, they all require intermediate materials from each other, and while you can always get them on the marketboard, for freaks like me at least it's more fun to be able to do it all yourself. Crafting jobs also share most of their gear, so, you don't have to juggle 10 gear sets if you level them all at once or worry about packratting a Varnished White Oak Gorget of Intermittent Artisanry for 200 playtime hours because you don't want to have to buy another one for 500gil in two years when you level Blacksmithing instead of Carpenter. Either way, though, I don't really see a reason to do it at the same time you're leveling or doing the MSQ. I think it would be too distracting. In fact, some of it is easier if you can get around easily, having a flying mount 100% helps with gathering just in general for example, and/or trivialize certain things which involve combat (like farming reagents or skins if you're a cheapskate).
- If you _are_ interested in leveling the economic jobs at least trailing behind your main combat job, which isn't a bad idea, pick one between the two main Disciple of the Land jobs (Mining or Botany), pick one or at at two of the Disciple of the Hand jobs, and assume you don't ever need to level Fishing (unless you want to). Even if you do intend to level all of them at once, there are actually lots of ways it becomes easier to level them once you've got one ahead of all of them. Including but not limited to having access to things which are frequency limited but XP/resource smorgasbords like weekly [Custom Deliveries,](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Custom_Deliveries) Collectables, Ishgard Restoration, being able to get Scrips, daily Grand Company deliveries, and as well a fantastic way to spend levequest allowances (which unlike for combat jobs are an excellent way to level crafting and gathering), which are capped at 99 and accrue daily. Basically, there is a lot of daily/weekly stuff that, if you were to devote spare time to it regularly, are fantastic sources of XP that are in some ways optimized for occasionally dipping your toes into it as you go along. If you're the sort of person who will kick themselves once you find out you could have been accruing a resource passively while doing one thing and then blowing it all in bursts to level quickly without much effort, there is probably more of that sort of thing with the economic jobs than there are with the combat jobs, and that's saying something, because there's a lot of that for combat jobs. Including...
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beast tribes
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@“Syzygy”#p82709 I don’t think the stories are that good, and the EXP on offer is (last I looked) inferior to later options like PotD, Wondrous Tails, or even just the Challenge Log.
- Also lining up with how useful levequests are for economic jobs as opposed to combat jobs, the DoH/DoL centric Beast Tribes are excellent sources of daily XP and other resources. They are also things in which you can trivialize the difficulty of them if you have an overleveled job. As in, you can press two buttons and slap together the quest objective item on your level 90 Goldsmith, and then turn it in as a level 7 Alchemist and get the full reward as if you had done it as an Alchemist. They also get and then stay better for leveling as your progress further within them, so, being Sworn with the Moogles for example makes those daily quests a better source of XP than before.
- Also I really loved the story for one of the DoH/DoL Beast Tribes. It's the Stormblood one!
Otherwise, yeah, there are tons of systems, but I really wouldn't get distracted by them except for these notable exceptions where pretty essential character functionality or QoL features are locked behind them and the game doesn't necessarily point it out. A whole lot of the game is also totally evergreen, and designed to offer a pretty consistent experience whether you try it at minimum level to access or at max level, for better or worse. So, like, as I understand it, doing Workshop Expeditions or whatever will be either roughly the same if not arbitrarily more complicated to do now as opposed to months from now once you're level capped.
