This post is heavily inspired by: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/eubmuy/road_to_70_my_experience/ so before I start credit to dx96 as without his post I doubt I would have been inspired to do this. In light of this I'm going to structure my post in a similar way to his.
The results:
https://imgur.com/TpYnLU9
https://imgur.com/GToXUn7
I was able to get all DoW/DoM and all DoH/DoL jobs to 70+ in exactly half the duration of the road to 70 buff (45 days). I also beat ShB and got my lvl 80 main a set of the 480 crafted gear as a present. To achieve this I did play a considerable amount, somewhere around 10 hours a day on average over the 45 days. You may have noticed that some jobs are actually over 70. This is because while levelling AST at 69 I decided to queue for an MS roulette and got praetorium. Because the buff was still active and the exp from that dungeon is insane I managed to skip over level 70 entirely. I tried this same strategy with pretty much every other job, however I got castrum something like 6 times in a row and so if it wasn't for poor RNG a lot of my jobs would be 71 instead.
Main Scenario Progress:
Originally I was expecting to get to Shadowbringers before doing anything else as that's usually what I do on mmos. However after realising the road to 70 buff only lasts 90 days I instead changed my goals to maximise the use of this buff. I would recommend focusing on the MSQ to at least Stormblood before attempting any of the other steps as it makes things much easier.
A Realm Reborn
I started the game in the typical mmo fashion of accepting every single quest I could find and completing them all to hand-in in bulk. Due to the buff however I quickly realised this was a bad idea when I was already level 20 before even getting to the level 10 MSQ. By the time I got to level 15 and could leave I was already over level 30 on my main and decided to pick up a few other side jobs to level as well. My original main was arcanist because I really liked the look of scholar and always like playing healers for fast queue times. This was a great decision once I hit 30 as I could do the quests as a summoner and then queue for dungeons as scholar for instant queues. To start with I was watching every cut scene and reading all the dialogue but at around 20-30 MSQ I started skipping and eventually by the end I was skipping virtually everything except major cut scenes. I finished ARR in about 30-35 hours and the post game stuff in another approximately 10-15 hours. For the post game stuff I skipped absolutely everything just to get through it and went back and watched them afterwards before starting heavensward. During ARR I was generally 7-10 levels above the MSQ at all times on my SMN/SCH and I also levelled a paladin up to around 35-40 and a ninja to 30. In general while running the MSQ you will be 5-10 levels ahead of the MSQ at any point right until the end of SB, thus it might be worth levelling a dps and a tank/healer at the same time here to get more bang for your buck. Ideally you want to quest mostly on dps because they're harder to queue for and queue for the MSQ duties on tank/healer because otherwise you waste time in long queues.
Heavensward and Beyond
From Heavensward on wards I did not skip any MSQ cut scenes and read every piece of dialogue available. This made the content significantly more enjoyable but meant it took me around a week to beat HW. In between beating the main portion of HW and the post game quest lines I picked up all the jobs and levelled them all to 30. Once arriving in Stormblood I took an extended break and spent most of my time getting every single job to 50+ and spending a little time on crafters with ishgardian restoration. Once that was completed I continued on with the story however I found that during HW and now in SB playing as SCH/SMN was ruining the cut scenes for me. The armour on this job always looks awful in my opinion and whenever there's a battle you just get a book out which looks stupid and ruins any cut scene you're in. Because of this and because it fit with the theme of SB I switched mains to Ninja while also levelling paladin as well to have instant queues for MSQ duties. Once beating SB I took another little break and levelled a couple of other jobs to 70 while doing the post game very slowly. At this point I picked up Red Mage and decided I wanted to make this my main in Shadowbringers. Since there's the trust system I wasn't reliant on levelling a tank/healer for instant queues so it was perfect. By virtue of just switching mains and playing around I already had SMN/SCH, NIN, PLD and RDM at level 70 before starting Shadowbringers.
Squadrons:
As you'll see in my levelling method I made heavy use of squadrons. Outside of running premade dungeons with good teammates I believe squadrons is the fastest method to level when you have the road to 70 buff. The reason is because for things like quests, leaves, fates and logs it acts like a 100% buff however for kills it also doubles all your other buffs so you can get over +500% xp bonus with all the other buffs and rested xp. Since dungeons are already a very fast method of levelling this just makes them insane and heavily weights them against all other forms of levelling.
Because I knew pretty early on I was going to be using squadrons a lot I unlocked them as soon as I possibly could. As soon as grand companies became available I started working on collecting seals and completing the hunt logs to rank up until I hit 2nd lieutenant and could unlock my squadron. I then used: http://ffxivsquadron.com/ to keep track of my squadron and to solve the squadron missions so I could always do the highest level one to level up the fastest. Luckily for me my challenge log popped shortly after unlocking so I could get a few new recruits and start running squadron dungeons right away.
Roulettes and Beast Tribe Quests:
Although the vast majority of my levelling was through squadrons I don't want to underestimate how good daily roulette's and beast tribe quests are for levelling. They are probably the largest xp/hr things you can do in the game. I would highly recommend looking up how to unlock all the roulette's and the beast tribes and get into a habit of spending a few hours every day doing them. Without doing this every day it would have taken me significantly longer.
Levelling Method:
The method I used to level was very similar to dx96's with some slight alterations:
Squadron members I used were mostly: Conjurer, Maurauder, Arcanist and Archer with Archer being replaced by dps job and all on offensive level 5 spec except tank on defensive. Generally because the AI's stats are broken the fastest runs are playing as either healer or tank. When playing as tank be a little conservative with your pulls as the healer ai seems to only start casting once you're below 50% and if they're casting something else they won't cancel to save you. The ai doesn't really use aoe skills so there isn't much point in doing large pulls anyway. As healer it's pretty much a cakewalk as everyone has huge hp pools and you tank is way over geared.
You may notice that I don't make any mention of palace of the dead. I really did not like it and had some really bad experiences with groups wiping at floors 30 and 40 which made me give up. If you wipe in PotD then you lose all the xp and it is a complete waste of time. For me the risk that I might get a bad group was too great and the xp from farming 1-10 was too low that I stopping doing it after about 4-5 times. I assume the xp is much better when you're farming 51-60 but I didn't have the patience to get there and with the buff don't being as effective here I didn't see much point. Given this I haven't unlocked the SB deep dungeon heaven on high and can't comment on that.
Gearing
Crafter and Gatherer Jobs:
For crafting and gathering I levelled them in a pretty similar fashion to dx96 however again with some slight differences. I also relied heavily on GC turn ins, especially starred ones however at a certain point I realised I was spending 2-300k gil a day just doing all of these or I would waste 3-4 hours gathering and crafting if I wanted to make them myself so I changed my strategy. I made heavy use of https://ffxivcrafting.com/ to look up materials for recipes. Note for most of these I never bothered doing the job quests past 20. One of the first things I will do before getting them to 80 is lookup all the items for all job quests and hand them all in, in bulk.
DoH:
DoL:
Bonus Blue Mage Section:
As you can see I also got blue mage to level 60. I don't however mention this at all in the section above and that's because I did 1-60 in around 45 minutes total. To do this you use the same method I talk about in the 1-18 levelling section above. You tag high level mobs then get a high level friend to 1 shot them. For blue mage you get around 200-300k a mob depending on the chain bonus and it goes very quickly. I spent maybe 2-3 hours one day getting BLU skills as well.
Conclusion
So that's my experience with the road to 70 buff. I would say that it's definitely possible if you play somewhere in the region of 5 hours a day for the 90 days. It's probably possible with even less play just you have to be a little more efficient with your time than I was. The buff is absolutely outstanding for levelling alts and when you get to 70+ and start running ShB content you really feel how much of a difference it makes.
submitted by /u/kewickviper
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...
The results:
https://imgur.com/TpYnLU9
https://imgur.com/GToXUn7
I was able to get all DoW/DoM and all DoH/DoL jobs to 70+ in exactly half the duration of the road to 70 buff (45 days). I also beat ShB and got my lvl 80 main a set of the 480 crafted gear as a present. To achieve this I did play a considerable amount, somewhere around 10 hours a day on average over the 45 days. You may have noticed that some jobs are actually over 70. This is because while levelling AST at 69 I decided to queue for an MS roulette and got praetorium. Because the buff was still active and the exp from that dungeon is insane I managed to skip over level 70 entirely. I tried this same strategy with pretty much every other job, however I got castrum something like 6 times in a row and so if it wasn't for poor RNG a lot of my jobs would be 71 instead.
Main Scenario Progress:
Originally I was expecting to get to Shadowbringers before doing anything else as that's usually what I do on mmos. However after realising the road to 70 buff only lasts 90 days I instead changed my goals to maximise the use of this buff. I would recommend focusing on the MSQ to at least Stormblood before attempting any of the other steps as it makes things much easier.
A Realm Reborn
I started the game in the typical mmo fashion of accepting every single quest I could find and completing them all to hand-in in bulk. Due to the buff however I quickly realised this was a bad idea when I was already level 20 before even getting to the level 10 MSQ. By the time I got to level 15 and could leave I was already over level 30 on my main and decided to pick up a few other side jobs to level as well. My original main was arcanist because I really liked the look of scholar and always like playing healers for fast queue times. This was a great decision once I hit 30 as I could do the quests as a summoner and then queue for dungeons as scholar for instant queues. To start with I was watching every cut scene and reading all the dialogue but at around 20-30 MSQ I started skipping and eventually by the end I was skipping virtually everything except major cut scenes. I finished ARR in about 30-35 hours and the post game stuff in another approximately 10-15 hours. For the post game stuff I skipped absolutely everything just to get through it and went back and watched them afterwards before starting heavensward. During ARR I was generally 7-10 levels above the MSQ at all times on my SMN/SCH and I also levelled a paladin up to around 35-40 and a ninja to 30. In general while running the MSQ you will be 5-10 levels ahead of the MSQ at any point right until the end of SB, thus it might be worth levelling a dps and a tank/healer at the same time here to get more bang for your buck. Ideally you want to quest mostly on dps because they're harder to queue for and queue for the MSQ duties on tank/healer because otherwise you waste time in long queues.
Heavensward and Beyond
From Heavensward on wards I did not skip any MSQ cut scenes and read every piece of dialogue available. This made the content significantly more enjoyable but meant it took me around a week to beat HW. In between beating the main portion of HW and the post game quest lines I picked up all the jobs and levelled them all to 30. Once arriving in Stormblood I took an extended break and spent most of my time getting every single job to 50+ and spending a little time on crafters with ishgardian restoration. Once that was completed I continued on with the story however I found that during HW and now in SB playing as SCH/SMN was ruining the cut scenes for me. The armour on this job always looks awful in my opinion and whenever there's a battle you just get a book out which looks stupid and ruins any cut scene you're in. Because of this and because it fit with the theme of SB I switched mains to Ninja while also levelling paladin as well to have instant queues for MSQ duties. Once beating SB I took another little break and levelled a couple of other jobs to 70 while doing the post game very slowly. At this point I picked up Red Mage and decided I wanted to make this my main in Shadowbringers. Since there's the trust system I wasn't reliant on levelling a tank/healer for instant queues so it was perfect. By virtue of just switching mains and playing around I already had SMN/SCH, NIN, PLD and RDM at level 70 before starting Shadowbringers.
Squadrons:
As you'll see in my levelling method I made heavy use of squadrons. Outside of running premade dungeons with good teammates I believe squadrons is the fastest method to level when you have the road to 70 buff. The reason is because for things like quests, leaves, fates and logs it acts like a 100% buff however for kills it also doubles all your other buffs so you can get over +500% xp bonus with all the other buffs and rested xp. Since dungeons are already a very fast method of levelling this just makes them insane and heavily weights them against all other forms of levelling.
Because I knew pretty early on I was going to be using squadrons a lot I unlocked them as soon as I possibly could. As soon as grand companies became available I started working on collecting seals and completing the hunt logs to rank up until I hit 2nd lieutenant and could unlock my squadron. I then used: http://ffxivsquadron.com/ to keep track of my squadron and to solve the squadron missions so I could always do the highest level one to level up the fastest. Luckily for me my challenge log popped shortly after unlocking so I could get a few new recruits and start running squadron dungeons right away.
Roulettes and Beast Tribe Quests:
Although the vast majority of my levelling was through squadrons I don't want to underestimate how good daily roulette's and beast tribe quests are for levelling. They are probably the largest xp/hr things you can do in the game. I would highly recommend looking up how to unlock all the roulette's and the beast tribes and get into a habit of spending a few hours every day doing them. Without doing this every day it would have taken me significantly longer.
Levelling Method:
The method I used to level was very similar to dx96's with some slight alterations:
- 1-18: (~1 hour) Start by doing your job quests and also the first two pages of your hunting log. I would kill anything with the hunting log symbol while doing the quests then look up on the wiki if there are any in the area nearby. If you have a high level friend another thing you can do is go to a high level zone with them and tag mobs while they 1 shot them. 1-20 takes around 30 minutes then.
- 18-20: (~15-60 mins) This is the first of the awkward levelling spots. If you're a tank/healer it's worth doing a quick level roulette or dungeon or ask your fc to help. Otherwise I would do either leaves or fates to bridge the gap.
- 20-50: (3-4 hours) Do your lvl 20 job quest then start running squadron with Halatali then doing each of the following until the next unlocks: Toto-Rak -> Brayflox's Longstop -> Stone Vigil -> Aurum Vale. At 30 you're going to want to do job quests and upgrade your job. Gear up with drops from the dungeon but its not that important since your squadron will be doing most of the work anyway. This can be quite slow at the beginning but once your squadron are levelled up and you have the level 5 abilities it goes much faster. Drzemel hold and the level 50 dungeons are not worth doing in my opinion.
- 50-53: (1-2 hours) This is the second awkward levelling spot. Catch up with job quests then again do either roulettes, dungeons, HW beast tribe or fates. A daily run in the praetorim will basically get you to 53 in 45 mins. If you run out of options running Aurum Vale here until 53 is not actually that bad and probably preferable to the other options.
- 53-61: (3-5 hours) This is the most grindy section, you're going to want to do squadron runs of only Sohm Al. You unlock the vault at 57 but you get at least 5 mil an hour doing Sohm Al which is more than you get with the vault and has much less chance of you wiping due to dumb squadron ai. As always make sure you're running daily roulette's and beast tribe during this section to make it go faster.
- 61-70: (4-6 hours) You want to run the highest SB dungeon available. Generally each run will get you 50-75% of a level. 3 Runs of each should comfortably get you to 70.
Squadron members I used were mostly: Conjurer, Maurauder, Arcanist and Archer with Archer being replaced by dps job and all on offensive level 5 spec except tank on defensive. Generally because the AI's stats are broken the fastest runs are playing as either healer or tank. When playing as tank be a little conservative with your pulls as the healer ai seems to only start casting once you're below 50% and if they're casting something else they won't cancel to save you. The ai doesn't really use aoe skills so there isn't much point in doing large pulls anyway. As healer it's pretty much a cakewalk as everyone has huge hp pools and you tank is way over geared.
You may notice that I don't make any mention of palace of the dead. I really did not like it and had some really bad experiences with groups wiping at floors 30 and 40 which made me give up. If you wipe in PotD then you lose all the xp and it is a complete waste of time. For me the risk that I might get a bad group was too great and the xp from farming 1-10 was too low that I stopping doing it after about 4-5 times. I assume the xp is much better when you're farming 51-60 but I didn't have the patience to get there and with the buff don't being as effective here I didn't see much point. Given this I haven't unlocked the SB deep dungeon heaven on high and can't comment on that.
Gearing
- For 1-50 I stuck almost exclusively to dungeon gearing. I kept most of the pieces around until every job had passed that point then I turned them into GC seals. By the time I got to my last few jobs they already were fully geared out for the dungeon before even starting it.
- At 50 I generally got ironworks for most jobs and supplemented here and there with HW crafted gear and rewards from MSQ. I got at least the ironworks weapon on every job.
- From 50-60 I just used gear from Sohm Al and from the half dozen or so vault runs I did before abandoning it in favour of Sohm Al.
- At 60 on my paladin, ninja and scholar I got the shire set and this was good enough until 70.
- From 60-70 I used a combination of the gear from dungeons, rewards from MSQ and crafted/vendor gear.
- At 70 I got the scaevan gear for every single class. Given I was running most of the roulette's every single day for 45 days I easily had enough poetics to fund this.
Crafter and Gatherer Jobs:
For crafting and gathering I levelled them in a pretty similar fashion to dx96 however again with some slight differences. I also relied heavily on GC turn ins, especially starred ones however at a certain point I realised I was spending 2-300k gil a day just doing all of these or I would waste 3-4 hours gathering and crafting if I wanted to make them myself so I changed my strategy. I made heavy use of https://ffxivcrafting.com/ to look up materials for recipes. Note for most of these I never bothered doing the job quests past 20. One of the first things I will do before getting them to 80 is lookup all the items for all job quests and hand them all in, in bulk.
DoH:
- 1-22: (~1 hour) I just did a combination of the job quests and crafted one of every item from 1-20 on my crafting list. For the majority of these the materials can just be bought from NPCs or for very cheap from the MB. This generally got me somewhere around 22-24
- 22-40: (~30 mins) For this I did a couple of GC turns ins but did it mostly through ishgardian restoration turn ins. I figured out roughly how many materials I would need then went out and gathered them or bought off MB if cheap enough which only took maybe 1-2 hours, then used a macro to craft all the materials on each job which took maybe an hour.
- 40-70: (~10-30 mins a day) If the GC turn in was starred or the HQ version was cheap on the MB I would buy that on a daily basis. Each day would catch up lowest job with beast tribe. Spent an hour or two over a few days doing ishgardian restoration to catch up the rest to 70.
DoL:
- 1-39: (~2-3 hours) For Mining and Botany I just did the job quests until around lvl 40ish. I found that just by spending my time gathering the materials for the job I would get enough xp to accept the next job. This got me to around 38/39 I believe so I stopped after that.
- 39-70: (1-5 mins a day) I did this almost exclusively with HQ GC hand ins. With only a bit of searching it was very easy to find cheap prices on the MB for these hand ins.
Bonus Blue Mage Section:
As you can see I also got blue mage to level 60. I don't however mention this at all in the section above and that's because I did 1-60 in around 45 minutes total. To do this you use the same method I talk about in the 1-18 levelling section above. You tag high level mobs then get a high level friend to 1 shot them. For blue mage you get around 200-300k a mob depending on the chain bonus and it goes very quickly. I spent maybe 2-3 hours one day getting BLU skills as well.
Conclusion
So that's my experience with the road to 70 buff. I would say that it's definitely possible if you play somewhere in the region of 5 hours a day for the 90 days. It's probably possible with even less play just you have to be a little more efficient with your time than I was. The buff is absolutely outstanding for levelling alts and when you get to 70+ and start running ShB content you really feel how much of a difference it makes.
submitted by /u/kewickviper
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...