New to FFXIV and crafting in general. A couple questions

Hey everyone! So I'm new to FFXIV. I've actually been a big FFXI player for awhile, but got burnt out a little last year. Wanted to try a new MMO and figured I'd go with FFXIV since I've already been playing FFXI. Anyways, I've been enjoying FFXIV for the past couple of weeks. The battle system is a little inferior to FFXI IMO, but the crafting system is vastly superior to FFXI's RNG nightmare system. It's something that is interesting me way more now than it ever has before. Just a little about me: I'm a self-sufficient crafter. I was that way in FFXI, and I plan to be in FFXIV too. I like gathering my own stuff. It's more realistic to me, and I actually enjoy my peaceful rotation of gathering the materials I need and then crafting as I go. It's time consuming, for sure. But I'm not obsessed with getting to level 80 as fast as possible. It's more about the experience and wanting to fully understand the ins and outs of crafting. I was telling my friend that it feels like it's own game in FFXIV.

Anyways, I've been following Caimie's guide to crafting, as well as another detailed guide that I forget the name of but seems to be pretty popular. I've gotten all my DoH to 15. I was then spending time leveling CUL to 37 (it's at 27 right now) as the guides suggested to get SHII. Like a fool though, I finally read the patch notes for SHB today, and saw that both SHII and Blessing are no longer cross-class skills. My plan was originally to level CUL to 37, ALC to 50 then do the rest to 50 before moving on. With SHII and Blessing no longer being cross-class skills, it doesn't really matter any longer what I level to 50 first? Also, I'm assuming leveling to 50 will be harder since I won't have access to SHII for each job until 37, and blessing until 50?

It seems like a lot of people on this forum are already super advanced crafters, so I don't know if you'll be able to help answer. I'm guessing I'm just wondering how these changes will affect levelling DoH classes to 50. And shout out to Caimie for such an amazing guide. It's been super helpful!

- If you're gathering your own materials, divvy up your HQ materials to make your initial quality level higher. HQ items help a lot when having no access to certain actions.
- Doing your daily GC turn in is great XP.
- Focus on melding CP if you're coming up short on quality.
- You can practice your rotations using https://ffxivteamcraft.com/simulator
- When picking a job to focus on, look at the recipe list and see which other jobs crafts are used in that tier of recipes.

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Originally Posted by Cleanse

- If you're gathering your own materials, divvy up your HQ materials to make your initial quality level higher. HQ items help a lot when having no access to certain actions.

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While this is good advice in general, I would add that if you're only grinding on a particular synth or series of synths where you having an HQ result is not necessary but are just grinding while getting as much exp as possible out of each synth, then using HQ mats will only serve as a detriment as it lowers the maximum bonus exp you can get, which is proportional to the amount of quality you can push out of it.

As for which to level first, some skills are still gated behind certain classes that you'll definitely want sooner or later. Off the top of my head I would say (listed in order of what I assume would be priority if grinding from scratch today)..

1. LTW 15 for waste not (you can take it to 50 for waste not II as well but it won't make a huge difference)
2. WVR 50 for careful synthesis II
3. ALC 50 for comfort zone
Tied 4th? BSM to 50 for ingenuity and ingenuity II (although just ingenuity will serve you fine for a long while)
Tied 4th? ARM 50 for piece by piece

PbP is mostly meh now at level cap though, as are some others, but I think there's still some synths and/or level ranges that would benefit from it?

TC .. since you are interested in gathering your own mats, I’d suggest using those mats as ‘tiers’.

CRP has a new recipe at 16, for Elm Lumber. That’s one mat ‘tier’, that lasts until CRP 21’s Yew Lumber, which lasts until 25’s Walnut Lumber. BSM and ARM have level 16 Iron Ingot, which is a ‘tier’ that lasts through both of those CRP tiers (Elm and Yew), before starting something new at 26, Steel. GSM’s Brass goes from around 14 to around 26. Thus, the tiers are not in sync between classes.

But, despite this, I’d suggest trying to level the crafters up by tier. Don’t take one class up to 50, 60, 70, 80 while the others are languishing at 15. This will help by keeping gear up to date. Without melds, and without any HQ materials, its possible to start reliably (still subject to RNG, but but more often than not) getting HQ results but only if your gear is HQ and up to date.

Cross class moves are not as required nowadays. But, they’re still quite useful for leveling up.

Thanks for the advice everyone! I think i'm going to do tier leveling as Roth_Trailfinder suggested, which I've sort of been doing anyway until I started leveling up CUL specifically to get SHII, which is now moot. I've been keeping myself geared up and crafting mostly HQ stuff already. I guess the other quesiton is I should be keeping my gatherers slightly ahead of of the DoH classes, so I can effectively gather the materials for each DoH class I'm trying to level?

Its a good idea to level gatherers up before crafters, if only because they’re the ones that’ll be getting the bulk of your materials, right? Have you looked at how much Iron Ore you need? Sure, you can buy it from a vendor, but the Miner would get a ton of exp farming it all up for you.

With that in mind, I’d suggest using your two free retainers as combat classes, ideally your main class. This way, they’ll be able to level up the most, and get you the combat drops that you need while you’re out mining or gathering stuff. You are going to need more than a few hides, of various types, to say nothing of the other various odds and ends that become necessary at various points, all the leaves, blobs, teeth, bones, eggs, etc.

Another thing at low levels is you can get the GC bonus items (engineering manuals) and just grind out (quicksynth) some low level crafts to get you up to like 10-15 easily.

First step is to get all the DoH and DoL classes up to level 15, including doing the class quests.

Once that is done I'd actually recommend leveling all of the DoH/DoL classes in parallell so that they are all at similar levels.
Two reasons for this:
1) That way you only need two sets of gear, one for DoH classes and one for DoL classes. Reduces inventory pressure a lot.
2) You can gather and/or craft all the materials you need for all your crafts. Never any need to buy any of it from the MB. That will save you tons of gil.