How to level in Heavenward

I've seen a lot of people struggling with leveling and complaining about using all their side quests for their first 60. I'm almost 58 and I've played an average of 1.5-2 hours a night and I've yet to do any side quests except for what's needed for Aether Currents. It's pretty simple:

1. Main Scenario: Should go without saying but running through MS is a major chunk of EXP and is your way to progress through each zone.
2. Daily Clan Hunts: Unlocks at level 53 in Foundation that gives you access to the Clan Hunt board. At level 53 this is over 100k experience every day. At level 56 it's near 250k exp every day. AND gets Centurio seals you'll use to buy end game gear. No brainer.
3. Duty Roulette: You have Low Level, High Level, and Main Scenario that give massive daily bonuses, and they take 25-30 minutes each. Do at least one or two a day.
4. Challenge Log: Great way to break up the monotony of the other tasks that you have an entire week to do. 10 fates and 20 levequests that you split throughout the week at your leisure and they don't even have to be done in Heavensward. You SHOULD get your dungeon challenge logs by default by doing at least one dungeon every day. And you get free exp each week just for sending player commendations.
5. Unlock Flying ASAP: When you get to a new zone through Main Scenario go through slowly at first and get introduced a bit through where Main Scenario takes you and then time a chunk of effort to find all 10 on foot aether currents. Then work on getting all the aether current quests done. The goal is that when main scenario lets you finish that last aether current quest that should allow you to start flying in an area. This will greatly increase the speed that you can do another tasks - most notably the clan hunts. It will especially help your subsequent 60's.

In the 2'ish hours I play every night I do 1 or 2 roulettes, all my clan hunts, some challenge log stuff, and I spend 20-30 minutes doing main scenario quests. I've only been restricted by the next main scenario quest by level only a single time and that's only because I focused on Main Scenario exclusively one night. And I have nearly all side quests for leveling subsequent 60's. There are lots of ways to level in this game and efficient leveling with utilize a bunch of them. If you just sit and spam the new dungeons you'll burn out quickly. Mindlessly FATE grinding is way too slow outside of what's necessary for the challenge log. Levequests are gated behind allowances. Ignoring clan hunts not only is missed experience but will require more grinding for level 60 gear.

There's only ONE thing I want SE to do, and that's add experience points from trash killed in High Level Roulette / Main Scenario Roulette. But other than that you have plenty of options and the grind will be over before you know it. As casual as a player as I am I'm going to go from 50-60 in probably less than 2 weeks. That's pretty quick for an entire expansion of new content.

It's obvious, Fates suck hard. Despite that, it's still worth the small amount of time to do them if they are close by. All those 10 and 15k exp rewards add up in the long term.

I am currently level 58 at level 56/57 main story quests because of this. At this rate I will hit 60 well before the main scenario quests catch up to me. I owe this to opportunistic Fate grinding.

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Originally Posted by Riastrad

It's obvious, Fates suck hard. Despite that, it's still worth the small amount of time to do them if they are close by. All those 10 and 15k exp rewards add up in the long term.

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It's exp/hour that's the killer with Heavensward fates. They have tons of health and actually take a while to complete. The effort for reward just isn't there. If you're going to FATE grind it's actually more experience per hour to grind Northern Thanalan for FATEs. I just do my 10 needed for the challenge log and ignore them in heavensward unless it's opportunistic to join in on an epic FATE. I pretty much meander around the zones these days just for the clan hunts and doing FATEs in between would actually slow my leveling down.

I'm only talking about doing them when they are close by. There's no need to rush to a boss fate or a normal one that's almost finished. Never grind them to the point of nauseum. If you do, the exp return would be very slow indeed.

Supplement your quests with them and they fill the gap nicely.

I agree with everything except the challenge log.

In a post-50 world, your challenge log is nearly worthless as a percentage of exp needed to level up. You're much better off using it to boost your sub-50 jobs. The dungeon exp will probably go to your main job just because, but active challenge log completion on a 50+ job is a waste of time.

Couple of things to add there.

Grab leves for the zone you will be questing, as its extra quests in the zone. If, on your way to a quest and pass a FATE in progress, jump in or just do enough to earn gold and move on if no one there. It's still XP and both add up. I got to 60 on MNK and still had some 56 quests, majority of 57 quests and all of 58-59 quests left for levelling PLD.

The challenge log don't scale past 50, but they scale down sub-50. Besides, sub-50 jobs already get the 100% Armory Bonus so they don't need further boosting. It's more efficient to use the challenge log for 50+ jobs if only just to avoid getting less EXP reward from the log.

To elaborate, on the one hand, you can use it for 50+ jobs that has no extra boost and gain the maximum reward every single time. On the other hand, you can use it for sub-50 jobs that is already getting extra boost and gain a scaled down reward.

In the end, you require the same amount of total EXP across all the jobs you want to be at 60. Using the challenge logs for sub-50 jobs mean that the total EXP you get "for free" from challenge logs is reduced, which in turn means you need to make up for them in some other way, i.e. less efficient.

I ve got to 60 without using any side quest . i kinda never do those side quests anyway.. lol
main story + leveling in dungeon was quite ok imo. a few dungeons per level should be ok.

Just because the challenge log items don't scale past 60 doesn't mean they aren't a great source of experience. Since you should be doing dungeons anyway that's 3 challenge log rewards that you should be getting without even aiming for them.

The challenge log offers a way to break up the monotony of the other tasks. Take a break from dungeons for a bit and hammer out a couple fates. Or do a few levequests. 20 levequests + challenge log can alone be around 650k experience. 10 Fates + challenge log can be over 300k experience. Sprinkling those in between your other activities throughout the week to snag near 1 million experience? Sounds worth it to me.

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

Couple of things to add there.

...If, on your way to a quest and pass a FATE in progress, jump in or just do enough to earn gold and move on if no one there. It's still XP and both add up. I got to 60 on MNK and still had some 56 quests, majority of 57 quests and all of 58-59 quests left for levelling PLD.

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This really only worked for me in Coerthas Western Highlands, Dravanian Forelands, Cloud top area where there were a lot of active people in the zones that can't fly yet. Once I got to Churning Mists I noticed no one doing FATEs, so there were hardly opportunities to "jump in an out of opportunistic FATEs". I think that's valid advice from 50-53 but beyond that you won't find much opportunity for it.

Northern Thanalan FATE farming, sadly, is the best EXP / hour . . . .

I made a bunch of calculations, including a 3 hours FATE farming in N.Than, then comparing it to FATEs in Western Coerthas, and to Dusk Vigil . . .

Welp, you can rack up to 11,000 EXP per minute with N.Than . . . I dunno why, but FATEs never take more than 2 minutes to respawn LOL

Gorgirema FATE acutally doesn't scale in HP and melt in 25 seconds.

That Steel boss fate near Mor Dhona frontier does scale, it had +1,000,000 HP LMAO, sadly, when you have 350 bots punching it, it still dies in 30 seconds ^^

What is particularily stupid is the fact that Lv.49 FATEs in N.Than give the same EXP as Lv.51-52-53-54-55-56 FATEs in 3.0 areas ... Add in the fact that despite the HP scaling due to the massive zerg, they still get completed in less than one minute ...
That they are soooooooo close to each other + 2 aetherytes to teleport to...

On the other hand, IF you have a LOT of rested XP, Dusk Vigil gives about the same: 10,500 ish EXP / minute (340,000 if you can run it in 32min ish ...)

But when out of rested EXP... N.Than FATEs suddenly become king again.

This is really stupid to see people there up to lv58+ still grinding lol.

FATE bosses actually despawn / respawn due to the hundreds (thousands?) of bots with their chocobo companion, and I have "Display quantity of objects and players" on minimum... (Happenened three times on the Red Baron FATE)

Overall, leveling a second job is even more boring than in 2.0 era =/

Duty Roulette: You have Low Level, High Level, and Main Scenario that give massive daily bonuses, and they take 25-30 minutes each. Do at least one or two a day.


I just wanna chime in and say the duty roulettes are 100% not worth it. All three only reward as much as a heavenward dungeon's clear EXP for completion - and unless you get a heavensward dungeon out of the low level roulette (unlikely), you're missing out on the oodles of EXP the mobs in those dungeons give you (esp bosses).

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Originally Posted by nyttyn

I just wanna chime in and say the duty roulettes are 100% not worth it. All three only reward as much as a heavenward dungeon's clear EXP for completion - and unless you get a heavensward dungeon out of the low level roulette (unlikely), you're missing out on the oodles of EXP the mobs in those dungeons give you (esp bosses).

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Do you have some numbers? It would be interesting to check actual numbers.

Im almost 59 and my main story is still around churning mist (54) because of daily roulette. When I reach 60, it will be a waste doing main quests, I have to stop doing daily roulettes.

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Originally Posted by Zfz

Do you have some numbers? It would be interesting to check actual numbers.

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About 332,000 RESTED xp for Dusk Vigil (lv51 dungeon) in about 32 min with average DF team. I think it was about 215K unrested ?
in comparison; 348,000 RESTED XP for The Vault (lv57) - > UNRESTED = 234,000. Takes about 27-32 minutes also

Now low level dungeons ... Mobs don't give thousands of EXP, but barely 500 exp lol. And bosses give wayyyyy less as well. If you maange to get 50k EXP from a low level dungeon, that will be a miracle. That's why 50-75k eXP + 130 K from roulette isn't worth it when you can farm 200k + stable in 'high' level heavensward dungeons, especially with a premade (SMN ♥) able to speedrun aoe trash packs in seconds (for ex I managed a sub 22 minute run on Neverreap with 2 SMN for LAW farming)

In the end, side questing gives about as much as current highest level heavensward dungeon you can run. Unless you take more than 3 minutes per side quest to complete it on average . .. (was an average of 10K EXP / minute)

Now if you have a Lv60 already, sadly Northern Thanalan gives the most EXP if you don't have instant dungeon queue times, and even if you do, you still get more EXP if you aren't with RESTED bonus EXP lol

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Originally Posted by Hyunckel

Now low level dungeons ... Mobs don't give thousands of EXP, but barely 500 exp lol. And bosses give wayyyyy less as well. If you maange to get 50k EXP from a low level dungeon, that will be a miracle. That's why 50-75k eXP + 130 K from roulette isn't worth it when you can farm 200k + stable in 'high' level heavensward dungeons, especially with a premade (SMN ♥) able to speedrun aoe trash packs in seconds (for ex I managed a sub 22 minute run on Neverreap with 2 SMN for LAW farming)

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The mobs in the low dungeons I've done give thousands of xp per kill. Just recently I did stone vigil and each mob gave 3k something xp

High, low, trials and Main Scenario all give 100-nearly 200k exp for completetion. Add that in with daily clan marks and it's not hard to level a second job, with or with side quests. Also mixing in a Heavensward dungeon helps.

Of course, this isn't the best exp/hour, but it is a viable alternative to smashing your face against the Northern Thanalan FATE wall.

Vault gives more than 350k exp when rested, what a joke.

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Originally Posted by Hyunckel

Dusk Vigil (lv51 dungeon) in about 32 min with average DF team. I think it was about 215K unrested ?
The Vault (lv57) - > UNRESTED = 234,000. Takes about 27-32 minutes also

Now low level dungeons ... Mobs don't give thousands of EXP, but barely 500 exp lol.

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50k from a low level is simply not true. Did you actually enter through the roulette?

If you enter through the roulette, each mob in low level dungeons will give at least over 1k EXP, some over 3k. I have not seen anything lower than 1k EXP per mob unless it's AoE trash that dies in 3 seconds. The seedlings in Aurum Vale, for example, if you let them hatch, each gives more than 3k EXP. The seedlings plus the Morbol in the room itself already exceed 50k.

Now obviously if you have a premade, it's faster to farm your own dungeons. But without a premade, roulettes are great EXP.

Trial Roulette has been giving me 90k~100k per trial. Main Roulette gives 200k~240k. Low Level Roulette probably about the same (and you could get the new dungeons, too).

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Originally Posted by Callinon

I agree with everything except the challenge log.

In a post-50 world, your challenge log is nearly worthless as a percentage of exp needed to level up. You're much better off using it to boost your sub-50 jobs. The dungeon exp will probably go to your main job just because, but active challenge log completion on a 50+ job is a waste of time.

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It's nice to have it completed though...as you have different targets in each class. (the new jobs don't have one because they're only jobs) Also, you'll be plowing through them anyway if they pop up in suggestions and you're a completionist.

Also at this point I'd do the side quests that give equipment at least. So you already have the gear for the next class/job when it reaches the appropriate level. (I haven't seen any lately that hands out jewelry though...GRRRRR!)

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Originally Posted by Solaria_Luna

It's nice to have it completed though...as you have different targets in each class. (the new jobs don't have one because they're only jobs) Also, you'll be plowing through them anyway if they pop up in suggestions and you're a completionist.

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I think you might be thinking of hunting logs, not challenge logs.

And I think the improvement to the armory bonus was meant to offset the lack of hunting logs for the new jobs. Daily clan hunts are meant to replace hunting logs above 50.

its not huge, but Sightseeing awards 18,000 xp per find... you could save them for your second job, or use them to get you over a hump. There's like seven per zone... and there are guides out there to find them...

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Originally Posted by Geryth

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While I agree with most of the things you said, half of these only apply to people who take their time getting to level 60 on their first jobs. This won't work for people who want to rush to 60 in 2-3 days. For your first class to 60, if you decide to level it all the way in one weekend, you will eat up all the MSQ and side quest and will have to grind dungeons / fates for half your level for both level 58 and 59. What you said does work for alts though. I like to do all the roulette and challenge log every day / week to maximize the bonuses.

And they definately need to add XP to the level 50 dungeons. Otherwise the only dungeons you have to level from 50 to 51 is Aurum vale and that place is horrible due to the quality of players that runs it, and you would have already ran it a bunch of times level 47 to 50 (unless you grind fates and stuff).