There needs to be a better way to level DoM/DoW.

Lately, one of the things that has been annoying me most about XIV is the total lack of options on how to level up DoM/DoW jobs that are actually reasonable and fun and non-grindy. So let's explore the options that I can think of, and discuss the problems with it:

1). Quests: Quests are too few and far between and can only completed once. They simply do not yield enough XP to make them a viable source of levelups.
2). Beastman Tribes: You only get 12 allowances per day, and not counting Ixals/Moogles/Namazu (craft), the XP is similarly terrible and each Tribe can only give 3 quests per day which is barely even noticeable on the XP meter. Add to the fact that once you get Lv50, there are only 2 tribes at any given time you can even do quests for anyways for a total of 6 quests per day which, again, isn't even half a level. I wonder if it is even 25% of a level. I doubt it.
3). Dungeon Roulettes: Only once per day. Doing roulette after your daily reward will oftentimes put you in low level dungeons that yield next to no reward. This gets worse, higher you go. Going into Sastasha at 50+ gives you pretty much nothing for the whole dungeon without the once per day reward.
4). Specific Queue for relevant level dungeon: Takes absolutely forever for DPS to actually get a group for one. XP starts falling off in the 60+ range.
5). FATEs: lol. XP isn't really worth bothering with. Takes far too long to complete some of them, and the XP reward is not very good even with bonuses once you get past 50 or so. There's a reason you rarely see people at the FATEs.
6). Palace of the Dead: Gets old real fast. A neat idea, but making this the ONLY way to get XP more than once per day, means that people would grind this until they got so sick of the place they don't wanna touch it anymore.

Seriously, we need more/better options on how to do it, especially for DPS classes. I'd suggest the following:

1). Buff Beastman Tribe XP to be more like the crafting ones. Craft Tribes give 20% or so XP per quest. Why is it, the others only give like 5% per quest? Something seems kinda off about that.

2). Buff FATEs to give more XP to make them worth doing (though you would likely need to adjust them so that they can be done with fewer players because some of them are nigh impossible to do solo).

3). Add something like Eureka, but only allow a player to get Character XP along with the other XP gotten in there, but is sync'd to a level far lower than 70, perhaps 50.

1. They've already touched on sidequests not giving enough exp and I believe their solution is to buff the exp given in future sidequests rather than adjust old one.
2. Similarly I found older beast tribe quests to yield very little experience while SB gives me about 1/2 a level if I do Ananta and kojin.
3. Daily roulettes are fine, u shouldn't be doing them more than once unless u can literally only get dungeons around your lvl.
4. Specific dungeon ques will always be tough for dps but they yield good exp.
5. Fates 100% need work, I like the steps they did with the SB fates but not adding those additions to older area fates was a mistake, wouldn't hurt to sell a item from your GC that gives u a boost to exp from fates.
6. I agree that Potd can get boring which is why I tend to only use it if I really need that little extra to lvl up and I've done everything else, the addition of HoH sounds like it'll be a refreshing take on deep dungeons.
7. Although niche in it's lvl grind (lvl 41-51) running stone vigil in the command missions with ur squadron is a super fast way to get exp in that lvl area where u don't have all your roulettes yet.

I do believe the combat classes have enough choices to level to the max in a reasonable amount of time.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

I do believe the combat classes have enough choices to level to the max in a reasonable amount of time.

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Yeah I second this.

Some other things probably worth noting:

Squadron
Challenge Log
Leve Quests
PvP

Dungeons do not fall off after 60. I've been leveling my guys from 60-70 with just dungeons and it only takes an average of 3 runs per level.

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Originally Posted by Cirgellon

Dungeons do not fall off after 60. I've been leveling my guys from 60-70 with just dungeons and it only takes an average of 3 runs per level.

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That's good and all, but you know, the 20-30 minute wait per dungeon? That means that's like a solid 3-4 hours for one level, and only 45-60 min or so of that is actual doing stuff.

Also, to reply to the person who mentioned Levequests... that's a joke, right? For example my RDM is 52. Pick up quest in Foundation, and go hauling butt clear over to Tailfeather, and come back for 15k-60k XP. lol. Is that even worth doing? I mean, a FATE at least gives you ~40k and you don't have to do so much travel and backtracking, teleport fees, etc. It would have killed them to put leves in towns like they did in ARR?

But even so... 50k is a drop in the bucket when you need 1 million to level.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

That's good and all, but you know, the 30 minute wait per dungeon? That means that's like a solid 3-4 hours for one level, and only 45 min or so of that is actual doing stuff.

Also, to reply to the person who mentioned Levequests... that's a joke, right? For example my RDM is 52. Pick up quest in Foundation, and go hauling butt clear over to Tailfeather, and come back for 15k-60k XP. lol. Is that even worth doing? I mean, a FATE at least gives you ~40k and you don't have to do so much travel and backtracking, teleport fees, etc. It would have killed them to put leves in towns like they did in ARR?

But even so... 50k is a drop in the bucket when you need 1 million to level.

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Do other stuff while waiting. There is a ton of stuff to do in this game, and level 60+ quests are giving 200k+ exp.

Alright, so I think the reason why the crafting beast tribes give so much compared to the others is due to the abundance of ways to level combat jobs. Here's how crafters stack up:

Levequests: Solid XP, but limited by however many leve allowances you have
Individual crafts: Peanuts XP
Crafting log record: Decent chunk of XP (if around your level), but one-off per item
Beast tribes: Good XP, but only 3 quests daily (7 if you're lucky to have a rank up that grants extra quests for the day, unless under 50 and doing Ixali beast tribes)
Custom deliveries: Good XP (55+ only)
Collectables: Not great XP, but can keep doing them infinitely. Works in tandem with individual crafts. (50+ only)

Basically, combat classes have around the same number of ways to level. Under 60, gatherers haven't even got Beast Tribes as an option (but retain all other options, replace crafting/craft log with gathering/gather log). As for DPS queue times, if you make a PF (unless it's at a stupid time), they DO fill up, at least on Chaos. Meaning you can grab tanks/healers for quicker queues.

You're also forgetting the leveling bonus from having an already-max level job, which is intended to offset not having quests/sidequests.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

That's good and all, but you know, the 30 minute wait per dungeon? That means that's like a solid 3-4 hours for one level, and only 45 min or so of that is actual doing stuff.

Also, to reply to the person who mentioned Levequests... that's a joke, right? For example my RDM is 52. Pick up quest in Foundation, and go hauling butt clear over to Tailfeather, and come back for 15k-60k XP. lol. Is that even worth doing? I mean, a FATE at least gives you ~40k and you don't have to do so much travel and backtracking, teleport fees, etc. It would have killed them to put leves in towns like they did in ARR?

But even so... 50k is a drop in the bucket when you need 1 million to level.

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You can use Leve Quests to bump yourself into the next bracket for challenge log or dungeon unlocks for those inevitable times you are 100k or so off from a level. Which is useful since challenge log exp rewards scale with level. The amount of exp they give does not eliminate them as an option for DoW/DoM to gain experience for leveling.

Furthermore, you seem to be ignoring that some of these things can even be "double-downed" on, or in some cases "triple-downed." For example, while waiting in your thirty minute dungeon/roulette queue you could accept BST tribe quests and do any FATEs that are available en route to each quest. Pre-60, you can even accept some leve-quests for the area you are going to do the BST tribe quests in beforehand.

Once BST tribes and leve quests are exhausted you still always have the option to do FATEs while waiting on dungeon/roulette queues.

Side quests truly are low, i had saved alot of quests for my last few jobs, well turns out i saved it for my last one which was DK and the exp after doing the majority of them was so low i got more experience running fates especially with the bonus exp ones.
Back in ARR we had a hunting log which did help.
The Beast Tribes do also help, if you get in a routine of doing everyday you will level up.

Squadron i had tried but just did not yield enough exp to warrant time doing it.

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Originally Posted by Maero

Side quests truly are low, i had saved alot of quests for my last few jobs, well turns out i saved it for my last one which was DK and the exp after doing the majority of them was so low i got more experience running fates especially with the bonus exp ones.
Back in ARR we had a hunting log which did help.
The Beast Tribes do also help, if you get in a routine of doing everyday you will level up.

Squadron i had tried but just did not yield enough exp to warrant time doing it.

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Ahh... you mentioned a daily routine which reminded me of yet another option for DoW/DoM leveling in HW/SB

Daily Clan Mark Hunts
also gets you 250 Centurio a day, a clan book every two days.

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Originally Posted by Kazrah

You're also forgetting the leveling bonus from having an already-max level job, which is intended to offset not having quests/sidequests.

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Not to mention the Brand New Ring, Ala Mhigan Earrings and the Company Action XP buff. The armory bonus included, you get up to +150% XP until 30, then +120% XP until 50.

Use the trip from 51 to 70 to get good with your job, because I still see people doing the most basic errors in them.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

That's good and all, but you know, the 20-30 minute wait per dungeon? That means that's like a solid 3-4 hours for one level, and only 45-60 min or so of that is actual doing stuff.

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I feel like 3-4 hours per level if you're just straight-up leveling is pretty reasonable. (I'd love to hear the FFXI crowd's opinion on that, lol.)

Leveling in this game gives you a choice between leveling efficiently and leveling immediately. I leveled all of my secondary combat jobs using nothing but daily clan hunts (HW and SB), daily roulettes (leveling, trials, and sometimes 50/60) and the Kojin beast tribe quests once they became available. I gained each level in about an hour or two of actual work, but the process took more than a week per job. If you want to be really efficient, you can level two jobs at once, one each in the 50-60 range and the 60-70 range. And leveling to 50 is easy and fast with squadron command missions.

But yeah if you want to level one secondary job as fast as possible, you're probably not getting much faster than you're already going. Heaven-on-High may help with that, though.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

But yeah if you want to level one secondary job as fast as possible, you're probably not getting much faster than you're already going. Heaven-on-High may help with that, though.

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What exactly is that? I heard that mentioned a couple times...

EDIT: And also, I'm already 50 with the current job I'm trying to level, so earrings/ring are not an option sadly. But, it appears that dungeons aren't quite as bad at least right now. Maybe it's odd time of day or something so I'll do a few of those. Hate not having gear anyways, and gear you buy out of the AH is way too expensive and too annoying to make myself at the Lv50+ range because each piece wants 20 some ingredients.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

What exactly is that? I heard that mentioned a couple times...

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Heaven on High is the new SB Deep Dungeon launching with patch 4.35 - 61+ combat jobs only.

While I'm all for having more ways to play the game you want to level up, I don't know if there aren't enough ways to level up combat classes in this game.
As a person who (as of today) has all but 3 classes at level 70, I never felt that i didn't have options, or that it was too slow.

I don't like to compare FF14 to other games, but really, in the world of MMOs, FF14 is not a game where it takes too much effort to level cap comparatively.
Armory bonus alone makes a huge difference.

You can actually level pretty fast from the command squadron missions. Especially levels 1-45 where you can usually get 2-3 levels per run if you have the ala mhigo earring and have "rested". This usually results in 180% or so experience. If you don't have any of the EXP boost items, and aren't rested, then PotD is usually worth a single level every 10 floors, regardless of what level you're at up to level 60.

If you just want to burn through levels and don't care about tomes. Do the roulettes, particularly the MSQ roulette. That' usually good for at least one level after level 50.

The levequests should probably be saved for bumping a level if you need it, otherwise save them for DoL if you haven't capped DoL.

I'll be very disappointed of HoH is exactly the same as PotD. Because PotD is responsible for a lot of bad zerg-style combat that players who level through it, don't know how to use their skills as they get them. I hope at the very least they throw away the "omg random spawn trap" mechanic. That trap is just RNG "haha, you died."

Don't forget Hunts.

It took me about a week on average to max each DoW/M job after my first just through roulettes/hunting log/hunting bills/command missions.

That seems fairly reasonable to me.

Perhaps a increasing bonus depending on how many 70s you have after like the 5th ... when it can be asumed you got a grasp on the game.

Everytime i see "road to 60" (was that removed? Have not seen it in a while) i get ready fot trouble. Undergeared with no exp. In your class ... but hey atleast they level fast. When you see a lv 47 with a lv 30 weapon ... horror.

Dont make leveling faster, or at least add ilv restrictions to dungeons that work.

Your beating an old horse.

The reason the queues are long are due to lack of tanks/healers.

This is a known issue and has been for a VERY...long time.

There is no issue when it comes to leveling....it is what you put into it.

Run fates....run a party finder....do hunts...you got plenty to keep you busy.
I've done it...my FC Mates have done it......you can do it.

Spam dungeons - its how I got leveled up so fast on mine. Takes a little bit of time...not such a chore.
And to add to that...leveling to fast is a bad thing.

There are more then enough ways to level. Between challenge logs, leves, beast tribes, dungeon roulettes, and leves. And everything else. The thing is you shouldn't just be doing one of these. Do a mixture. I would focus more on the roulettes and completing challenge logs.

Become friends with a healer/tank in ur FC/LS or become a healer/tank yourself if you really have an issue with dps que times because SE can't really effect that unless they magically add a load of people to the game that want to only heal/tank. I'm currently lvling a mnk now and I've yet to go over 15 minutes for a roulette que with the msq roulette being the longest wait and alliance raid roulette being near instant.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

Lately, one of the things that has been annoying me most about XIV is the total lack of options on how to level up DoM/DoW jobs that are actually reasonable and fun and non-grindy.

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Lack of options? This game has more options for combat class xp than any other mmo I have played. Not saying I'm against improvement but claiming that there is a lack of options is frankly false.

I'm curious just how fast the leveling process should be per popular opinion.
I'm a fan of the slow and steady pace for leveling, but I always find it interesting what the speed fans are doing/expecting.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

I do believe the combat classes have enough choices to level to the max in a reasonable amount of time.

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Seconding this as well. There are plenty of options, just most of them require a lot of grinding. The only thing I'm struggling on is levelling my third class from 60-70 (getting to 60 is a cinch), but I would say that's more lack of motivation on my part. Just gotta deal with the grind. FF loves its grind.~

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Originally Posted by MOZZYSTAR

Just gotta deal with the grind. FF loves its grind.~

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That's just the mmorpg genre.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

I do believe the combat classes have enough choices to level to the max in a reasonable amount of time.

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I think the real issue is that the other methods just takes time to arrive which can feel boring when the process of releasing other leveling content is DF and beast tribe in the beginning stage of X.X then only once we reach X.3 and beyond the other methods of leveling are released.

I suppose I should have made myself more clear.....

It isn't that there aren't options, it's that most of the options seem very lack-luster or incredibly boring. Stuff like FATEs and Levequests, you put a LOT of time, travel, and work into what seems like such a minuscule return, and same goes with the Hunt. When using the Hunt just for XP gains, the XP is worse than the Beastman Tribe daily quests.

The options that are actually good are limited... Challenge Logs are once per week. Once you fill those in, you're done. You can't do anymore if you wanted. Once you run your daily roulette, you're done. Any further dungeons must be specific-queued which generally takes longer than a roulette.

And all that's left is PotD which gets old, fast, especially if you're a caster. PotD is so freaking BORING as a caster because everything dies before you can get more than 1-2 spells off. Can't even do a whole rotation as a RDM on anything, because the other 3 group members blow it up before I can hardly touch it. I might as well spam unenchanted melees at that point. I might actually land a hit or two.

Dungeons are nice once you actually get the invite, if the wait times are reasonable, sure. And the guaranteed piece of gear is also nice, and if you run the same dungeon 3-4 times, you're bound to get most of a suit of gear which is awesome. But again, sometimes the wait times are offputting.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

I suppose I should have made myself more clear.....

It isn't that there aren't options, it's that most of the options seem very lack-luster or incredibly boring. Stuff like FATEs and Levequests, you put a LOT of time, travel, and work into what seems like such a minuscule return, and same goes with the Hunt. When using the Hunt just for XP gains, the XP is worse than the Beastman Tribe daily quests.

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Don't sleep on the hunt or beastman tribe quests. The exact numbers differ depending on the tier of the quest, but you can get in the ballpark of 2 million experience in the 60's from doing 6 beast tribe quests (350k-ish each), and another 1.5 million+ from just the Stormblood hunt marks (100k-ish each). That's more than a third of a level from 69 to 70, and I am pretty sure it's equivalent or better for lower levels. That's not bad at all for less than an hour of work, particularly one you can do while waiting for those specifically-queued dungeons.

I'll keep that in mind when I actually get 60.

Right now, though, I'm trying to get through the 50s, and the Beast Tribe quests there are only giving me 60k out of 1.2 million.

It seems like they realized that 60k was way too low and buffed it for SB content, but they should have went back and buffed the HW tribes' XP too.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

I'll keep that in mind when I actually get 60.

Right now, though, I'm trying to get through the 50s, and the Beast Tribe quests there are only giving me 60k out of 1.2 million.

It seems like they realized that 60k was way too low and buffed it for SB content, but they should have went back and buffed the HW tribes' XP too.

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I didn't realize you were still in Heavensward levels. But the outcome is roughly the same, and probably better actually. 6 beast tribe quests at 60k each is 360k, which is more than 1/4 of a level. The Stormblood numbers I quoted are actually lower, about 1/5 of a level. (But I'm going by the higher levels, I think the ratio is better at lower levels.) The same is true of the hunt marks, they should be giving about 30k+ each in Heavensward, which adds up to 450k. That's about 2/3 of a level total for doing both. That's roughly the same exp/hour as a specifically-queued dungeon.

hunter marks are a good chunk of EXP too people tend to let them slide
but they are handy for that little push you need for next level

It's not really that there are too few ways, its that the way never changes one bit. You do the same things 13 times till you get sick of them, because not all ways have the same exp parity. Ignore fates, ignore pvp, do hunts and beast tribes while waiting for roulettes, do every roulette you can, then spam dungeons.

Or you could just do what I did, and create a brand new character on a preferred world. That Road to 60 buff is no joke. I was earning two levels just from doing sidequests. Sometimes three levels from doing levequests. Got so bad that I was about five levels above where I was supposed to be in the MSQ. That was actually a detriment, because certain things I was supposed to have by level 20 I didn't have because they are rewarded through the MSQ at lower levels.

But I understand not everyone is going to create a different character and start from scratch.

I like to help and offer suggestions but i honestly got no clue. On the one hand gaining exp in this game is a joke. For example if you had all jobs to level 60 in HW, all you would have to do is do the experience point roulette once a day (even for the 2 new classes starting at 50) and trial (not very long for once a day) and have all them to 70 by now. On the other hand I get the concept it feels like it is boring and not much to do. Given I came from FFXI, the only thing I can suggest is make exp grind like it was in ffxi, but that is the complete reverse of what they designed this game in the first place. Given that i do not have much to give a suggestion, more so just something to think about

I'd say there are actually lots of options for leveling combat classes/jobs. I guess the perception may depend on how many hours per day one plays, but it is a rare day when I have even run through all the roulettes available.
It will take time if you want to level all jobs all the way to level 70. This is a good thing.
Leveling your main class can be done pretty much on quests and mandatory dungeons only - leaving all the other options for leveling other classes.

The problem is...leveling TOO FAST is a thing.
People complain about that ALOT around me...first they get impatient..then immediately regret going so fast.