Leveling DoH: Firmament vs. other

[Jojoya]

It's very easy to hit the 3rd milestone in Ishgard crafts, and the mats tend to be significantly cheaper. You're also cherry picking here, I recall doing a breakdown where others are offer a significantly better exp to time ratio. The optimal way to level through Ishgard isn't just "craft the highest craft you can".

It's only easy if you have better than the leveling gear the typical player leveling crafting will have. Not every player can afford to spend 75k gil per HQ piece of gear from the MB. Most will be relying on vendors for NQ gear because what used to be a fairly large supply of NQ gear from quest rewards showing up cheap on the MB has disappeared.

As for material costs, they're only cheaper for the level 20/40 recipes (I'll go more into that below).

Nor does Rowena. Scrip gear is bad in general, the correct way to level with Ishgard is all at once and then stop to gear up, with melds. It doesn't take that long, and with a guide you don't really need to figure out anything. You can also sell items from the tokens to pay for gear, mats, etc and yellows typically convert poorly. Unfortunately fetes have nerfed this a bit.

Scrip gear works fine for leveling, not to mention the player is again earning XP as they earn the scrip. I wouldn't go full scrip for level 60 since there is no shared left side gear except belt but certainly the tools and accessories are worth getting. It's more cost effective than paying out of pocket for gear then paying out of pocket for recipe materials since you only have to pay out of pocket for the recipe materials.

Someone who is using level 20 gear to get all the way to 80 via Firmament is going to be at it a lot longer than someone who stops to get gear along the way.

Have you paid attention to how much Skybuilder Scrip is earned as you level? The amounts are small compared to item cost and the MB has been flooded with the majority of those items, driving prices down. It is not a good way to earn scrip to make gil until you hit 80.

You don't need the master books while you're leveling, and you can get yellow scrips far more efficiently at level 80.

The same can be said of Skybuilder scrip. It makes more sense to have your leveling serve a double purpose. If you're going to need the yellow scrip later, may as well earn it while you level.

While the Master books aren't technically needed while leveling, some players want access as soon as possible for the primal weapon and housing item recipes they contain. How disappointed my friends were to find they didn't automatically learn those recipes, and what they needed to do to get them would have also earned them as much if not more XP.

You don't need much gil to level in Ishgard; it's quite a bit more time intensive or gil intensive to level through normal materials.

That's no longer true across the board. Normal materials have dropped down significantly in price due to changes this expansion. Firmament material cost will generally be lower for the level 20 and 40 recipes. It takes a big jump when you hit the level 60/70 recipes.

Using the level 60 CRP recipes as an example and current Coeurl MB prices
Firmament -7500 gil
Splendors - 4500 gil
Leve (Beech Rod) - 3600 gil

There will be some variations based on which class you're leveling but from level 60 on, the Firmament recipes tend to be the most expensive if you are not gathering you own materials.

There are a lot of assumptions being made about leveling based on what things were like in the past. Few are bothering to take a look at what things are like now. The marketboard is not what it used to be. The belief that the Firmament is the better way to level has driven the prices of those materials up while the prices of materials for normal recipes have fallen down thanks to lower demand and desynthesis changes.

[Plastics]

It's only easy if you have better than the leveling gear the typical player leveling crafting will have

This is both irrelevant and false. We're talking about optimal, and a guide can easily fill in the knowledge to enable this.

As for material costs, they're only cheaper for the level 20/40 recipes (I'll go more into that below).

This is false. Almost every HW and SB collectable on my server costs 2-3x what a higher level Ishgard collectable costs to craft. Nobody farms in HW and SB, and there's low demand, so the prices are abysmal and have been for years.

Scrip gear works fine for leveling, not to mention the player is again earning XP as they earn the scrip.

There are only 2 times where scrip gear makes sense to get. When you hit 70, and when you hit 80. At all other times it's nonsensical. It's either completely unnecessary or a total waste of yellows.

Have you paid attention to how much Skybuilder Scrip is earned as you level?

I have yet to lose gil leveling a crafter. I'm usually 2-3 million ahead by the time I hit 80. I see this nonsense belief that you aren't making much gil or not to spend any gil to speed up the process, and I still don't understand where this is coming from. I didn't keep track of the rewards, but I started with far less than MSQ gives you and ended up with a lot of extra gil from doing things like selling these cosmetics.

It makes more sense to have your leveling serve a double purpose. If you're going to need the yellow scrip later, may as well earn it while you level.

No, the things you "need yellows" for actually require a reasonable grind or quite a few weeks of CDs to finish, and even if you level entirely using Rowena you won't be close. To test this theory, I didn't level one of my DoLs with leves and just used Rowena as people suggest. I was many, many, many hours off of having the books unlocked. It was also significantly slower than leves. So is Ishgard. By my calculation, it was much faster to level with leves, then farm yellows with 80 gear.

"dual purpose" isn't important, the overall efficiency is. I can trivially grind out 15000 yellows at 80, but it's going to take you how many hours of leveling with Rowena to do that? So trade the 30 minutes of time you lose by not getting yellows for a much faster leveling route.

There are a lot of assumptions being made about leveling based on what things were like in the past.

I'm not making any assumptions, I'm making observations. If you want an assumption, it's that Ishgard will continue to be better even in the next expansion. They added this content for people to level crafters quickly, and if nobody is doing it, it will stop serving that purpose, so there will be something to ensure it remains relevant.

[Jojoya]

snip

At no point have I said I was discussing optimal. The problem with optimal is that what is optimal for someone who plays 8 hours a day is not going to be optimal for someone who is playing 4 hours a week.

If you're going to keep calling things false, you should be providing your evidence to prove it false as opposed to just saying "it's what I've observed" or "a guide told me so".