Leveling DoH: Firmament vs. other

[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]

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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".