Quote Originally Posted by morruin View Post
As a recent returnee I think the 6-10 hours mentioned is this thread is rather optimistic.

I have just taken 6 days (not full time obviously) just to clear The Chrysalis - and I benefitted from being a healer and having other (higher iLvL) people in the DF roulette.

A fresh 50/returnee player need to follow the MSQ - and gear up himself by running other content. A dps doing the MSQ after the expansion has launched will have a lot of queue time and less players in the DF (they'll be off flying around Ishgard)

I liked the solution from LoTRO. The MSQ there was split into chapters and you could start a new chapter (tied to expansions in the beginning) without having finished the last one. So your questlog could read something like
Chapter 1.12.5
Chapter 2.9.6
Chapter 3.6.8
and you could go back and finish them when you wanted, without having your progress blocked.
I would strongly suggest you join a Free Company if you want help clearing older content. This is an MMORPG and the game expects you to be social and communicate with other players to get things done. If you're in a FC and still can't find help then leave and find another because that's not a good FC.

Comparing the game LOTRO's story content doesn't work either unfortunately. LOTRO had completely separate stories per expansion so you missed nothing by skipping ahead to a future expansion's story. A player entering Ishgard having not completed the 2.x story arc will have no clue at all what is going on because it is a direct continuation of the story with the exact same cast of characters. Not to mention said player would not have access to any of the content unlocked via the 2.x story quests.

This entire game hinges on story completion to unlock access to everything. It is simply not viable to allow players to skip anything because it would result in countless players unable to access specific areas of content.