My daughter and I have just started playing FFXIV and have both purchased the main game. We'll want to purchase Heavensward, but we know that we won't get to level 50 and get all the story content up to 2.55 done by the release date.

Here's the questions:

If we preorder Heavensward so that we get the special preorder items, is the xpac automatically applied to our accounts or is it not applied until we put in a code somewhere?

Will we be getting xp for the level 50 story content that we have to do before we can proceed in the new content?

Ideally, we'd like to get the bonus preorder items, but NOT get xp at level 50 while we finish the story quests. How do we do this?

Thanks!