Ok I figured I'd update this after another night on FFXIV.

Last night was a mixed experience. It is really not fun trying to navigate the combination of ingame UI and external website resources needed to get anywhere with crafting gear for a character in FFXIV.

Figuring out what gear is available for you, screening it down to what is good for you and then figuring out if / how you can actually make that gear and what crafting skill levels are required is akin to voodoo right now with the tools available. 90% of those tools our outside of the game too which I think at this point with MMOs like WoW, Rift, STO, and Eve as competition is not acceptable.

However. Once I figured out what I wanted to make leveling the crafting skills was fun as was making my first set of lvl 8-11 Gladiator gear.

I made

Sheepskin Boots
Dododo skin cap (which is made with sheep leather)
Dodoskin Wristbands
Dodoskin hauberk
Maple shield
Bronze Gladius.

I then went out into the world and was able to EXP Chain #3 mobs between equal and 2 levels higher than myself yielding nearly 2 levels of EXP in Gladiator all in a little over 30mins.

I also tried to leve quests and I have to say balance here is very broken. Grinding works solo because you can single pull, to get good exp out of a level you need to make it equal level and equal level 2 mob pulls is death solo and still pretty close duo. I don't mind leve quests being group targetted if that is what they want but at the moment new players are steered into them by the new player experience and they are a dead end. Grinding EXP is quicker and the rewards in terms of Bonus XP and Gil are so trivial there is nothing to redeem them. I'm using mine for Crafting for now and I'll check again closer to level 20.

I like it, it works and is fun and different to other mmos. I'm really looking forward to getting my Duo buddy on tonight and pushing on to lvl 12 or so where we will have to stop and sort out new gear I imagine. I assume that later we will party up and that's what I really miss about mmos like Everquest and FFXI.

The game is a brick wall to newbies and that will need to change and vets arguing it isn't or that it is a good thing to have a nearly verticle learnign curve with downright missleading advice from the game are doing the game they obviosuly love a great disservice. To have a community FFXIV needs players and to get those players the game needs to bring them in, educate them and hook them. FFXIV is far too user unfriendly right now, without my FFXI experience I probably wouldn't be here post 1.19.