Disciples of the hand question

[Urthdigger]

It gets a little more complicated than that. As mentioned before, you'll need to gear up your DoH as well. In addition, you'll want to make use of cross-class skills so you can high-quality gear. Otherwise you might as well just buy the gear off an NPC! You may also wish to look into food so long as you're gearing yourself up. In the end, if you're going to level any DoH, you should level all of them.

[maynard7]

It gets a little more complicated than that. As mentioned before, you'll need to gear up your DoH as well. In addition, you'll want to make use of cross-class skills so you can high-quality gear. Otherwise you might as well just buy the gear off an NPC! You may also wish to look into food so long as you're gearing yourself up. In the end, if you're going to level any DoH, you should level all of them.

So that means a maaajor amount of time. Would you recommend just buying gear then?

[Nutz]

So that means a maaajor amount of time. Would you recommend just buying gear then?

If your focus is combat, then yes. You'll get a fair amount of gear from dungeons and such as well anyway. Crafting your own gear to level up is very nice to do, but usually more of a benefit you utilize on your 2nd+ combat role since people tend to do the story and unlock everything up front and then go back to gathering/ crafting later. To hit all bases you pretty much want to level up all crafts, and to do that more effectively you pretty much want to level MIN and BOT as well.

It's there if you like it and I think it's a lot of fun, but it's not for everyone and definitely not required.

[Urthdigger]

So that means a maaajor amount of time. Would you recommend just buying gear then?

If your only interest is gearing up your battle classes, then yes.

[Yaichiro]

So that means a maaajor amount of time. Would you recommend just buying gear then?

It's a time consuming process indeed not to mention that you need to farm/buy materials as well. The gain you get by levelling a battle class along with DoH is minimal and not worth it. It becomes really beneficial when you start levelling up your alts classes since then you can farm for materials in your free time or when you're waiting for queues to pop up.