Leveling up makes me want to quit.

[Voltyblast]

The real strategy to power level with FATEs and dungeons as a DPS is that you find a zone with FATEs at your level, populated or not (you still get decent EXP for most FATEs even when they fail as long as you get gold) then you queue for a dungeon and grind the FATEs while you wait on the queue.

You forgot that you can't get in groups while queueing, so you also have to choose: you want to gain LOTS more of exp within a group (enemies do give exp as well and getting a gold is basically lazy work, which is what we want), or queue for the dungeon and do nothing else (you can't even get your chocobo out while queueing: that's bad programming there).

And the part that it's not supposed to be fun because it's a grind...then what is this? A job? Games are supposed to be fun last I checked: in rpgs levelling is usually the fun part of the game, not the annoying part. Yes this is an MMOrpg but I never found levelling frustrating in OTHER MMOs because you always had different ways to level up ALONGSIDE grinding the usual (questing, dungeons, dailies, you name it).

In addition to that, I always loved levelling and getting new skills and stuff for my characters. In here you don't really get a whole lot to begin with: sometimes you gain a passive (hooray!) sometimes it's a skill (Yaaaay...finally) and now at 50, you can get some of the most useless/badly designed skills ever made (Tornado Kick, Sheltron and last but not least, Wanderer's Minuet/Gauss Barrel). Sure not all jobs get bad skills, but since I play monk as second main job It's really boring to level up with basically no real new skills.

So not only the levelling in this game is annoying and sometimes frustrating (always depending on the situation), but it's also not really rewarding: It's long and tedious and you still get FAR more experience from fates regardless of which dungeon you get in: in the Churming Mists a fate can give more or less 40k exp (Azys Ila give more, but it's deserted and I don't see people grinding there at all). A dungeon (WITHOUT ROULETTE) can only give 100k or 200k at best and in the span of 30-40 minutes of run. Fates only take 2 minutes max and gives half of that amount, and more if you do a boss fate PLUS the armory boost.

FATEs still win. Sadly.