Hey Vitalian, you and your friends have picked a GREAT time to come back, a lot of things are open sourced ingame, and everything is fairly easy and progression based.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Vets-HC-Social

Check out RAWR, we're a large friendly active FC and have been helping a swarm of returning people as of late. We also have an active discord server for voice and general chat people use to communicate when ingame and out of game. If you have questions feel free to ask me in Discord (will be online most all day).