new player, few things

[hawkemoon]

i am currently lvl 15, have been doing storyline/class quests mostly, i went back to see about starting leather or wood worker, i am an archer, and it wont let me, says i am too low lvl and i need to finish my lvl 10 class quest, which i have,
how effective is crafting?
i usually enjoy it as an aspect of gameplay and i am curious if its worth spending time and effort on it in this game,
i am not trying to power lvl, but i also would like to get up to endgame content in a reasonable amount of time, are there methods that are more efficient ?
how locked are you to class? i most recently have played rift and wow, rift is completely wide open to changes, like from tank, to dps to healing, etc, while wow is a bit more restrictive, but still allows you to choose and maintain 3 diff "builds" that can be easily changed between.
as an archer do i have other paths to follow? i usually choose to play a rogue/stealth type, an archer ranger type and as another alt, a paladin/tanky type

[hawkemoon]

thanks in advance for any information you can share. i am enjoying the game so far, just seems a bit solo'ish, at the lower lvls i am sure that is is kinda lonely,
ohh,
which leads me to ask,
how is endgame, and "what" is the current endgame content?

[Niwashi]

questions like, race vs class? starting area? this was during basic character creation, i am hoping that since there was no information at that time, that it makes no difference

Race is almost entirely cosmetic. Although there are a few slight stat differences, they're so negligibly small you can ignore them and just make the character you like the look of, or if you're a lore buff choose a race whose lore interests you (though within the game there are actually very few references to racial lore).

Class is fundamental to how you play at any given time, but this game has the most open multi-classing system of any game I'm familiar with. You can unlock other classes and take any or all of them all the way to endgame if you want to. There are lots of players with all 13 combat jobs, all 8 crafting classes and 3 gathering classes advanced to level 60. It takes a while to manage that, since they're leveled up separately, alternating between them, but there's no limit on it. There are limits, however, on which skills can be cross-classed and to where (skills learned by one class that are then usable while you're on another). Anyway, with the ability to learn and advance multiple classes, which one you start off the game with really doesn't matter after the fist few levels. After the level 10 class quest from your starting class, you can unlock whichever other ones you're interested in, and if you later decide that one of those others is more interesting, it can become your main class any time you wish, or you can continue alternating and not even choose one to be your main focus (though by endgame, gearing them up gets hard that way).

Starting area: The first 15 levels worth of the main story will take place in your starting city (which in turn is determined by your starting class). The stories in each of the cities are different, and the only way to see the other cities' storylines for those 15 levels is to make three different characters, one starting in each of the three cities. However, at level 15, the story will send you as an envoy to the other two cities, and after that the three storylines merge into one. From then on everyone gets the same quests. There might here and there be a slight difference in the dialog wording depending on whether you've already met a character before (during that first 15 levels) or are meeting them for the first time, but there are no other differences that depend on your starting city after you reach the point where the stories merge. It's really just for the first 15 levels that it matters.

how effective is crafting? i usually enjoy it as an aspect of gameplay and i am curious if its worth spending time and effort on it in this game

It's not necessary. Many players choose to ignore crafting altogether, and they get by just fine without it. But many others (myself included) find it a significant boost to the game.

For some players, crafting is purely a way to make gil. There are a lot of crafted items that sell for quite a bit on the Market Board, and most of the richest players got that way through crafting. It can also be very useful for making your own gear while leveling up, but to do that you need to keep your crafting classes at least on par with your combat classes. If you're willing to put the time in to do that, it's quite useful, but many players don't want to slow down advancement through the game enough for their crafting to keep up. A widely used middle ground is to allow your first combat job to outstrip your crafting level, so you can keep going though the main story at a fairly fast rate, but keep advancing crafting so that later, when you decide to go back and level additional combat jobs, your crafting classes are already advanced enough to provide gear for those.

One of the reasons leveling crafting takes so much time is that to be really effective at it, you need to level up all of them (and the gathering classes as well, or at least Botanist and Miner, if you don't want to spend a fortune on materials). There are a few reasons for this. One is cross-class skills. As mentioned, there are only certain skills that can be used cross-class, but some of them are pretty important, and the crafting classes can all share their cross-class skills. They each learn a different skill at levels 15, 37, 50, and 54, and those ones can be shared with other DoH classes. Another reason is materials. It's common for Weaver recipes to use some leather from Leatherworker, or Leatherworker recipes to use rivets made by Armourer, and so on. (Culinarian is somewhat separate in this regard, though. It neither uses nor contributes materals to/from other classes the way most of them do.) By leveling your crafting classes up together, you can make the materials you'll need. It's not too necessary in the early few levels while materials are cheaply available from NPC vendors, but at later levels a lot of those materials can only be acquired by crafting them or buying them from someone else who did. That's the point where it can get really expensive if you can't make them yourself.

Personally, I really like the crafting system itself. In some games, crafting is little more than gathering the materials and then choosing "craft X" and after a slight pause with crafting animation, you get "success, you made X". Here, it's a whole system of skills to advance quality or progress or restore durability or crafting points, while timing them to correspond to the material's current condition that turn. You're actively doing stuff trying to gain as much quality as possible while still having enough durability to finish the progress bar as well to complete the craft. It's a much more involved and interesting system (and gets more involved the higher you level up and more skills you gain).

i am not trying to power lvl, but i also would like to get up to endgame content in a reasonable amount of time, are there methods that are more efficient ?

There's kind of a priority system. As you've found out already, quests that unlock features or content have that special icon with the plus sign in the corner (a relatively new addition that I'm rather glad of, since we used to get a lot of players missing basic features for a long time and not being aware of it). And the main story quests have the fiery ring around the icon, and that's also necessary to unlocking a great deal of the content and features of the game (in addition, obviously, to providing the story). Both of those are signs that the quest is important, and they'll be the primary concern of the first combat class/job you advance through the game.

For when you need additional XP beyond what that provides, there are quite a few options.

Once you've completed at least two dungeons you'll unlock Duty Roulette, a feature that puts you into any of the dungeons or trials you've done before. Once per day it gives a really big XP bonus for doing that, and when that bonus is active, it becomes the best XP source in the game. So if you have time, do a leveling roulette once each day. If your main class is running short on XP and barely able to keep up with the main scenario, then do the roulette dungeon with your main class. If your main is outleveling your main scenario progress, then it can be better to use the leveling roulette to boost another secondary combat class instead.

For your main class that's doing all the main scenario quests and other important quests, that's likely to be as much extra XP as you need. If you decide to level up all the others as well, you'll need more XP sources. Here's a good place to use any extra sidequests that weren't important enough to do with your first class. (Their XP is good when done on-level, not so much if you're significantly over the level of the quest.) Each class has its own hunting log targets that give an extra XP boost. FATEs give good XP and are also a good source of Grand Company seals (once you advance far enough into the story to join a Grand Company, which is at level 20 IIRC). You can run dungeons again to get both XP and another chance at good loot drops. At level 17 you can unlock access to the Palace of the Dead, which is a special type of dungeon with its own leveling system. Levequests can be another source of XP, but if you're advancing the crafting classes as well as combat, you might want to save the leve allowance for crafting leves rather than combat leves as they're an even better way to advance crafting quickly. There is a weekly challenge log unlockable at level 15 that gives extra XP for doing a variety of things.

In general, I'd recommend doing a bit of a wide variety of those. Don't just pick one and spam it over and over until you're sick of it, because that can lead too easily to being sick of the game overall. Doing a bit of various different things is much better for avoiding burnout.

as an archer do i have other paths to follow? i usually choose to play a rogue/stealth type, an archer ranger type and as another alt, a paladin/tanky type

Well, as said before, you can advance as many of the classes as you want to. There is also an advancement for the combat classes to unlock a job at level 30. Archer becomes Bard. Rogue becomes Ninja. Gladiator becomes Paladin. Arcanist is the only one that branches out. At 30 Arcanist can advance to Summoner or Scholar (or both). To do so, you need the job's base class at level 30, and there's a second class that needs to be at least 15:

Bard: Archer (30), Pugilist (15)
Paladin: Gladiator (30), Conjurer (15)
Dragoon: Lancer (30), Marauder (15)
Warrior: Marauder (30), Gladiator (15)
Ninja: Rogue (30), Pugilist (15)
Monk: Pugilist (30), Lancer (15)
Scholar: Arcanist (30), Conjurer(15)
Summoner: Arcanist (30), Thaumaturge (15)
Black Mage: Thaumaturge (30), Archer (15)
White Mage: Conjurer (30), Arcanist (15)

[hawkemoon]

first off thanks for some very detailed and useful information, it would have saved me and I imagine other new players a lot of time if something like this was in the sticky notes on new player information
I have progressed thru my class quest to lvl 25, and main storyline to 18 and have just been given the retainer unlock
as a feedback it says who to contact for retainers, but not where, other than in the city, would be helpful if the person for retainers was a quest completion so you could find him, luckily someone in general area chat told me to look at the market, and there he was.
a follow up on class, when you hit lvl 30 class and do side for your job
so if I follow up with archer I will become a bard
can I choose a different class?
can I decide once I am a lvl 50 bard, to go back and level gladiator/conjurer and have a second "job" as a paladin?
or do I need to level and alt to be able to do that

on crafting
i do enjoy it, and as a MMO junky i have always done the gathering and crafting, so it fits well with my personal characteristics, gathering is smooth and easy, though i don't like that i cannot "gather" or even see nodes unless i am in gather class, so i cannot gather while questing/leveling you have to actually change to gather and activate the radar. but i do like that you don't have to go searching too much, that the nodes are spawned specifically for you and you can run the 4 spawns in a circle until you feel like stopping

and as a final note, could you explain "place of the dead"

and sorry, but one of the first things i did do was open the play manual and was trying to find out what the purple with a + quest was, and manual didn't have answer, nor does it have the information that you all have shared, it is fine for some basic how to stuff, but doesn't even come close to the information an experienced player starting a new game is interested in.

[Lakhi]

Retainers:
In any of the big city (Limsa, Ul'dah, Grid, Foundation) market areas, there'll be an NPC at a counter called "Retainer Advocate", talk with them to make your retainer(s).

Jobs:
You can have all the jobs on one character if you would like. Since you're an Archer, you'll have to go to Ul'dah to pick up the Pugilist class and level it to 15. Once you do this and if you're caught up on your class quests, a new level 30 one will appear to allow you to unlock Bard. You are definitely allowed to pick up other classes and jobs and still keep your bard. For example, my main is BLM, but I also have most of the other jobs that I can change to and play instead. The nice thing about this game is that you're not limited to just one job You can pick these other classes and jobs up whenever you want.

Gathering:
Your Gathering Log will tell you where the nodes are for the specific things you want to gather