Returning player,unshure where to start

[Tabmow]

Hi all, I have a lvl 60 drg and a lvl 53 Sch,which i want to be my main in Stormblood,my problem is,where the heck do i start! do people still level grind via leves? i have checked my current lvl 53-54 area and its dead,or do i do dungeons? my msq is at lvl 60 atm. TY in advance,so happy to be back.

[Frizze]

First of all, welcome back!

Ok, so you need to do 3 things. You need to re-learn scholar, you need to get caught up in level, and you need to press the MSQ into the expansion content. The 4th thing, getting your gear ready to go, should come naturally from doing those. So starting out, getting re-acclimated with scholar is most important. Re-read your spells and traits - they made a lot of class changes with 4.0 and some things dont work quite like they used to. They also ditched cross-class skills and replaced then with "Role Skills", so look into those and find a set up that works well for you. When youre comfortable with that, id try some lower level content to get back into the rhythm of actually playing. Maybe a dungeon or two in the 30-50 range. You can build up from there into a level 50 or two, then into the highest level ones you can run. As youre leveling a healer, you should have short ques most of the time for dungeons.

When youve got yourself back up to speed, your fastest leveling will come via roulettes. The leveling, 50/60, alliance, and MSQ roulettes will all offer a massive once per day exp bonus. The MSQ roulette now features "unskippable" cutscenes, so committing to an hour+ run may or may not be worth your time regardless of the exp and poetics that it pays. Leveling is worth around a level per day(draws from any 4-man instance you can go into in levels 1-49 51-59 and 61-69), and usually well worth the time. Alliance is a new roulette that puts you into one of the 24 man raids you can access. Your scholar would only be offered crystal tower raids until you got to 60, and those are mostly easy(though if you never unlocked them youd have to do that first to get access to the roulette). By the same token, the 50/60 would only give you level 50 dungeons. All of these roulettes will pay out in poetics as well as exp, which is important because you can buy the level 60 gear set you eventually want for poetics in idyllshire. In between roulettes, extra runs of the higher level dungeons are good for extra exp. The level 51-59 dungeons(61-69 too) now have a guaranteed loot drop at the end. What that means is that in addition to whatever you randomly get from chests, when you beat the dungeon boss one piece of gear for the class youre on will automatically get added to your armory(any armor or jewelry from the dungeon set that you dont already have - weapons arent auto-dropped). You can use this to your advantage if you need a gear boost before you get to 60. Extra advice, try to run The Vault at least once before you move on to the last step. Every healer ive talked to mentions this dungeon as the real test of their abilities in this range, so doing it is a good way to make sure youre on point before you move forward into the next tier of content.

And finally, as your scholar is likely level 60 by this point and youve gotten your skills and gear back in shape its time to pick back up on the MSQ. If you dont remember what step youre on, they added a new UI element to help. This is the easiest part, as you can just follow the in game prompts and story beats from ishgard and the end of that storyline straight into the stormblood territories and their stories.

Best of luck, and enjoy the story.

[SannaR]

What Frizze said is really good advice. The only thing I would add to it is to do your beastmen tribe dailies if you had them unlocked. You would be wanting the Vanu and the Vath as those are the battle class ones. They scale to your level.

[Tabmow]

Thanks for the input and great advice!

[Iscah]

The MSQ roulette now features "unskippable" cutscenes, so committing to an hour+ run may or may not be worth your time regardless of the exp and poetics that it pays.

It's not an hour+ for the roulette. (If you heard this from someone else, they're either exaggerating or talking about how long it would clear the two dungeons for MSQ progress.) Castrum takes ~35 mins and the Praetorium is ~50.

While it's still rather long, it's slow-paced enough that you can go off and do out-of-game stuff during the cutscenes, so if you want to be helpful (and ideally if healer is in need) it's still worth doing it if you have the time and/or something to do while you wait.

[Frizze]

They also could have been figuring in que time, as MSQ is a roulette very likely to put even a tank/healer into a que rather then go right away(or close to it). If we use your times(my experience says longer but is out of date and i choose not to update it), thats still an average run of roughly 42.5 mins(and since you dont know which youll get you need to plan on having the 50+ available anyway or you arent getting the roulette reward). In 42 mins with a healer que you could do leveling and 50/60, possibly with enough time left over to add in guildhest or trials(smaller exp and currency rewards for smaller investment of time). Most groups will finish alliance in less then 40 mins(and those runs are often more fun - although the que potential is also higher for this one). But ultimately, this info isnt to benefit me its for the OP and anyone else who might read this with similar questions. Im biased against MSQ and have no problem admitting it. If i were leveling something it would be the 6th or 7th roulette id get to(alliance, leveling, trials, pvp, and 50/60 would all come before it for me for sure though not necessarily in that order). But i did mention it because it has a nice poetic payout(useful if youre still buying gear), and from what im told its a nice exp bonus.

I forgot to mention the pvp roulette though(which i actually used regularly when going 60-70), so that was bad on me. Matches are fairly short(usually less then 10 mins), you cant talk to the other alliances so no trash talking the fallen(or being verbally abused by the other team while down), and the game doesnt force any type of class balance on the party(anything goes). You automatically get the whole PvP moveset for your class, and everyone is set at the same level and gear level so theres no advantage to be had/lost there. Its not too bad a setup. The more experienced players will typically be obvious, but anyone can figure out how to throw attacks at the other teams and do some damage. Rewards are exp, pvp exp(you earn titles), tomes, and seals(several nice glamour sets available) - and if you do the Garo event a couple mounts are up for grabs too. Everyone gets some, but there are bonuses for winning so you still wanna try.