Returning player,unshure where to start

[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.

[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.