Leveling Alts Along with Main

[ADarklore]

Researching more... discovered that progression of the Samurai Job quest is locked behind completion of portions of the SB MSQ, which sucks... as there is a skill locked behind a quest completion... let alone the fact that SE is saying, "Hey, you can play the Samurai early, but you can never complete the class quests for possibly weeks or MONTHS until you complete all ARR's MSQ and progress through HW and possibly into SB's MSQ as well... as it requires access to areas only accessible after completing certain portions of the MSQ. IMO, if a quest requires you to access another location, they should either not offer the quest until you are able to reach the other location OR should make the location available along with the quest. If SE offers access to jobs via 'pay to jump to xx level so you can play the new job' then they should also offer you a means of completing the job quest as well, especially since the job quest givers are both located in ARR starter zones. Just seems to me to be quite an oversight on their part; at least Red Mage doesn't have any skills tied to a quest completion.

[ADarklore]

The skills will be unavailable, yes. Fortunately, they thought of that when designing classes that don't start at 1 and they will have around the same amount of abilities as everyone else at lower levels. Sure, if you get dropped into a level 17 dungeon as a Samurai, you'd probably only have one or two buttons to press, but you'd be able to do it. And yes, all melee have combo systems in place to make it a bit more engaging, while DPS melee also have the thing of positional requirements for maximum damage (which is a pain to do consistently outside of group content). If you really, really like combos, could try out Monk or Dragoon.

Samurai's combos are like, 1-2-3 1-4-5 1-6. Monk has an interesting setup where their combo pieces are interchangeable but instead follow a 1-2-3 stance rotation with some choice in what to use for each stance so it could be like 1-2-3 or 4-5-6 Or 1-5-3. Then there's Dragoon which has two combos, but at max level the combo is like, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-5-4. It gets a little crazy when factoring that and different buffs, positionals and non-rotational buttons to throw in there. Of course, wouldn't recommend laying the keybinds out like that either and would GREATLY recommend setting comfortable keybinds if you were to play a melee job. It's a bit easier for casters, though having important buttons on easy keys benefits them just as much.

Ultimately, it comes down to which ones you prefer most, dungeons grant a decent amount of experience, though a large portion of it ends up being split between monster kills (which benefits your lower level characters) and the end of dungeon duty finder bonus (which is higher for your highest level character). I played to 70 with mostly only one class before I started branching out and didn't hit any snags at all, not sure how much extra you might have to do if you ended up splitting them by only getting exp on some characters from quest turn-ins, since quest turn-ins have level requirements as well if you end up outpacing the quests you might not be able to turn them in on a lower character.

I use a controller with PC, so there really are no keybinds for me to setup... I use xhotbars for skills/potions and regular hotbars for keeping an eye on skill cooldowns, etc. I love the Samurai because, being a huge anime fan, I've always preferred the ones with Samurai warriors with cool sword techniques- hence the appeal towards the job. I will also be leveling the Red Mage as well, which I think I'd prefer to take into dungeons vs Samurai. In dungeons I much prefer to be at range, but solo content, you tend to be the center of attention anyway, so might as well be melee.

[Iscah]

Researching more... discovered that progression of the Samurai Job quest is locked behind completion of portions of the SB MSQ, which sucks... as there is a skill locked behind a quest completion... let alone the fact that SE is saying, "Hey, you can play the Samurai early, but you can never complete the class quests for possibly weeks or MONTHS until you complete all ARR's MSQ and progress through HW and possibly into SB's MSQ as well... as it requires access to areas only accessible after completing certain portions of the MSQ. IMO, if a quest requires you to access another location, they should either not offer the quest until you are able to reach the other location OR should make the location available along with the quest. If SE offers access to jobs via 'pay to jump to xx level so you can play the new job' then they should also offer you a means of completing the job quest as well, especially since the job quest givers are both located in ARR starter zones. Just seems to me to be quite an oversight on their part; at least Red Mage doesn't have any skills tied to a quest completion.

Red Mage and Samurai both have skills tied to quest completion: at Lv60 and Lv70. Although if I remember correctly, the difference is that the red mage quests up to Lv60 are set entirely in ARR territory, while samurai Lv58 requires you to visit Ishgard and western Coerthas (the first 'field area' of Heavensward) so you'll have to wait until then to complete that quest line.

Once you complete the Lv60 quests, they actually do stop giving you quests until you are able to access the next location. Or more exactly, they won't give you the Stormblood set of quests (Lv60-70) until you reach Stormblood in the MSQ, regardless of whether you can access the required locations or not.

For the most part this applies to the ARR jobs as well - the initial job questline takes you up to Lv50, but you can't pick up the Lv50-60 Heavensward-era quests until you reach Heavensward in the story. Red mage and samurai are the only exceptions for this, since they are accessible in ARR and the other option would be to give them nothing at all storywise until you unlock Heavensward.

Access to areas for quest progress does vary a lot from job to job. Some of the Lv50-60 plots take place back in ARR settings and can be cleared immediately. Others require you to wait until you gain access to one of the very last regions unlocked at Lv58 in the MSQ. Likewise for the Lv60-70 quests, which may be immediately accessible in previous zones, or may require you to reach certain new areas, or in at least one instance simply says you can't progress until you have completed quest X in the MSQ.

Even in ARR you'll find occasional blocks, like summoner which - for lore purposes - requires you to have cleared a certain fight before you can progress with the job storyline.

As a general rule, the job quests are written with the expectation that you are playing both job and MSQ at around the same level. If your class level has gotten ahead of the story, you're "out on your own" and the game won't be expecting you to be there yet.

The other thing is that there is no actual issue with you not having access to your Lv60 samurai skill yet - because there's absolutely no content that it's useful for at this point. Any dungeon you participate in will synch down your level to match the dungeon, so you won't be Lv60 and won't have the skill anyway. (It's just a passive "meditate to charge your kenki gauge" skill - and you won't have the gauge in any ARR content either.)

Also if you had directly paid to boost samurai, it would automatically mark the Lv60 quest as done, and give you the ability. It would just be a very inefficient way of spending your job boost instead of using it on a class that starts at Lv1, purely to get an ability that's not all that useful yet.

[Iscah]

However, is it even possible to use Samurai or even Red Mage in lower level MSQ dungeons? I figure I could run the dungeon with SAM/RDM and then switch back to another class to turn in the quest for the XP. But, I'm not sure if you could use higher level class with lower level MSQ quests or not? I do understand that higher level skills will be greyed out for lower content, but would be nice to know if it were possible to even do.

As others have already said, you can take your high-leveled jobs into low-level dungeons but they are synched down and only have a few skills available. Have a look through your skill descriptions in the Actions and Traits menu - it will list the level at which you "learned" these abilities (even though you really got them all instantly at Lv50). Level synch for dungeons gives you access to your skills based on these levels.

As for handing in the quests, all the game checks is whether your current level is equal to or higher than the quest level - so you can do this not just with another battle class, but actually with crafting or gathering classes as well! In ARR anyway. They 'fixed' that for Heavensward.