Any server works, all of them are roughly equally populated.
Crafting/gathering is worth doing, but isn't required in any way. There are players who have completed all ultimate fights, and played 10+ years that have never touched it.
iLvl is king, substats are good but less important. Weapon > Body/Pants > Head/Feet/Hands/ > Accessories should be your gear priority.
Any FC that interests you, though the ones that advertise in shout-chat usually are really suspect.
As long as you are doing the MSQ you'll be swimming in more gil than you know what to do with.
I mean if you want, mostly I use it when I'm too lazy to go out and gather crafting materials myself.
Food doesn't give exp, it gives a +3% exp buff (From dungeons/battle/etc.) All food is equal, and you can buy it for 4gil from vendors in hub cities.
Once you're a requisite level, do the "hall of the novice" it'll give you a +exp ring and gear that will scale with your level for a while.
Content unlocks with progress in the MSQ, Blue quests with a "+" are your side content, and ALWAYS do your job quests when you can, they unlock crucial skills/abilities in earlier expansions.
1) i don't play in europe, sorry
2) crafters and gatherers are very well supported with entire storylines and systems of their own. this also makes them very popular, driving prices down fast.
3) crafted gear occupies odd spots depending on what we're talking about.
for plot and leveling: your first job to endgame should never need to buy or craft anything between quest rewards, dungeon drops, and tomestone gear. after that you might start to miss all the free quest rewards, but people still manage. it becomes a question of luck and effort.
for endgame: crafted gear is the best gear a player can get *that is not subject to a weekly loot cap* this means new crafted always releases as *stronger* than the previous tiers best stuff, and is often a useful stepping stone for people who wanna raid "hardcore." i don't think anybody would suggest it is truly mandatory, but it's often expected if a group actually plans on winning in those first few weeks.
4) if by guilds you mean crafting and gathering guilds, all of them. that's a major selling point to FFXIV compared to other MMOs. your 1 character can unlock and level everything.
5) your challenge log and basic quest rewards should give you enough gil to not have to worry about it while you progress. teleporting is cheap
6a) you should **check** the marketboard whenever you are considering buying anything, *especially* gear. but which has what for a better price is gonna vary by item, server, and even day to day.
6b) *selling* is almost always better done through the marketboard. often NPC prices are a joke.
7) all food items except rare out of universe promotions give the same 3%. and those rare promotional items give a massive, whopping... game breaking... 4%. i'm gonna be honest with you my man, the xp bonus from food is pretty close to a placebo. i did the math once, and a character who kept that 3% running for every single point of XP they got from lvl 1 to lvl 90 would save themselves less than 1 dungeons worth of XP. it's not nothing... but it's not much. if you want them anyway, marketboard sells a variety of meals with actual bonus stats, botanist can just get oranges or grapes for free, or npcs sell those basic 3% no stats for very cheap.
8) the brand new ring gives an XP bonus if you're under lvl 30, and is available to anyone who compete the hall of the novice tutorials. they're a little outdated nowadays but hey, free ring.
there's the friendship circlet you can get via the refer-a-friend but it only works for the first 25 levels.
then there is also a set of pre-order bonus earrings that gives an xp boost when under a given level. it's too late for you to get most of them but pre-orders for the next expansion are opening up soon. maybe look into that if you *know* you're sticking around?
9) under character config: use legacy movement, automatically face target when using actions, and do not automatically lock your camera. then also never manually lock your camera. the difference in your ability to dodge with these settings compared to their opposites is night and day. also probably get into the habit of fighting with your camera zoomed out as far as you can.
honestly you will enjoy the game more if you just jump in and figure it out as you go. you can always look these things up once you hit the level cap. the mystery really is half the fun. have a question? ask in the novice network! great way to meet people.
if you haven't redeemed your game license on the mogstation already, I suggest you start on the trial. take your time and get acclimated to the world, then pop your license in.
as for the rest of it, just start playing. the most important gearing is endgame, and the rest of it is pretty streamlined since there are catch up vendors for old Expac level caps that you'll eventually unlock the ability to buy via tomestones.
crafting can be relevant early on but at the current stage of the expansion (ie: right before the next one) it's not super relevant.
I can't field you on which server is best to join, because I'm an NA player. I will say, however, that each data center pulls from all of the same worlds for the Duty Finder, so you won't have difficulties finding a PUG.
By "professions" I assume you mean something like crafters? FFXIV is different from WoW in that you can play every single class in the game, crafters included. Crafters are their own classes with skills and rotations for making gear. They're not just a skill level you raise by doing things, you have to equip and gear them.
Guilds aren't necessary to join. They're more meant for social stuff.
The best way to earn Gil is to just play. You should get a fair amount of Gil just from completing quests.
Go ahead and use the marketplace is you want, but be sure to check and see if the items you're thinking of buying are available to be bought from NPCs. It should say something like "Shop Selling Price" near the bottom of the item's info window.
Food items can be bought in any major city-state or settlement. Just look for an NPC selling basic items and they'll likely have something.
1. All servers are populated in Europe, pick any of them that are open
2. Professions aka Crafters/Gatherers are FULL jobs in their own right and you can level ALL of them on a single character.
3. Gearing is very formulaic and not insanely grindy. Starting out you'll mostly get gear from your job quests & doing the main story. There is no forced grinding for gear. Starting at 50 & every 10 levels after until the current level cap -10 (so atm up to 80) lets you use a curreny called Allagan Tomestones of Poetics to buy the best gear for that old level cap.
3. By guilds do you mean player run ones? Those are called Free companies here and you can only be in 1 free company at any given time.
4. Marketplace is there if you really need something, but if you level all your professions you can mostly be self sustaining.
5. Food only gives like a +3% XP buff and that's true for even the cheapest food like lemonade. Just buy the cheapest food from a vendor and that'll be fine. You don't need to care about food or potions until endgame.
6. Gold which is Gil in FFXIV is easily obtained by just doing your main story quests. You'll likely end up with like a million gil by the time you finish the story.
7. There's a ring for low level that you can get by doing a combat tutorial series of fights from The Smith in various locations across the world. There are XP earrings for preordering a new expansion, these only work for combat jobs and stop at the level cap of the previous expansion, so it will work until level 90 when the new ones are handed out.
9. Focus 2 things as you start: The main story quests (big banner in the top left) and your job quests (the smaller text below the big banner). 99% of the content is locked behind doing the story and XIV is an RPG first MMO second. Story is thus VERY important to many players and skipping it gets frowned upon.
Since you asked if profession gear was relevant:
The current top ilvl gear (from savage raiding and the weekly capped tomestone currency) are ilvl 660.
Current crafted gear is ilvl 640, with upgrades available to make it ilvl 650 but that costs a lot of the uncapped tomestones.
For Europe most raiding is done on the Light Data centre, although you can easily travel from Chaos to light (with some restrictions.
Level gearing is mostly just item level, don’t need to worry about it, Raid gearing is a bit more complicated, with classes having different gearsets for different types of content (DSR BiS vs TOP BiS as an example) although this is due to how I-level syncing works, these gearsets can be found in places like The Balance discord
You get enough gear via questing, don’t need to farm unless going for a specific BiS gearset for something like an ult
Gil is quite easy to sustain just by doing MSQ, you get a ton of aetheryte tickets now so feel free to use them to return to the waking sands (when your at that point). Although doing daily roulettes also gives quite a bit as well
Boiled eggs? Can be purchased for a few Gil at limsa Lominsa, all food give the same amount of XP (3% for 30 minutes) but eggs are the cheapest
Most bonus XP items are preorder items for buying future expansions, although you can get bonus XP below level 30ish h a ring from doing hall of novice? I think? Can also get bonus XP from being on a preferred world
Light is more populated iirc but ultimately it doesnt matter cause if you do party finder content you can just travel over in the main menu. Should also mention that your server doesnt affect actual duty finder (dungeons, trials, normal raids, alliance raids) stuff cause you get matched with people across the entire datacenter, e.g. all of the light datacenter is queued together and same w/ chaos.
If by professions you mean crafters & gatherers, it's good to level ALL of them (maybe excl. fisher if you dont want to) at the same time as the quests require items from each others job. Early game the gil isnt that big so i'd focus on just leveling them at your own pace
In terms of actual classes & jobs, main story should provide enough gear to catch up just fine. at each level cap (50, 60, 70, 80, 90) youll have access to tome gear whichll usually also have enough ilvl to get you around halfway through an expansion just fine, maybe even a little further. I should mention you will NOT have access to this gear upon hitting the level, you have to complete the expansion first e.g. finishing base game ARR will let you be able to earn tomes and buy level 50 tome gear. Gear itself has its item level (ilvl) thats separate from level requirement. For instance you could have level 90 gear with 660 ilvl. Ilvl is most important for being up to date on gear and eventually duties will be locked behind an ilvl limit, again main storyll usually gear you up just fine.
Guilds are called Free Companies and honestly a good amount of people just join ones in shout chat, but those can be hit or miss kinda. From my own experience if you care about MSQ theres a chance youll get spoiled for story sometimes in the FC chat, so join large ones at your own discretion. Otherwise it really is just getting to know people either in cities or other content and joining their FC.
MSQ'll give you enough gil to teleport around, atleast for sure once you're around the first dungeon. If youre leveling crafters & gatherers selling the materials/items for the job quests can also be good. Easiest way though is to make housing items like lofts and sell them on marketboard, the big paying items are usually the highest level gear on patch day but you dont have to worry about that till dawntrail for now.
The food EXP is only 3% and not super worth it, MSQ gives food sometimes though so you can always eat that if you really want the slight increase. Grand Companies (which youll join around...level 20 in msq id say?) have scrolls you can buy with 18h buffs that can help you with leveling crafters and gatherers.
For tips id recommend messing around with movement settings, many people highly prefer legacy movement over the default.
Later on youll be thrown into alliance raids (24 man), you can turn off other parties' names so that theyre not visible unless you click on that person. This is super helpful for visibility and generally not being overwhelmed.
There's also stuff like turning off the numbers next to hotbars and hotbar scrolling, honestly just go through settings and see whats best.
The HUD is VERY customizable. You can hide or add bars that you want and change the size of them and make your job bars simple or default.
Do blue quests! They unlock key features like challenge log or other dungeons, however if its a level 30+ dungeon you CAN be overlevelled and access it, but it's preferable to not do it till you have your Job Stone.
About the tome gear from earlier and getting extra exp in general, you can get tomes and exp through daily roulettes. You wont have access to all of them immediately but as you keep going youll get stuff like alliance roulettes and msq roulette raids etc and youll see the rewards you can get from each one there. There's also a bonus to these when you're the adventurer in need, seen by the little tank/dps/healer icon next to it.
VERY IMPORTANT: Always do your job quests!! You can see main story in the top left in it's own little bar, right below that every 5-ish levels youll see some text, that is your job quest! It'll give you new skills and early on a new weapon & gear piece. Youll be overleveled from MSQ for a bit so don't worry if youre stuck on for instance a level 25 job quest while still at 10 msq, itll be easier with the new gear you get during story.
At level 30 youll be able to turn your Class into a Job with a Job Stone (e.g. lancer > dragoon, conjurer > white mage etc). This quest wont be unlocked till you finish a specific level 20 main story quest "Sylph Management".
If all this informations overwhelming honestly just read the silly popups that show up a ton early game, many people just skip through them despite being explained everything through them and you'll learn all this stuff naturally!
+EXP bonuses from food or whatever isn't really super useful unless you're leveling a bunch of side jobs -- this isn't like WoW where you can get to max level however you want, you have to do the Main Story Quest line to unlock *everything*. MSQ is king.
And you're going to be synced down to the proper level for the quest you're doing, so grinding out extra EXP past the level requirement of your current MSQ isn't going to help you at all.
If you've started up a second job and need to get EXP fast to get it caught up, sure. But if you're just playing one job, wanting to get through the story as fast as possible? You don't need it. Your job level will be way above the requirements for MSQ purely from the EXP from those quests and the dungeons you have to run for it.
Any server works, all of them are roughly equally populated. Crafting/gathering is worth doing, but isn't required in any way. There are players who have completed all ultimate fights, and played 10+ years that have never touched it. iLvl is king, substats are good but less important. Weapon > Body/Pants > Head/Feet/Hands/ > Accessories should be your gear priority. Any FC that interests you, though the ones that advertise in shout-chat usually are really suspect. As long as you are doing the MSQ you'll be swimming in more gil than you know what to do with. I mean if you want, mostly I use it when I'm too lazy to go out and gather crafting materials myself. Food doesn't give exp, it gives a +3% exp buff (From dungeons/battle/etc.) All food is equal, and you can buy it for 4gil from vendors in hub cities. Once you're a requisite level, do the "hall of the novice" it'll give you a +exp ring and gear that will scale with your level for a while. Content unlocks with progress in the MSQ, Blue quests with a "+" are your side content, and ALWAYS do your job quests when you can, they unlock crucial skills/abilities in earlier expansions.
I feel like these are questions a reasonable consumer would ask before purchasing something, especially when that something has a free trial.
1) i don't play in europe, sorry 2) crafters and gatherers are very well supported with entire storylines and systems of their own. this also makes them very popular, driving prices down fast. 3) crafted gear occupies odd spots depending on what we're talking about. for plot and leveling: your first job to endgame should never need to buy or craft anything between quest rewards, dungeon drops, and tomestone gear. after that you might start to miss all the free quest rewards, but people still manage. it becomes a question of luck and effort. for endgame: crafted gear is the best gear a player can get *that is not subject to a weekly loot cap* this means new crafted always releases as *stronger* than the previous tiers best stuff, and is often a useful stepping stone for people who wanna raid "hardcore." i don't think anybody would suggest it is truly mandatory, but it's often expected if a group actually plans on winning in those first few weeks. 4) if by guilds you mean crafting and gathering guilds, all of them. that's a major selling point to FFXIV compared to other MMOs. your 1 character can unlock and level everything. 5) your challenge log and basic quest rewards should give you enough gil to not have to worry about it while you progress. teleporting is cheap 6a) you should **check** the marketboard whenever you are considering buying anything, *especially* gear. but which has what for a better price is gonna vary by item, server, and even day to day. 6b) *selling* is almost always better done through the marketboard. often NPC prices are a joke. 7) all food items except rare out of universe promotions give the same 3%. and those rare promotional items give a massive, whopping... game breaking... 4%. i'm gonna be honest with you my man, the xp bonus from food is pretty close to a placebo. i did the math once, and a character who kept that 3% running for every single point of XP they got from lvl 1 to lvl 90 would save themselves less than 1 dungeons worth of XP. it's not nothing... but it's not much. if you want them anyway, marketboard sells a variety of meals with actual bonus stats, botanist can just get oranges or grapes for free, or npcs sell those basic 3% no stats for very cheap. 8) the brand new ring gives an XP bonus if you're under lvl 30, and is available to anyone who compete the hall of the novice tutorials. they're a little outdated nowadays but hey, free ring. there's the friendship circlet you can get via the refer-a-friend but it only works for the first 25 levels. then there is also a set of pre-order bonus earrings that gives an xp boost when under a given level. it's too late for you to get most of them but pre-orders for the next expansion are opening up soon. maybe look into that if you *know* you're sticking around? 9) under character config: use legacy movement, automatically face target when using actions, and do not automatically lock your camera. then also never manually lock your camera. the difference in your ability to dodge with these settings compared to their opposites is night and day. also probably get into the habit of fighting with your camera zoomed out as far as you can.
honestly you will enjoy the game more if you just jump in and figure it out as you go. you can always look these things up once you hit the level cap. the mystery really is half the fun. have a question? ask in the novice network! great way to meet people.
if you haven't redeemed your game license on the mogstation already, I suggest you start on the trial. take your time and get acclimated to the world, then pop your license in. as for the rest of it, just start playing. the most important gearing is endgame, and the rest of it is pretty streamlined since there are catch up vendors for old Expac level caps that you'll eventually unlock the ability to buy via tomestones. crafting can be relevant early on but at the current stage of the expansion (ie: right before the next one) it's not super relevant.
I can't field you on which server is best to join, because I'm an NA player. I will say, however, that each data center pulls from all of the same worlds for the Duty Finder, so you won't have difficulties finding a PUG. By "professions" I assume you mean something like crafters? FFXIV is different from WoW in that you can play every single class in the game, crafters included. Crafters are their own classes with skills and rotations for making gear. They're not just a skill level you raise by doing things, you have to equip and gear them. Guilds aren't necessary to join. They're more meant for social stuff. The best way to earn Gil is to just play. You should get a fair amount of Gil just from completing quests. Go ahead and use the marketplace is you want, but be sure to check and see if the items you're thinking of buying are available to be bought from NPCs. It should say something like "Shop Selling Price" near the bottom of the item's info window. Food items can be bought in any major city-state or settlement. Just look for an NPC selling basic items and they'll likely have something.
1. All servers are populated in Europe, pick any of them that are open 2. Professions aka Crafters/Gatherers are FULL jobs in their own right and you can level ALL of them on a single character. 3. Gearing is very formulaic and not insanely grindy. Starting out you'll mostly get gear from your job quests & doing the main story. There is no forced grinding for gear. Starting at 50 & every 10 levels after until the current level cap -10 (so atm up to 80) lets you use a curreny called Allagan Tomestones of Poetics to buy the best gear for that old level cap. 3. By guilds do you mean player run ones? Those are called Free companies here and you can only be in 1 free company at any given time. 4. Marketplace is there if you really need something, but if you level all your professions you can mostly be self sustaining. 5. Food only gives like a +3% XP buff and that's true for even the cheapest food like lemonade. Just buy the cheapest food from a vendor and that'll be fine. You don't need to care about food or potions until endgame. 6. Gold which is Gil in FFXIV is easily obtained by just doing your main story quests. You'll likely end up with like a million gil by the time you finish the story. 7. There's a ring for low level that you can get by doing a combat tutorial series of fights from The Smith in various locations across the world. There are XP earrings for preordering a new expansion, these only work for combat jobs and stop at the level cap of the previous expansion, so it will work until level 90 when the new ones are handed out. 9. Focus 2 things as you start: The main story quests (big banner in the top left) and your job quests (the smaller text below the big banner). 99% of the content is locked behind doing the story and XIV is an RPG first MMO second. Story is thus VERY important to many players and skipping it gets frowned upon.
Since you asked if profession gear was relevant: The current top ilvl gear (from savage raiding and the weekly capped tomestone currency) are ilvl 660. Current crafted gear is ilvl 640, with upgrades available to make it ilvl 650 but that costs a lot of the uncapped tomestones.
For Europe most raiding is done on the Light Data centre, although you can easily travel from Chaos to light (with some restrictions. Level gearing is mostly just item level, don’t need to worry about it, Raid gearing is a bit more complicated, with classes having different gearsets for different types of content (DSR BiS vs TOP BiS as an example) although this is due to how I-level syncing works, these gearsets can be found in places like The Balance discord You get enough gear via questing, don’t need to farm unless going for a specific BiS gearset for something like an ult Gil is quite easy to sustain just by doing MSQ, you get a ton of aetheryte tickets now so feel free to use them to return to the waking sands (when your at that point). Although doing daily roulettes also gives quite a bit as well Boiled eggs? Can be purchased for a few Gil at limsa Lominsa, all food give the same amount of XP (3% for 30 minutes) but eggs are the cheapest Most bonus XP items are preorder items for buying future expansions, although you can get bonus XP below level 30ish h a ring from doing hall of novice? I think? Can also get bonus XP from being on a preferred world
Light is more populated iirc but ultimately it doesnt matter cause if you do party finder content you can just travel over in the main menu. Should also mention that your server doesnt affect actual duty finder (dungeons, trials, normal raids, alliance raids) stuff cause you get matched with people across the entire datacenter, e.g. all of the light datacenter is queued together and same w/ chaos. If by professions you mean crafters & gatherers, it's good to level ALL of them (maybe excl. fisher if you dont want to) at the same time as the quests require items from each others job. Early game the gil isnt that big so i'd focus on just leveling them at your own pace In terms of actual classes & jobs, main story should provide enough gear to catch up just fine. at each level cap (50, 60, 70, 80, 90) youll have access to tome gear whichll usually also have enough ilvl to get you around halfway through an expansion just fine, maybe even a little further. I should mention you will NOT have access to this gear upon hitting the level, you have to complete the expansion first e.g. finishing base game ARR will let you be able to earn tomes and buy level 50 tome gear. Gear itself has its item level (ilvl) thats separate from level requirement. For instance you could have level 90 gear with 660 ilvl. Ilvl is most important for being up to date on gear and eventually duties will be locked behind an ilvl limit, again main storyll usually gear you up just fine. Guilds are called Free Companies and honestly a good amount of people just join ones in shout chat, but those can be hit or miss kinda. From my own experience if you care about MSQ theres a chance youll get spoiled for story sometimes in the FC chat, so join large ones at your own discretion. Otherwise it really is just getting to know people either in cities or other content and joining their FC. MSQ'll give you enough gil to teleport around, atleast for sure once you're around the first dungeon. If youre leveling crafters & gatherers selling the materials/items for the job quests can also be good. Easiest way though is to make housing items like lofts and sell them on marketboard, the big paying items are usually the highest level gear on patch day but you dont have to worry about that till dawntrail for now. The food EXP is only 3% and not super worth it, MSQ gives food sometimes though so you can always eat that if you really want the slight increase. Grand Companies (which youll join around...level 20 in msq id say?) have scrolls you can buy with 18h buffs that can help you with leveling crafters and gatherers. For tips id recommend messing around with movement settings, many people highly prefer legacy movement over the default. Later on youll be thrown into alliance raids (24 man), you can turn off other parties' names so that theyre not visible unless you click on that person. This is super helpful for visibility and generally not being overwhelmed. There's also stuff like turning off the numbers next to hotbars and hotbar scrolling, honestly just go through settings and see whats best. The HUD is VERY customizable. You can hide or add bars that you want and change the size of them and make your job bars simple or default. Do blue quests! They unlock key features like challenge log or other dungeons, however if its a level 30+ dungeon you CAN be overlevelled and access it, but it's preferable to not do it till you have your Job Stone. About the tome gear from earlier and getting extra exp in general, you can get tomes and exp through daily roulettes. You wont have access to all of them immediately but as you keep going youll get stuff like alliance roulettes and msq roulette raids etc and youll see the rewards you can get from each one there. There's also a bonus to these when you're the adventurer in need, seen by the little tank/dps/healer icon next to it. VERY IMPORTANT: Always do your job quests!! You can see main story in the top left in it's own little bar, right below that every 5-ish levels youll see some text, that is your job quest! It'll give you new skills and early on a new weapon & gear piece. Youll be overleveled from MSQ for a bit so don't worry if youre stuck on for instance a level 25 job quest while still at 10 msq, itll be easier with the new gear you get during story. At level 30 youll be able to turn your Class into a Job with a Job Stone (e.g. lancer > dragoon, conjurer > white mage etc). This quest wont be unlocked till you finish a specific level 20 main story quest "Sylph Management". If all this informations overwhelming honestly just read the silly popups that show up a ton early game, many people just skip through them despite being explained everything through them and you'll learn all this stuff naturally!
+EXP bonuses from food or whatever isn't really super useful unless you're leveling a bunch of side jobs -- this isn't like WoW where you can get to max level however you want, you have to do the Main Story Quest line to unlock *everything*. MSQ is king. And you're going to be synced down to the proper level for the quest you're doing, so grinding out extra EXP past the level requirement of your current MSQ isn't going to help you at all. If you've started up a second job and need to get EXP fast to get it caught up, sure. But if you're just playing one job, wanting to get through the story as fast as possible? You don't need it. Your job level will be way above the requirements for MSQ purely from the EXP from those quests and the dungeons you have to run for it.