Even by 80, my pioneer toon is still figuring out the best ways to level :) The Shadowbringers leg was both effective and not that effective, but I think I got the idea for most the upcoming alts.
Crystarium Deliveries & Scrips
Obviously, Crystarium Deliveries were my primary focus. About a whole level per quest, 4-5 quests in total plus craft experience, is something not to be ignored – and to say nothing about all the stories which were great as always, including the meta walk-and-talk finale. I liked the amaro cooking/alchemy quests and gathering quests most of all.
The big drawback of Deliveries is that they now have several jobs mashed into one questline, which means that only one of them will benefit from quest XP, and also it’s less lore and stories overall. It’s good that you can pick the least leveled or least mats-inquiring job for every next quest, so this variety is a big plus.
I’m still making a full couple of crafting/gathering sets to make the journey easier: one at the beginning of expansion content and one around *4-*6 level which safely takes me to the expansion cap. Shadowbringers was the first expansion to introduce scrips as a questline reward, and I made a big mistake: went and spent them for master recipe books, not realising that Rowena’s representative sells a full beautiful set of 500 ilvl, with main and off-hand tools!
I managed to discover this and stop in time, but I still lack three off-hand crafting weapons. I’m still shunning the whole collectables thing yet, and I definitely don’t want to spend my leveling time for them, so that was a narrow escape :) At least my alts now know better.
Tribal Quests
The second cool thing I’ve discovered were Tribal Quests. No, I knew about them, I had all DoW/DoM pre-requisites done, but they appeared to be so awesome! Every tribe offers a solid amount of experience for completing very quick minor tasks – like less than 5 minutes per daily 3-quest batch.
It’s a huge help during leveling, but it works only within the expansion range: for example, you get 500k-600k per quest, but once you reach expansion’s level cap, it’s immediately 1k – even if the quest is already waiting just to be turned-in. It takes time-gating to progress through the Tribal story and earn reputation, so it’s not a reliable and only source of XP, as you’ll outlevel them faster than midway, but nevertheless it’s worth doing. Especially if I have alts parked: a daily login for a 5-minute round will take away a lot of leveling pain and grind for them.
Another thing: Tribal Quests have their own stories! Not only the traditionally awesome storytelling, but they happen in a certain spot, which improves as you progress through reputation and storyline (like Halfhill farm or Garrison in WoW). Even if I don’t benefit from XP anymore, I plan to see them till the end with all alts for that reason alone. And of course, by achieving the high ranks of reputation you get access to multiple goods, including mounts – can’t say no to that.
Grand Company Leves and Leves
Grand Company deliveries were my leveling bread-and-butter until Shadowbringers, as they allowed to cover a whole level in-between story quests with single simple crafts across all the jobs. I did not find the as cool in Shadowbringers, as their income became pretty feeble – about 25% of a level compared to 80-90% in previous expansions.
Normal leves in Crystarium were a great replacement in that sense – actually this is what I mostly did for 75>80 leveling. You could grab a single quest for 1,5 million XP, and as you always do a high quality item, it’s 3 million per simple craft – which is almost a level. Not a lot of mats, not a lot of bother – and most important, significantly reduced grind.
Triple turn-in quests: I finally know how to detect them. As you click through the leve quests, the quest interface has a playing card mark in the top-right corner, and the one that differs from the other two within a level range will be a triple turn-in. For example, in Shadowbringers two quests within a 76-level batch will have a green card mark with a dwarf, and one quest is a golden card – go for it! Same mats, same craft, triple experience: I leveled 4 remaining jobs 77>80 today in under 2 hours.
They’re also a life savior for mat-demanding jobs: if you need to avoid skin/leather grinds, or bags overloaded with alchemy/cooking mats, you could pick the ones that require less. For example, an alchemy item of 72 is just 25k XP difference from 76, but it’s simple mats, same as you can pick a cooking quest that requires no meat or god forbid, fish. So you could mow the required amount of weeds in 10 minutes and skyrocket across levels.
I guess Endwalker uses the same model, so I’ll hop on questlines and tribal quests right from the start, and turn my attention to leves in between.
Crafting/Gathering Rotations
I’m more or less aquainted with my crafting and gathering hotbars. I find some of the abilities useless or outdated, so I’m moving them to an auxiliary hotbar now – aka the one I’d never likely need them. In general, my hotbars are a mess, with only a few abilities arranged at the same places across jobs, the ones that I use the most.
I always open up with Muscle Memory to fill 1/3 of progress bar, then I do Waste Not > Innovation to play with quality enhancement abilities until 100% high quality chance, and finish the craft with 2-3 Innervation-enhanced progress abilities. This is the strategy that never fails me, and I always have a couple of moves left when the craft ends. It’s almost a no-brain crafting strategy, and I can improvise a little if anything goes wrong. For Gathering, it depends on a situation of course.
I need to sit and arrange all my buttons across one and all other jobs to make it convenient, but I’m too busy :) Just spent an hour arranging mats on my main across two retainers, and that was hell of a job.
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Well, I’m glad I arrived to the final leg with my main, and I think it’s gonna be good to drag alts to Endwalker too before I proceed. As I discovered, I’m doing tribal dailies on all of them in any case.
Gnomecore 