Early Level Questing

[Smiling River]

As a new character, is it worth doing all the quests? Is it mandatory? Is there a better way to level up / progress in the early levels?

[FreelanceWizard]

There's four types of quests, more or less, in the game. They are:

 

• Main Scenario Quests (quests with the meteor symbol) -- these are required to unlock content and progress the story. You do need to do these eventually, as a lot of group content is locked by them.
  
• Side Quests -- these have a normal quest icon and give you XP and items. You can skip these as desired. I skipped quite a few and used dungeons for leveling, which gave me a solo means to level DPS classes (for which Duty Finder queues are often fairly long).
  
• Class Quests -- these are given by your class trainer up to 30, then your Job trainer once you've unlocked the Job for the base class. While some skip them, you really need to do these as they control access to certain abilities. The Job quests in particular unlock your Job skills and give you Artifact armor.
  
• Levequests -- these come from Levemetes and are basically short, repeatable, timed solo quests that provide XP and your choice of Grand Company seals or gil. They're handy for leveling up secondary classes.
  

 

In general, these days, the best XP comes from Duty Roulette, whose once daily XP bonus is about half a level. After that, dungeons around your level provide good XP and gear, in addition to teaching you how to play your class in groups (the game being largely based around advancement through group content). Quests and FATE grinding end up being fairly similar these days, I believe. Before the MSQ unlocks the first three dungeons around level 15, the fastest way to level is to go through the MSQ, do the side quests at each quest hub, and hit FATEs when you see them pop on the map.

 

Technically speaking, nothing is ever mandatory in XIV, but you'll find your advancement curtailed if you don't do the Main Scenario Quests (as you lose access to dungeons) and avoid grouping (as the best gear comes from dungeons either directly or indirectly via Tomestones).

[Smiling River]

Thanks for the prompt reply! That clears things up for the most part. I guess I'll do the silly "fetch this" quests until 15 and then try the dungeon runs

[AvaZope]

I also know if you're like me an have the Pokemon "gotta max 'em all!" mentality towards classes/souls, you may want to skip some parts of zones. Especially zones where the quests are 15+. 

 

Getting a class to level 15 is easy. Just do the hunting log, fates you run along into, and some level 10 levequests. However after 15, the leveling process can really slow down, so I skip whole hubs and grind on some classes so when I go back to level another, I have different options to level that class.