FFXIV: Fastest Ways to Level Up

Last Updated on: 6th September 2021, 12:10 am

One of the most notable quirks of the MMO giant, Final Fantasy XIV, is the ability to level multiple jobs on one character. World of Warcraft requires an entirely new character to be created if one wants to level an alt class. For both newcomers and veterans alike, the question of the fastest ways to level up is always relevant, especially leading up to a new expansion and level cap increase.

1. Dailies/Weeklies

While this is somewhat of a grab bag of different things a player can do, dailies and weeklies give the best EXP to time ratio in FFXIV. Through these alone, a player can gain 1-3 levels a day even near the level cap, and the main tabs below will be if one were in a real rush to level.

READ MORE: When is FFXIV Data Center Travel? Everything We Know

First up is the Dailies, which consist of Roulettes and Beast Tribes. The roulettes are located in the Duty Finder and offer a number of exp and item bonuses for accomplishing, well, daily. Levelling, Alliance Raid, Main Scenario (Praetorium is worth so much extra EXP that it may be worth the 30 minute penalty to abandon if you get Castrum), and Trial Roulettes are generally the most worth your time. Levelling is unlocked after completion of the first dungeon, and the other three above are unlocked after completion of The Praetorium. These roulettes scale to your current level, no matter the level of the duty selected, and as such offer the highest EXP to time ratio in the game. Completion of these four alone in about two hours can bring a level 79 job to 80.

Another topic worthy of mention are Beast Tribes. The quests for these groups also scale to level, though the EXP is pretty negligible until the Stormblood tribes, where the six. quests in one day offer about 1/3 an EXP bar. Shadowbringer’s tribe also increased the EXP load while cutting the work in half. For reference, at level 79, a single Fae tribe quest offers slightly more EXP than a Trial Roulette, and the three quests can be completed in about five minutes.

The last topic here is the weekly Wondrous Tails, available each week in Idyllshire. For completing nine duties in the notebook, you will receive half an EXP bar scaled to your current level. Using Retry seals and farming A Realm Reborn Extreme primals, the journal can be completed in about 20 minutes and can currently yield up to 19 million EXP at a time, once per week.

2. Good Ol’ Dungeon Grinding

While ya may hate to hear it, grinding the highest level dungeon available to your job is ultimately the fastest way to level up through raw EXP gain. Well, this may not be entirely true…

Dungeon grinding is the fastest only if playing a healer or tank job. While both roles tend to have low wait times to queue into dungeons, healers rarely need to wait longer than 30 seconds. As such, assuming an average dungeon run takes about 20 minutes to complete, and offers about 1/3 an EXP bar after level 50, and a full bar below 50, one can level up about once an hour after level 50, and about half an hour per level before then.

These numbers may be a bit off as I’m relying on my own experience with EXP bonuses through a past pre order accessory, as well as the armory chest bonus, but the method here is only about a third faster for me, even factoring in the bonuses.

One may wonder then: what is a DPS job to do?

3. Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High

While not AS fast as normal dungeon grinding, using Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High is probably the quickest way from level 1-70, at least as of the time of writing.

These unique areas, located in the South Shroud and Ruby Sea respectively, are a different form of gameplay based on dungeon crawling through floor after floor, where the party always enters at Level 1 and builds up through combat. I am simplifying the process a good bit, but that’s the premise in a nutshell. There are plenty of tutorials out there which could do a better job than me explaining this content.

Factoring in the long queue times that DPS jobs tend to have, Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High ends up being generally faster than grinding the highest level dungeon over and over.

READ MORE: FFXIV Patch 5.5: Class Balancing

While some of this info could change following the release of Endwalker, the core formula of FFXIV has remained unchanged for years. We can safely assume that these methods will remain the best in the game for level progression, and levelling will likely be made even easier if the trend continues.