Thinking about jumping back into this game and was wondering if you still had to grind Fates in order to level up sub jobs. Last time I played was I think October and that really bummed me out because I was needing to level several other jobs for the abilities.

I am looking through patch notes to see what changed and I saw they added new quests, but not sure if those are endgame or just more additions to remove Fate grinding.

Can anyone elaborate on what they changed with leveling so that I am not inferring incorrectly. Thanks!

EDIT: Hmmm.... went to just patch the game just in case and found that they are doing a free week of play for inactive accounts. Guess I will at least hop in play around.

Nope, but it's still an option. Dungeons are much better I find, especially with roulettes giving bonus experience daily.

I've leveled one job to 50 using FATEs and two using dungeons/duty finder. The latter was much more enjoyable, if it took a bit longer (in terms of days)

No, FATE's have become pretty irrelevant for leveling up. They've added lots of other ways to get experience, like dungeon roulettes and stuff. Even just running a dungeon by itself is usually better than FATE grinding.

To be clear, that does not mean the concept of FATE grinding does not exist. There is a particular quest to upgrade your relic weapon late in the game that will require lots and lots of FATE grinding. But you can technically bypass that in favor of other weapons if you can't stand doing it.

You can run dungeons by yourself now!? Or is it only possible as a Disciple of War?

Really glad to hear you no longer have FATE grind as that is what killed me from playing the game and stopping somewhere in 40s when I tried to attain other skills for my main.

Not quite, what I meant was that dungeons give a fat bonus of experience (like, a lot) the first time you queue for a random one each day. It's still a 4 person, 15-20 min experience on average.

They also give more experience in general than they used to, meaning doing those is better than FATEs. Less running around, more variety, and generally faster also.

@giantstalker: Ah sorry, I misread "itself" as "yourself". Just me reading what I wanted to read.

Only 4GB left. I am actually excited. Thanks a lot everyone.

I recommend picking up the challenge log as soon as possible. It provides some good ways to get some free exp (often for stuff you do anyway), but it's not automatically unlocked. I believe the quest to unlock it is in Limsa Lominsa.

Cool. Looks like decent chunks of EXP are rewarded ontop of whatever EXP you achieve doing it.

Daily Dungeon Roulettes help speed things along but FATES are still one of the faster ways to level at least early on. Hunting logs can help give you a quick boost in XP too.

Depending on what party role you're playing, dungeon grinding is probably faster than fate grinding. If you're a tank or heals then that's certainly true. If you're melee DPS then it's still mostly true, but you can afford to do a fate or two while waiting on the dungeon queue (melee dps queue is like 4-6 minutes (until 2.4 when rogue/ninja come out and EVERYBODY makes one)). If you're a ranged DPS, I'm sorry about your queue times.

Also not sure if levequests were around the last time you played, but they're repeatable quests that cost 1 'Allowance' each to attempt. You gain 3 Allowances every 12 hours, and they stack to 100, so if you don't play for a few days, you'll have a ton of allowances and can chain leves for a level or two if you really want to (you'd be better of doing your daily dungeon roulette first, though).

I still like doing Fates. Dungeons just feel too slow. What I did for my most recent 50 was FATES, Challenge Log, and Guildhests to around Stone Vigil access. Ran that a few times til level 44 and then just spam Darkhold first room til 50.

@kishinfoulux: It depends on how quickly you feel the need to reach 50 I guess. If you need to get there in just a day or two (for whatever insane reason) then just doing dungeons won't necessarily be the quickest. But if you're patient enough to spread the grinding over a period of time, by regularly doing daily roulettes and challenge logs, it's exponentially less effort than doing FATE's. It would take you hours of grinding FATE's to equal the amount of bonus experience from a handful of daily roulettes and challenge logs.

I think that's by far the best way to go about leveling secondary classes personally. The rest of your time can be spent doing anything else more interesting.

lol every queue I join as a DD ends up taking 40 minutes

Ranged DPS I assume

Most folks pf DD for a speedrun, so queues can be bad on any role. That said, 40 mins is most def a ranged dps haha.