@aune on cohost

I will never once understand anyone who complains about leveling being "too slow" in FFXIV. At all. In any expansion.

This isn't just coming from having played many an MMO where it was very, very expected that leveling would take up a majority of your time since it made up most of the content -- you know, things like Ragnarok Online, Anarchy Online, FlyFF, Maple Story, FFXI, Phantasy Star Online, the list could really go on almost forever.

It's just straight up absurd.

You literally cannot keep pace with your job quests in ARR on a brand new character, as unless you do literally nothing else, you will hit level 20 before you finish your level 5 quest. The mob kills for the early quest + MSQ in the zone around it will easily push you past it. It sets you up to not think of your job quests as important to unlock skills, because you just actually cannot do them at a reasonable pace.

With barely any extra kills or actions performed, I've unlocked Sastasha on a brand new character.... and I'm level 25. Outleveling the gear for the first dungeon by 10 levels by the time you get to it is pretty goddamn weird. It is trivial to outlevel entire expansions to the point that I know someone who was barely in HW that had been asking me what level 90 gear to pick up -- and it was like, you... really don't need to. You don't have access to anything that that's gonna make a difference for. I guess you could spend the gil, but by the time you get here, you're gonna need new equipment.

Even just during normal Endwalker, I seem to recall I hit 90 before I got access to the 89-90 gear, without... really doing anything out of the ordinary? I might have run one or two leveling roulette duties and I think we ran like... 5 FATEs? Total? And people made such a big deal of it "not being enough" that the dev team BUMPED THE EXP GAIN.

I know leveling isn't like, Content so much in XIV, but it's been this way for forever. Back during the start of my current sub in ARR, I hit cap in the first like... 3 weeks? Of playing. It was much, much harder to level back then and it was still just trivial.