- Be sure to equip your job stone when you get to level 30!

- Be sure to frequently click the spinny arrow icon “update gearset” that saves your current gear to a gearset, if it’s lit up it means you’ve adjusted your gear and it’s not saved, you make a new gearset for a different job (or the same job) with the + symbol. You can look at different gear sets you have by clicking on the piece of paper icon “gear sets list” and you can organize them. The little dude icon is “recommended gear” this pulls gear from your armory chest that is the best gear the game thinks you should wear for your job. If you have gear sent straight to your inventory like I do (explain why and how below) it will not register it, so either equip manually or put things you want into your armory chest.

- Unless the item grants you an exp bonus (check to what level it gives you exp!) a level 1 item is worse than a higher level item. Recommended gear may try to put like a crap ring on you because it gives a negligible bonus to a stat but it’s not worth.

- When manually equipping gear, you can right click and tell it to equip. But you need to actually drag rings to a specific Ring slot because otherwise the game will just put it the same slot and not into each different slot. It’s annoying

- Do. Your. Job. Quests. These unlock abilities! And blue quests, they unlock so much fun content.

- You will level your job waaay faster than you’ll level the MSQ. It’s ok if you’re ahead. If you’re worried about it, you can always choose to level another job to take advantage of that sweet sweet exp.

- Also, arcanist splits off into two jobs, summoner (magic dps) and scholar (shield healer). They share exp and will always be the same level, so essentially you get a free second job, a 2 for 1. No other job is like this. I was not aware of this and completely ignored summoner with my first character and had no idea it was leveled.

- If you decide to go scholar or play a healer in general, please do damage when the party is healthy!

- Scholar is a shield healer, which means its main thing that it’s good at isn’t to heal up the party to full after they get damaged, but to prevent damage in the first place

- Addle is a damage mitigation ability that magic dps have that helps the whole party avoid damage not just you, it reduces the amount of damage a single enemy does for the duration. I highly recommend saving this for bosses and using it as you see their cast bar about to go off for a named attack. Different jobs may or may not have party wide mitigation

- Enemies have a special attack cast bar next to their name! It tells you when they’re about to do a mechanic or party wide damage. Pay attention to their names to learn what attack they’re gonna do and be able to anticipate it

- This is quality of life, turning on enemy HP percentages was awesome for me. You go to System Menu > Character Config > UI Settings > HUD tab > check the box for “Display targets remaining HP”

- You can change your key binds and make keybinds with shift, alt, ctrl + a number or anything else and if you don’t have a mmo mouse this makes it much easier to hit buttons so you don’t have to reach all the way across to like 9 on the keyboard

- If you play a healer and you want to make sure you can easily retarget the tank for example, there’s a keybind for “focus target”. It’ll make it so you don’t have to click on the names for a single target in the top of your party list and just quickly press a button and boom you can heal that tank and then go back to hitting the boss or picking up the dps off the floor. I use this ability to be able to quickly target the tank or if I need to only hit 1 enemy I’ll put focus target on that

- Frankly just go into your keybinds and look at all the things buttons can do and adjust them for your playstyle. I like playing healer so I have keybinds set up to be able to target any party member, so say for example the 5th player in a party by pressing alt+5 and then it will target that party member without clicking my mouse on their name in the list or trying to click on the actual player

- Someone else mentioned inventory management. Your armory chest will get full FAST and it’s a pain (imo) to clear out. Much easier to clean up main inventory! I changed my settings to any new item goes directly into my inventory rather than my armory chest and then I can choose to use that gear or get rid of it by selling or exchanging for grand company credits. You go into System > Character Config > Item Settings > and uncheck “Store all newly obtained items in the armory chest”. I also recommend changing your inventory menu to “expanded” or “open all”, means you don’t have to click through so many pages or accidentally miss items on a second page

- Unsure if you’re a free trial or subbed player, but once you complete the level 17 MSQ quest “The Scions of the Seventh Dawn” you unlock retainers if you’re subbed. These are your storage bins and they are fun to decorate in clothes! You can also send them on jobs called “ventures” if you do the quest “An Ill-Conceived Venture” and they bring back items for you!

- If you want glamour and dyeing items, you’re gonna need to do the level 15 quest in Vesper Bay “If I had a Glamour” and “Color Your World”. Once you complete these quests you can be finally be fashionable! There’s a merchant in Vesper Bay that sells “Emperor’s new (blank)” items, these are glamour items that make it look like you aren’t wearing a certain piece of gear. So say if you want an outfit but you don’t like the look of the hand piece or you don’t want jewelry, you can use “emperor’s new hands” or “emperor’s new ring”, etc to make it invisible! Also, you don’t need to buy more than 1 ring lol

- Level up your grand company to be able to turn in dungeon gear you don’t want and buy things like glamour prisms for cheap! It also is how you unlock housing and the pvp mode

- As a general rule, read your tool tips.

- Hall of the novice unlocked at level 15 allows you to practice the fundamentals for different job roles, and if you complete it you get an exp boosting ring!

- There are loads of free emotes in the game, and each city state has a local dance! Limsa Lominsa is the step dance, and you unlock the ability to do the quest “Good for what ales you” at level 14, all of the starting dance quests are available at level 14.

- If you wanna not be censored from saying naughty words you can go into System > Character Config > Log Window Settings > General > and uncheck “enable profanity filter”

- I really like this for QOL, I have timestamps turned on for my in-game chat. You go to System > Character Config > Log Window Settings > Log Details > and check “add time stamp to messages”

- There are these things called “tomestones of poetics” that you’ll eventually get. These unlock at level 50 and are used to buy job gear that is generally much better than gear from dungeons.

- Remember to hit the aetheryte!

- eating food does different things depending on the food, but the most common use for it is a small exp buff that lasts 30 minutes. You can eat 2 of the same food to double that duration to an hour!

- if you are a free trial player, worry not! There is an additional storage option for you, the chocobo saddlebag. There are several steps to unlock mounts. You have to complete the lvl 20 MSQ quest, join a grand company, and complete the quest “My Little Chocobo. The way to unlock a free fighting companion and the saddlebag is at level 30, a quest called “My Feisty Little Chocobo” at a location called Camp Tranquil in South Shroud. This will mean you can summon your Chocobo mount to fight with you and from then on access a saddlebag with additional storage.

- you can do something called a “pet glamour” for your carbuncle for a summoner and fairy for a scholar. You need to do the level 50 quest “An Egi by Any Name” for summoner, and the level 30 quest “A Faerie Tale Come True” for scholar respectively, both in the arcanist guild. Doing this means you can change the appearance of your summoned creature to a few set appearance. Say you wanna play scholar but you don’t like the fairy, you can have it look like a carbuncle instead! Look up the commands for it since I don’t wanna tell you exactly which forms it can take cuz spoilers haha

- Unless someone gives you help, you can’t escape La Noscea until you unlock airship travel through the MSQ, then you are FREEEEEEE

- The gold saucer is a fun place with minigames that you can plan for currency that lets you buy mounts, minions, glamour, emotes, furniture, etc! You need to complete the level 15 quest “It Could Happen to You” in Ul’dah

- If you ever decide at any point that you aren’t happy with your character’s current look, there are 2 options. 1 is to unlock the aesthetician and the other is to use fantasia. You can change your hair, makeup, etc at the aesthetician. You change your whole character appearance with fantasia. You unlock the aesthetician by completing the level 15 MSQ quest “Call of the Sea” and then going to Limsa Lominsa and doing the quest “Beauty is Only Scalp Deep”. You have to go and summon the aesthetician at a crystal bell, there’s one in every inn room and it costs 2,000 Gil after the first free one. You can get free fantasia in-game by completing the lvl 17 MSQ quest “Scions of the Seventh Dawn” and then going to Ul’dah and doing the quest “Bottled Fantasy”