One thing that is very nice about FFXIV at times is that it is very, very predictable in terms of content preparation and how things are handled. It allows me to do things like what I am about to do – spill the beans on how you can, starting immediately, prepare yourself for Dawntrail and whatever goals you might have in…10, 11ish months, when it launches.

Now, firstly, a disclaimer – while these predictions are very well-rooted in the game’s past history and 4 prior expansions of launch content, there is always the possibility that with the two Fan Fests between now and launch, we get thrown a curveball. For the general flow of expansion content in FFXIV, I think that these established trends are unlikely to change, but they might. Square Enix and CBU III have a very formulaic approach that makes sure that an FFXIV expansion launch hits right and draws people back in, and that’s not a bad thing in this case.

Secondly, this will roll up some 6.5 stuff you can prepare for now too, because that’s a part of the whole deal, but it’s not worth sorting out the 6.5 stuff from the 7.0 prep because they dovetail nicely together – stuff you do now to prepare for 6.5’s content cycle will also benefit you in 7.0 and there’s not really a separation line that logically tracks there (unless I wanted to milk this very-popular post concept for more views by writing some of the same stuff twice, which, nah, not my style).

So, let’s start with the big list of stuff you definitely need to do for the expansion launch, and then we’ll get nitty-gritty on optimizing and the ways you can super-charge your expansion prep to enjoy those first few weeks of Dawntrail without distraction from your new goals!

The Must-Dos

Finish the Endwalker MSQ through 6.55

This is an obvious one, given how FFXIV just generally works, but if you’re currently playing, should already be good here. If you took a break after Endwalker launch or at some other point and never came back but plan to for DT, you will need to finish the full Endwalker MSQ including the patch content. While it’s been a weak cycle of story after 6.0 in my opinion, it’s still decent and the gameplay has shine to it, but regardless of my opinion of it, you have to do it to be able to accept the Dawntrail starting quests and head for the new world of Tural.

Worth noting is a slight exception case, though – if you are willing to wait for launch and really don’t care to see the post-EW patch story, you will, likely, be able to buy an EW-specific story skip once Dawntrail launches that will nudge you to the 7.0 starting quest, either as a single chapter skip to just pass EW content or as part of a package to skip other prior story chapters as well. This costs real money, likely around $10 if you’re just doing EW skipsies, and even though I personally am not a huge fan of the patch story arc this time out, I still think it’s worth experiencing. But, if you want to do that, it will exist readily as an option on day 1 so if you’re already level 90 on a job and just want to move on to the new stuff, it’s a perfectly valid way to go.

Speaking of leveling…

Get Your Jobs To Level 90

Anything you want to play in the new DT content will need to be level 90. Any gear level will let you start questing, but you’ll probably want to be around 620-630 ish item level, which will likely be near the floor for doing the 6.5 story dungeon as-is.

Buy The Expansion, Obvs

Dawntrail will require a license to play, which means buying the expansion in some form. If they follow the Endwalker model (which seems likely as the general direction gaming has gone in has mirrored it), you’ll be able to buy either a standard or Collector’s Edition key digitally, and if you want the cool stuff, you’ll likely have the limited-availability option to buy a collector’s box with the physical goodies and a large box with Yoshitaka Amano artwork on it that is platform-agnostic, so you just buy a digital key and the physical box for CE goodies if you want. Based on pricing for Endwalker, a total cost of $200 for the digital CE and goodie box is likely, but given the state of greedflation, I’d expect and set aside up to $300 just in case (or your local converted equivalent).

Pre-orders are likely to start at one of the remaining two Fan Fest events for this cycle, and my money (metaphorically and literally) is on EU Fan Fest in October, as that’s when Shadowbringers went up for preorder the last time we had a 3-event Fan Fest cycle. Pre-ordering the game code digitally will give you some manner of pre-order bonuses (usually a minion and an Experience-boosting earring that scales in level up to the current level cap), while pre-ordering the physical goodie box…just makes sure you get one, since they’ll likely sell out day one if EW was any indication. Pre-ordering your game key also ensures you have early access to the expansion, allowing you to start playing the Friday prior to the game’s likely-scheduled Tuesday launch, and this play mode has no restrictions other than that once you have a character doing DT stuff, you’ll have a deadline date to have a real DT key added to your account or else you’ll lose access to characters in that content until you do.

All The Optional Things

Leveling Alt Jobs

If you don’t currently have every job to 90, but want to, fret not! You’ve got at least 10 months to get it done. This goal can be done now, of course, but there might be merit to waiting until pre-orders for DT are live, since the likely experience-earring bonus will make this easier all the way to level 90. I would recommend doing this sooner rather than later, so you can have a chance to get familiar with the jobs you want to play and can also gear them up, although that is not necessarily a hard process for reasons we’ll get into later.

Right now, you can level a new job through standard roulette shuffling, through casual open-world content like Hunt marks and FATEs, through deep dungeons and Bozja (Palace of the Dead to 60, Heaven-on-High to 70, Bozja to 80, Eureka Orthos to 90), and through a combination of any or all of these. For crafting and gathering jobs, the Firmament in Ishgard remains one of the best ways to go from 10-80 on any of those jobs, and you can stretch beyond a little bit with the help of the numerous leveling guides online. For crafters and gatherers in particular, you will likely want to level these first, because this will let you use up and then reaccumulate Levequest allowances, which will be a vital part of getting those jobs to level 100 in DT, on top of whatever new story content we get via our new version Crystalline Mean/Studium replacement. These jobs also do not benefit from the preorder earring, so holding out on them isn’t necessary – they’re the best thing to level now if you don’t have them and want them prior to DT.

Gearing Up

Gear in FFXIV is very predictable, so here’s the lay of the land – in 6.5, we won’t have any new tomestone type or new gear that way. Two new options for 650 item level combat gear will emerge – Augmented Diadochos gear (crafted gear upgrades!) and Alliance Raid stuff from Thaleia, the final Alliance Raid for EW. The Thaleia gear will only be left-side armor, no accessories or weapons, while Augmented Diadochos gear will cover all slots, but requires you to trade in the 640 base Diadochos gear for Certificates of Import and will ask for Tomestones of Causality (uncapped!) to buy a new form of Rain that will be used for trade with the certificates. If you trade any piece that is crafted in High Quality, you’ll get the certificates to cover the same slot in Augmented, so you’ll just need to dump tomes into Rain and that will be your actual limiter for the time you’ll be grinding.

This means that Tomestone of Comedy gear at 650 is going to remain tops for non-Savage raiders, and with the last Alliance Raid, we’ll be able to Augment this gear to 660 as well without doing Savage for the shine/twine drops – weapons, however, will likely remain unupgradable without doing Savage until either 6.58 or 7.0. However, that’s not a big deal, since the last step of the Manderville Weapon relic quest comes in 6.55 and should, based on trends, push the weapon to 665 and BiS, since it is overbudget on secondary stats and offers configurable points for a third secondary stat choice. If you plan to upgrade tomestone gear from the current tier, you’ll need 3 total Alliance raid coins – one from each of the 3 raid instances. Right now, you can farm the first two without a cap, so a stockpile of coins from both is wise to start working on. Thaleia will be limited to one coin per week on launch, likely until at least 6.58, so they will be your main constraint for upgrade items until that unlock.

You can, also, decide to try running Savage in Anabaseios and see how far you can push your gear with the 660 items and 665 weapons that drop there. There is enough time between now and DT that this is worth thinking about if you’re even marginally curious about trying the high-end content of FFXIV – this tier has some interesting quirks mechanically but it’s overall pretty decent as a jumping-in point and has a taste of everything that is raiding the high-end of FFXIV.

In 6.5, we’ll get our last standard trial for the expansion with a Normal and Extreme version, and this will likely drop item level 655 weapons on EX. If you’re not raiding Savage and want a good weapon before the Manderville upgrade in 6.55, this is a reasonable step, and normally EX trials are made to be learnable to a kill in a single lockout (under 3 hours).

Now ultimately, you might be wondering why I would suggest all of this knowing you’ll replace the gear in the first week or so, and that’s a valid question! The reason I suggest it for FFXIV in particular is simple – you can make your leveling experience noticeably easier if you come prepared. If you are full 660 item level going into Dawntrail. Leveling dungeons will start to outpace the 660 gear, but not until level 95’s dungeon, and even then, you won’t be sitting there farming it, so having a higher base will keep you viable. The level 97 dungeon will likely be the point where you start wanting upgrades, but a mix of the level 95 dungeon gear and quest rewards near that point should start to boost you up, and with smart play, you can make a full 660 loadout with no upgrades work until the level 99 dungeon, which will likely be the point we get new Artifact armor and weapon sets anyways. This will keep you from hitting item level walls or feeling underpowered and with even just a single upgrade each from the level 95 and 97 dungeons (you get one piece for sure at the end even if you don’t win anything), you should gain enough power in leveling to make it to the end with ease.

The bigger thing is that some of this will be unnecessary at 7.0 launch, because the current tome gear will be purchasable with Poetics at that point. Now, here’s the trick – if you want to wait and just cycle through Poetics to buy all of it, you can – but you will likely be slowed by the caps and earning rate when you’re trying to vibe through MSQ in DT and it’s not exactly fun to be grinding tomes during leveling. This is fine if you’re trying to gear your lowest priority job category, but less so for your first few jobs. If you plan to level everything at launch (it’s me, hi, I’m gonna level them all it’s me), having at least your first 3 job categories (fending, maiming, scouting, etc) geared and ready means you could use a mix of new dungeon drops and Poetic-purchased 660 gear to level jobs past that point and not be too bad off, but there is enough time to get everything geared, especially given that later in the 6.5x cycle, the Comedy cap will likely expand to 900 weekly instead of 450, which means you can buy one major or two minor upgrades per week.

If you’re just trying to slide in with base preparedness, the 6.5 dungeon will likely give up 635 gear and that coupled with some 650 base tome pieces and Alliance raid stuff will give you enough oomph to get to the level 95 dungeon with relative ease, at which point you’ll likely need to start upgrading more diligently.

For crafters and gatherers, the rule is actually easier – the best set you can have pre-Dawntrail is in the game now with the craftable Indagator sets that came in 6.3. These require a decent time investment and need to be fully penta-melded for them to be perfectly useful into level 100 content, but they will hold until you can craft your initial level 100 gear in DT and you won’t encounter much difficulty with crafting anything until level 98 or so, at which point consumables and tightening your rotations should do the work. If you don’t like this idea, 6.5 should see a last round of Scrip-purchasable gear, including right-side accessories, and while this set, fully melded, won’t be as good as the Indagator sets in raw stats, you won’t have to fuss with pentamelding and you can buy them easily with scrip income from a variety of endgame activities that you’ll still have around 8 months to do.

But there is one item to discuss on gearing that isn’t just these things…

Gearing the New Jobs (In Advance)

Dawntrail is planning to bring two new jobs, a melee DPS and a caster DPS. We don’t know the actual jobs yet, so I want to disclaimer here that for the melee role in particular, we may not actually know or be able to prepare until the job is properly disclosed at a future Fan Fest, but we can make a good educated guess that I am willing to stand behind – that the job will use Scouting left-side gear and Aiming accessories. Reaper was added in EW to give Dragoons a gear-share, so Reaper was added to Maiming gear to help keep Dragoons from feeling bad in gearing since gear is so portable between jobs in this game. There is only one job now that is on a similar island, and that is Ninja, who uses Scouting armor with Aiming accessories. I expect that whatever the melee job ends up being, regardless of theme, it will be on these armor types so that Ninja no longer has to be an island of gearing unto itself.

The casting job is easy – it’s gonna be Casting gear, duh. No need to know anything about the job or game dynamics for that one!

These jobs will, in all likelihood, start at level 80, which means if you want to be ahead of the curve, you can and should use Poetics to go buy Scouting gear, Aiming accessories, and Casting everything from the Shadowbringers vendors in the Augmented Cryptlurker variety. If you want to be super ahead of the curve, you can also grab and sit on item level upgrades from Vanaspati, Ktisis Hyperboreia, and then level 90 sets at 660 as best you can. You’ll get a coffer for each job’s intro quest that has full left side gear and a weapon, but these are often not at the highest item level possible for the introduced job level and you’ll still need right-side accessories, so come prepared for that. You’ll likely be able to buy weapons for the new jobs for Poetics once 7.0 launches and those will also be slightly more powerful, and Endwalker content that drops weapons (level-up dungeons, white gear vendors) will also likely have new weapons for these jobs to offer. You won’t be able to get a Manderville weapon, though, so for best item level, you’ll either need an Augmented Crendulum weapon or to see if P12S is upgraded to drop weapons for the new jobs.

But the base armor is easy and you can do that literally today for level 80, while making the level 90 and prog gearsets a part of your prep (if you really want to).

Content Unlocks

Because leveling alt jobs in FFXIV is so tied to roulettes and helping run old content for players seeing it the first time, you should make a point of unlocking as much of the roster of content as possible going into DT. Just by playing MSQ, you should have access to Leveling roulette, MSQ roulette, 50/60/70/80/90 roulette, and Trials, but you can and should make sure to have more than just these. Once you have at least 3 Alliance raids open, you can queue for Alliance Raid Roulette, once you have at least two normal raids open you can do Normal Raid roulette, and if you want great experience with some modest suffering, doing the PvP intro quests will give you Frontline roulette. If you really want to suffer, unlocking battle mentor and unlocking every duty in the game will give you access to Mentor roulette, which can either pop you into a Guildhest or an Extreme trial, based solely on how pissed the universe is at you that day. All of these give XP, though! Worth noting is that it is likely that Mentor roulette will be iffy for the first few weeks, depending on how the game team decides to handle mentor recertification. At Endwalker launch, you kept the crown but had to do the new duties by a deadline to maintain the crown, so it’s likely going to remain available during launch of DT if you already have the crown – but if not, you’ve got until launch to unlock it if you insist upon suffering.

Also, I’d highly recommend to ensure you have all available Hunts unlocked, because Hunt bills from EW will remain reasonably easy sources of EXP and you’ll need all the prior Hunt iterations unlocked to be able to open the new one in DT, which will be a great source of EXP. If you’re planning to sprint a lot of jobs to level 100 in the first few weeks, having your Trusts leveled to 90 will be a boon. This will require taking them through Shadowbringers to 80 and then Endwalker to 90, but you get alternate skins and a cool title for it. While we don’t know how the Trust system will work for DT dungeons yet, even given the theme of Scion conflict, it’s likely that leveling all of the existing Trust NPCs will help you out here, as they typically swap one between expansions, but we also only have the transition from ShB to EW to go off of on that note.

Consumables and Supplies

Now is a great time to start building a stockpile of leveling supplies. Meals in-game always offer experience boosts, and anything will do, but stocking up on current item level 640 HQ food will give you great stat boosts as you level, and it will be crafted at such volume that prices should start to level out over time before a likely pre-expansion spike. Getting some of that sooner, rather than later, is a good play. If you have crafters leveled, stocking up on the highest grade Dark Matter will mean you can keep your stuff repaired through leveling and that’s a good idea so you don’t get caught with broken gear.

Materia from Endwalker (grades IX and X) will be replaced in DT gear with grade XI and XII, so you don’t need to hold onto combat materia, although melding it to leveling gear you acquire is a good way to keep your power growing. If you wanted to cash out, selling a bunch after you gear up and are close to the new expansion launch is a good way to make some gil, although market timing matters here and it’s tricky, especially for players who’ve been dedicated all throughout EW and are sitting on piles of it themselves.

Gil Making

In addition to EW materia and consumables, players returning post-6.0 will have some stuff they might want. Expect some amount of market interest in minions, orchestrion rolls, and mounts from EW content that can be sold on the market, especially stuff like Retainer Venture minions and some of the banger raid music from EW.

Retainer Leveling

Prepare to level your retainers to 100! Depending on how many you have and what jobs, you may want to plan your leveling in DT around the jobs on your retainers, since they cannot level past your own level with a given job. Gearing them up to current endgame standard for close-enough is also a good idea, as new ventures will require higher item levels equipped to them.

The Ugly, I Wish I Didn’t Have To Think Of This Issue

Server Woes

Endwalker’s launch is almost two years old now, so it is perhaps easy to forget, but the launch window was an absolute shitshow of multi-hour queues, multiple queue-killing errors, and general unplayability for people with limited schedules. Since then, Square Enix has bet on expanding the game in two ways – new server hardware standards worldwide and a rollout of new logical datacenters and worlds.

There’s a big problem with this approach though – the game has not meaningfully addressed the core issue of too many players. Sure, we fixed the 2002 error issue where it attempts to reauthenticate every 15 minutes and kicks you out because now you’re in a full server, and sure, there are new servers and new hardware. The problem is that CBU3 approached the issue as one where just adding separate servers was enough, and spoiler – it isn’t. On NA, the Dynamis data center added in EW is basically a meme, because there are almost 0 players on it and a lot of the players that moved there or rolled there have to DC travel to the main NA datacenters just to get roulette queues to pop! Meanwhile, the existing worlds and datacenters remain about as populated as ever and there’s no real sign that the changes made will do much to alleviate this, because the new server hardware is largely untested for the kind of volume an expansion launch will bring. I hope CBU3 has estimates and ideas of capacity and ways to flex and leverage their total hardware loadout to ease concerns, but I remain unconvinced that the mitigations they’ve taken since EW launch will be sufficient – I fully expect to see multi-hour queues, less errors, but an overall experience that will still feel bad.

To be clear, I very much want to be wrong and if I am, I will smile as I am fed my helping of crow, but I am just not convinced right now that the measures they’ve taken are in any way sufficient. In fact, I think that the DT launch might feel really bad for those Dynamis players in particular, as they might be able to get in easily but then struggle to find groups and be unable to DC travel to safety. It might also work out that by pushing them all onto their home DC that queues suddenly start popping – who knows where the chicken and egg lie in this issue – but after EW, I’m braced for issues and anything even marginally improved over the EW launch will impress me.

It’s Just a Game, But Prep Can Be Fun

One thing I have learned from my time in FFXIV in Endwalker is that I really enjoy being in the zone for preparation, being able to do stuff now to get ahead later so I can focus on just playing. You might think I’m crazy for all this, and in truth, yeah, probably! But I enjoy it and I think that a thing I genuinely like about FFXIV is that I can do this, because the game is predictable in a way that WoW isn’t. Doing all of this seems daunting, but you’ve got at least 10 months to do it and if you do, I am sure that the opening hours of Dawntrail will be fun and relaxing since you can just settle in and focus on the MSQ and getting your enjoyment out of the new content without hitting walls or snags.

Some things here might end up being changed in the Fan Fest cycle, but overall, I’m confident enough to share today and get started on it myself, so hey! Do with it what you will.