Dawntrail’s launch in just about a week (for early access) means a chance to start fresh, attack Final Fantasy XIV from a new angle, and for a lot of people who made their way to the game during the WoW exodus of 2021 or since, Dawntrail may very well be your first expansion being caught-up and ready to jump into the new content right at the start with everyone else.

Fret not, starting off an FFXIV expansion is pretty easy and doesn’t require crazy optimization or careful planning. You can just play, do the new content as you see unlock quests encouraging you to move towards it, and you will get most of the way towards where you want to go. But you might want to make a plan now, to have a route in mind, and for that reason, I’m here today. This guide will cover what to do at level 100 in Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion, with a couple of caveats. Since this is being written pre-release, we don’t know where specific vendors will be or what costs things will carry, but we can make a set of pretty safe assumptions and use data from Endwalker and other prior expansions to fill the gaps in our understanding. So, that being said, let’s get into it.

First Priority – Finish the Dawntrail MSQ

Perhaps an obvious item, but in order to unlock the 91-100 dungeons, trials, Arcadion raid, Echoes of Vana’diel, and all hunts, you need to get through the MSQ of Dawntrail. Until you do that, most of the recommendations I will make won’t even be accessible. While we don’t know where the MSQ will start, Old Sharlayan feels like a reasonable guess from the launch trailer, but when you first log in when 7.0 is live, the MSQ tracker should come alive with the quest, and clicking it will show you where to go to accept it. Once you get started, follow the meteor quest markers all the way until you get a credits roll and you are golden (city)! After the credits roll, NPCs for tomestone exchange, EX trial totem exchange, and other such vendors will open in the tomestone city-hub for Dawntrail (the expectation is Solution Nine will be the place, but we don’t know 100% for sure yet).

I won’t get into cutscene and skipping discourse, but I will say something generally – Final Fantasy XIV has an overall excellent story that is worth experiencing at least once without interruptions, so make a point of watching the cutscenes, reading the unvoiced dialogue when it occurs, and following along the best you can. If nothing else, it will contextualize the repeatable content you’ll be doing, but it’s also normally just well-written storytelling. I’d encourage you to take it at your own pace and enjoy the ride, because the raid patch is two weeks after full launch and Savage two weeks past that, so there’s not an incredible need to rush, and not being first in line for the EX trials should let some common strategies come together.

In doing the MSQ, you should also get your first bit of starter gear for level 100 – the Artifact set. This set has all left-side armor pieces and a weapon, but crucially not accessories. This gear will be 690 item level and should get you into pretty much everything at endgame until the first raid tier, but only when complimented with other gear sources for accessories.

Unlock The Full Expert Roulette Dungeons and Farm Up Accessories

At level 100, the Expert roulette of daily dungeon runs should comprise 3 dungeons – the level 100 capstone MSQ dungeon and two other optional side dungeons. These dungeons are required to unlock Expert roulette, but expect during the early week or two of Dawntrail to see a lot of the MSQ dungeon. Level 100 dungeons should drop accessories exclusively, also at 690 item level, to match your Artifact set. Farming all of the accessory slots this way should let you reach an item level of 689 or so (one ring will be lower level, likely 678 from the level 99 dungeon) and prepare you for the next step in gearing your character.

Farm Allagan Tomestones of Aesthetics

The uncapped acquisition but capped-carry tomestone to start level 100 content will be Aesthetics. These can be farmed from all level 100 content, dropping from Expert roulette dungeon bosses, completion rewards for doing level 100 dungeons, doing any roulette as a level 100 job, and likely also for doing the last two of the three trials to be added in the base Dawntrail experience. Up front, the EX trials for Dawntrail should also drop these. What are they used for? Well, two major roles are served here. The first is gearing beyond your Artifact armor and the Expert dungeon accessories, as Aesthetics tomestone gear will likely be item level 700. Aesthetics gear should cover all slots, including weapons and accessories, and the costs are actually pretty low – around half what the normal capped tomestone equivalent items cost. In Endwalker, weapons were 500 tomes, chest and legs were 410 each, helm, hands, and feet were 245 each, and accessories were 180, so you can see that it’s not a terribly bad grind to get geared up. The second thing, which you may want to save for, is that the first-tier Master Recipes for raid-start crafted armor and weapons, will have materials for sale that will cost 20 tomes a piece. These items won’t be available until Savage week, so up front, gear your jobs and get full 700 sets to the best of your ability using this vendor!

EX Trials

For those daring to spend a bit of time earning some better gear, expansion launch window means two Extreme trials will be available, from the level 93 Valigarmanda trial and the level 97 or 99 story trial (boss unknown as of writing). Typically, one of the EX trials will drop weapons themed for the boss while the other drops accessories at launch, and these are hugely helpful. These items should match the Arcadion normal raid gear at item level 710, which is a substantial shot in the arm of player power before the raid. The weapon trial will normally drop a job-specific weapon, a coffer that can be used for any valid weapon option, and then sometimes items like Orchestrion Rolls, a crafting material, and sometimes rarely a mount. You’ll also receive 1-2 totems for completing the trial regardless (1 is typical at launch, but depending on their assessment of difficulty, you may get two). The accessory EX will just drop accessories at random, usually 3-4 per kill, with the same extra items as the weapon EX. Fear not if RNG is not in your favor, in a few short clears of each, you can simply buy your gear using the totems as currency – weapons are consistently 10 totems for one, while accessory costs can vary a bit, with Endwalker selling each accessory for 5 totems. With 4 accessories to cover (no second ring since they’re unique), you would need 20 totems from the accessory EX to gear one role in full. These trials have no loot lockout and can be farmed as often as you like.

To start with, I’d suggest getting the weapon for your expected main job you want to play (likely the job you’ll take through MSQ) and the accessories for that job’s role. With those filled out, you can enter normal raid with nearly 705 item level and only need to replace one ring and the left-side armor with new raid gear. This will give you the best possible starting point for normal, but also Savage, as you’ll likely find that some of the EX trial accessories and almost certainly the weapon will remain your best pre-raid gear for Savage.

Now, one thing about EX trials – on NA, OCE, and EU datacenters, the trend is not to queue for these (you do have the option to, but you’d need enough people to attempt the same). Instead, these typically fill via the Party Finder, which means signing up to pick-up premade groups. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I would strongly encourage you to push some EX trials and see how it goes. The fight designs are relatively straightforward and designed to be learnable to a clear in a single 90-minute instance timer, with mechanics that loosely reference the same stuff you saw in the normal versions during your MSQ push. On JP datacenters, queuing content is relatively common, so if you happen to be reading this and playing on a JP datacenter, this is less of a thing. My advice – get in there and try it, you might be surprised! EX trials are fun and the push in skill and rewards like unique mounts is pretty cool.

Level Alt Jobs

Past this point, you’re basically ready to push the high-end content that releases in the raid tier and on Savage, so now what? Well, leveling alt jobs is always a good idea. Once that first job is at current maximum level, you get the Armory bonus to push other jobs up faster, and if you already have a sweet stockpile of Aesthetics gear and tomes, you can start dragging alt jobs through roulettes and leveling your Trust NPCs too. My advice on leveling alts is generally to use this priority setup:

-Level your expected main job
-Level your gatherers
-Level any alt jobs you might play in serious content (alternate jobs in the same main role, other roles altogether)
-Level whatever is assigned to your retainers (they cannot outlevel you in a given job, so for a Warrior retainer to hit level 100, you have to hit 100 on Warrior first)
-Level your crafters
-Level and try the new jobs
-Level anything else you want

Now, some of this can be done in parallel – gatherers don’t use roulettes, so you can do their content easily while waiting on a duty queue, and the same goes for crafters. I find it easier to level gatherers first for an obvious reason – gathering new materials directly feeds your crafters, which makes the process of leveling them easier, less time-intensive, and less costly. For combat jobs, the order is a bit more subject to personal desire – I tend to like leveling jobs on my retainers before I seriously look to finish out roles or even cover alt jobs I would raid on – but my recommendation here is down to the fact that we only have two weeks to normal and 4 to Savage this time out, compared to how much longer we got in Endwalker to run through MSQ and spend time leveling out other jobs. I also think that if you plan to craft Master Recipes – mostly for raid-level gear and consumables – it makes sense to ensure that your crafters are leveled and geared before other combat jobs. As a result, this priority is pretty malleable to personal needs, but either way, you would benefit from mapping it out if you have a lot of goals to reach!

Gear For Alt Jobs

If you come into Dawntrail with full 660 gear on a job, congratulations – that job doesn’t need anything until the level 95 dungeon, at which point you will start receiving drops that are higher item level than that gear. On your first trip through, you’re not gonna necessarily want to spend a ton of time running dungeons to farm gear – in fact, just the MSQ trips through dungeons should help you stay setup until you get your Artifact armor at (likely) level 99. However, while you do run through dungeons, it is worth rolling on everything (I mean everything) that you can possibly use, and if you have crafters leveled, just literally everything. Why? Well, the easiest answer is that there is value to having fresh high item level sets to trade out for immediate upgrades as you level a job through the 90-100 stretch. The bigger answer for crafters is that having a stockpile of current gear gives you the ability to level Desynthesis by breaking down the gear into crafting components, and as each role crosses the finish line, you benefit by having more Dawntrail-level gear to desynth, especially if you can swing it before leveling crafters themselves, since the materials you can gain this way will help you level crafting further for cheaper.

New Materia Farming

Dawntrail is expected to introduce two new ranks of materia that will be used for your gear – ranks XI and XII. XII’s will be hot commodities for all open slots and first overmelds on crafted gear, while XI’s will be a high value in the first Savage week (for those additional overmelds), but generally the odd-numbered rank in an expansion isn’t terribly useful away from crafted gear, since on normal gear you can fully meld XIIs for significantly more (3x value) stats. There will be a few reliable early-endgame sources of this new Materia that you can choose to mix and match to your own ends – new Materia tokens rewarded for duties, from chests in the Expert roulette level 100 dungeons, from Hunt currency, and from extracting Materia from full spiritbonded gear. To address these in order then: duties. If you do roulettes as a role in need, you’ll sometimes get these, usually for Leveling, MSQ, and Alliance Raid roulettes. If you want to do these while leveling, feel free to, however, I find that during the MSQ run, I dislike ducking out to a random duty and so while it can be a good source of Materia, its generally not worth it to me until that first job is done with MSQ. While gearing up, farming tomes, or leveling an alt job though? Hell yeah, give me the bonuses. Chests in the Expert roulette dungeons are an easy one, just open every chest, done! Hunt currency can be tricky – if trends are retained, we are due for a new Hunt currency to replace Sacks of Nuts, but that just means you’ll want to farm DT hunts as much as possible before raid releases ask you to start melding gear. Lastly, if you’ve leveled a crafter enough, you should have unlocked the ability to extract Materia from gear at full Spiritbond, so once you’ve used a piece in level-appropriate content for long enough, you can create a piece of Materia from it. This is an easy way to get your Materia up, with one caveat – when you’re frequently upgrading and replacing gear, it’s not idea. However, once you hit level 100 and have your gearset for raid prog ready, you can get some mileage out of it.

Have Fun

At the end of the day, all of what I just described is a way you can enjoy your time in the game if you enjoy the endgame and rush of preparing for new content, but it is by no means the only way or the best way for everyone. You only get to do the start of an expansion fresh once, so do what makes you happy and maximizes enjoyment of it. For me, that’s gonna mean sprinting the MSQ, enjoying the story, and then getting into the groove of blasting EX trials and gearing up for Arcadion while bringing up my alt jobs and tradeskills (and doing that 2x since I need my raid alt to be ready by Savage too!). What’s important here is that you find what you like and get into it – just play, have fun, and even if you have high-end content aspirations, you’ll have time to work that out once you get there.