FF14 - 2026 Complete Beginner's Guide! (Final Fantasy 14)

Welcome to the most complete Final Fantasy 14 beginner guide on the internet. Previous versions of this guide have racked up millions of views and almost as many kind comments from you guys telling me how helpful it was. I hope you enjoyed this labor of love as much as I enjoyed making it for you. If you enjoy this video, the nicest thing you can do is like the video or leave a comment to let the algorithm know that it was helpful. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I try to answer every single one. Feel free to use the timestamps in the description to come back to topics you need more information on later. Now, let's talk about how to play one of the best MMOs ever made.

Okay, when you create a character, one of the first things you're going to have to do is choose a data center. The important thing to know is if you're on a North American data center, you can only play with other players on North American data centers. So, if you're on Behemoth and your friend is on Cactar, you still can play together, but there are limitations we'll talk about in a moment. So, try to get on the same server as your friends if possible. In order to switch data centers, all you have to do is go to your character select screen, right-click on your character's name, and then from here, you can choose to visit another world server or visit another data center. So, you can come in here, select the world. It'll populate the list, and you can choose which one you want to go to and which world you want to go to on that server.

If you're visiting another server, there's going to be limitations. You won't be able to join their free company. In other words, you won't be able to join their guild, but you will be able to join a link shell where you can talk to them from server to server. But if you want to be in their free company, make sure you end up on the same server. It's going to make life a little bit easier for you.

If you see this star, like this one here on Primal, that's encouraging you to create a character on one of these servers on this data center. What that means is you're going to get increased experience here. There's incentives here that are saying, "Hey, we need more players to play on this data center, so we're going to incentivize that with extra experience and things like that." And generally speaking, if you don't have a reason, like a friend on one of these other servers already, definitely take advantage of that because there's nothing wrong with the server. It just so happens that more people created characters on these servers for one reason or another, and they need to balance out the server load, and so they're rewarding people. You get a 90-day XP buff. So 3 months of much, much increased experience, and you can use it to level your other jobs because remember, all of your jobs, in other words, all of your classes, are going to be leveled up on one character. You make one character and it does all of the things. And we'll get into that here in a lot more detail in a moment.

So once you've chosen your data center, you're going to have to create a character. The first thing you're going to have to choose with your character creation is going to be your race. You're going to be able to choose between hire, Ellisen, Lofll, Mikot, Rogaden, Aura, Rothgar, and Vieira. The first thing that you're probably wondering is, is there a difference between the races? Is there one reason to choose one over another? Like in so many other MMOs, there's passives attached to each one that say, "Hey, this one's going to be a good mage, and this one's going to be a good warrior."

But before we answer that question, now this game is awesome, but what about on the go or when you need a change of pace? That's why you've got to check out Ark Knight's Enfield, a new RPG combining strategic real-time combat and immersive exploration one second and transforming the world with your factory building the next. This game delivers a high-quality story with cinematic cutscenes and memorable characters inside of a mysterious and beautiful world. You'll take control of a team of up to four operators to strategically take down your enemies in exciting real-time battles. Choose from 24 different operators to form your team, leverage diverse operator classes and skills, utilize physical statuses and elemental reactions, and coordinate precise timing to play the way you want to play. But this game goes beyond simply exploring and battling by giving you the ability to build an automated industrial complex where you'll be able to create the perfect automated production line system to gather resources for you. It may look intimidating at first, but the production lines are designed to expand gradually. Start with one simple line and eventually build a fully automated industrial empire or simply take advantage of the blueprint system to use someone else's layout. While the game does deviate from the typical RPG formula, it still has a massive focus on giving you the ability to explore different regions of the world from futuristic industrial zones to zones inspired by traditional and modern Chinese designs. And looking at the gameplay from the actual game, it looks like the world we get to explore is stunning. So, what are you waiting for? Ark Knight's Enfield is a 3D real-time strategy RPG coming to PlayStation 5, PC, and mobile in early 2026. Make sure you don't miss out by using the link in the description to pre-register now for the global official release date. Massive shout out to Griffine for sponsoring this segment. Now, let's get back to the video.

The first thing that you're probably wondering is, is there a difference between the races? Is there one reason to choose one over another? Like in so many other MMOs, there's passives attached to each one that say, "Hey, this one's going to be a good mage, and this one's going to be a good warrior." And the answer to that question is a definitive no. It does not matter. In this game, races are 99.999% cosmetic. They do have some base stats associated with them. The difference between each one is so insignificant that literally nobody cares about them. It's the difference of maybe one or two intelligence or one or two strength. It's literally nothing in the grand scheme of things. When you're at the end game and you have pieces of gear giving you much, much, much more stats than that, you're not going to care even in the slightest about the margin of one or two intelligence on a character. So, when it comes to choosing your race, pick the race that looks cool to you, pick the race that you're going to be attached to. If you want to be a massive rogen, then go for it. And if you want to be a cute catgirl, live your best life.

Once you've chosen your race, it's going to let you choose between different clans. Clans are another way of changing the character cosmetically. They do again have slightly different stats, which you can see over here on the left. But again, I can't express to you enough how much these don't matter. So, please don't make your character decision based on those. Don't choose something that you're less excited about simply because it had two more decks, right? It doesn't matter in the long run. I promise you, you will regret it if you do this. It is also worth noting that if you do create a character that you don't love, like down the road you wish you wouldn't have made that race or you wouldn't have made that look or, you know, maybe you would have maxed out one of the sliders that you didn't max out. You do get something called Fantasia later on a couple of times while playing through the game. It's given to you, and you can use this Fantasia to change your character's appearance, which means you'll be able to change everything about them. You basically recreate the character from scratch when you use the Fantasia. So you can go from a guy to a girl. You can change your race. You can change your looks. Everything can be changed with the use of the Fantasia. And you're given about one or two of these while you're playing through the story of the game. So you're not locked into your look forever. So don't stress it too much. Make something that excites you and get into the game and have some fun.

All right. Once you've picked your clan, you're going to get to choose between assortment of things like heights, bust size, and hairstyle. Right? You get to choose between all of the things you're used to choosing between when creating a character and an MMO. Down here in the bottom, you can change the scenery and the lighting to see what they look like in different conditions, just in case you want to make sure they look good in the real world. And then it's going to ask you a couple of RP questions. This has no bearing on your character strength or power or anything beyond the RP. It's going to ask you to pick your birthday, which you can do. And then it's going to ask you to pick a patron deity. Again, just pick the one that looks cool to you. Maybe it has a cool symbol. Maybe it's got some cool lore, but it's going to have no bearing on your character in the actual game.

Finally, you'll be able to choose between gladiator, pugilus, marauder, lancer, archer, and the disciples of magic, conjurer, thiturge, and arcanis. So, you've got your disciples of war, who are going to be your physical damage characters, and your disciples of magic, who are going to be your magic characters. You choose gladiator if you ultimately want to be a paladin. You choose pugilist if you ultimately want to be a monk. You would choose marauder if you wanted to be a warrior. In other words, these classes are unique because in order to play as the class on the left, you have to get the class listed on the right to level 30 first. Whereas the classes that I've not listed yet, such as the astrologian, the blue mage, the dancer, the dark knight, the gunreaker, the machinist, the pictomancer, the reaper, the red mage, the sage, the samurai, and the viper. All of these other jobs you can unlock by doing a quest. They don't require you to have been a certain starting class. They require you to hit a certain level, and then you can do a quest and unlock them. And it doesn't matter what you were before then. So, it's only these jobs right here that require you to get a specific class to level 30 before you can start them. And the rest of the jobs can be unlocked when you get any job to the required level and then complete the quest.

So, if you're trying to decide what job you want to be, if you wanted to be a melee DPS, you would be choosing between monk, draon, ninja, samurai, reaper, or viper. If you wanted to be a ranged physical DPS, you would be a bard, a machinist, or a dancer. And if you wanted to be a magical range DPS, you would be a black mage, a summoner, a red mage, or a pictomancer. Then there's the blue mage. But it's important to note that the blue mage is a bit of a unique specimen in the game. It's not really viable for endgame content. Its level caps out lower than the rest. It's just kind of a fun side thing for soloing and kind of being overpowered in early game content. You wouldn't plan on maning a blue mage. It would just be an alt that you unlocked and leveled up when doing various activities throughout the game. And Dantrell is adding a second limited job, the beast masteraster, expected to release in 7.5. If you wanted to be a healer, you would go either white mage, schar, astrologian, or sage. And if you wanted to be a tank, you would go paladin, warrior, dark knight, or gunreaker.

Next, let's talk about role and icon colors. Once you've chosen a role, you'll be able to tell what role you and other people are by looking at their job icon. When you're looking at your party, you'll see to the left, each person has a little square with a color and a symbol inside of it. That symbol is going to indicate their job. You'll learn to know what each of these symbols mean, and you'll know just by looking at them what job that person is. For instance, mine here is a black mage symbol. It's red because I'm a DPS. The following one here is blue because that's a tank. And again, the next is green because that's a healer. So DPS are red, tanks are blue, and healers are green. When you're in combat, you'll see a small number to the bottom left of each person's icon, and that's going to tell you the order of emnity or the order of aggro. So if they have an A, that means they have aggro on the enemy. If they have the two, that means they are next in line to get it. So if the tank were to lose it or the tank were to die, the enemy is going to start attacking this person here. And now this person has aggro because they've got the A. And this is good for the tank to know how they're doing on maintaining the aggro. This is good for the healer to know who's going to be getting hit next so they can make sure they have the health they need to take the hit. It's not something you have to pay terribly close attention to unless you're one of those support roles, but it is nice to know what those numbers mean.

Now, roles are handled a little bit differently in Final Fantasy compared to other MMOs. The tanks are going to be responsible for tanking the enemy. Typically, tanks are going to grab the enemy and turn it away from the group. It's going to get a lot more complicated than that when you get into difficult content, but that's the gist of it when it gets started. The healer is going to be responsible for keeping everyone alive. You're going to heal people when they take damage. And the damage dealer is going to be responsible for putting out as much damage as possible. But it doesn't really stop there in Final Fantasy 14. In Final Fantasy 14, the tanks are going to be responsible for putting out damage as well as the healers. So, whenever the tank has aggro already, and the healer already has everyone topped off on their health, they have abilities in their arsenal that actually do great damage that they are going to use. This ends up allowing every role to be great at soloing all of the content they need to solo for the game, all of their quests, the main story quests, the side quests. So, don't feel like if you choose to be a tank or a healer, you are just going to have to stand idly by and watch the damage dealers have all the fun.

So now that you've created your character and you've chosen your job and in doing so you've chosen your role because jobs are role locked. So a gladiator will always be a tank and an astrologian will always be a healer. However, you can at any time change your job and therefore your role by simply changing your weapon. So if I put on a black mage weapon, I'm now a black mage. And it's also worth mentioning that you don't just change your weapon, you actually have to put on the gear for that class. Every class has its own set of gear. So, your paladin can't tank in black mage gear. And this can be done with a single click, and I'll show you how to do it later. Sometimes there's going to be a quest that you have to do to unlock the job before you do it. And it's also worth noting that each class has to be leveled up independently. So, if you change to a black mage, you're going to have to level up your black mage. If you change to a white mage, you're going to have to level up the white mage, right? And the level starts at whatever level that class is unlocked. So, if that class is unlocked at 30, then it starts at level 30. If it's unlocked at 50, then that class starts at 50 when you switch to it. And if it unlocks at level one, that's right. You're leveling it up all the way from level one. There is one exception, and that's that the summoner and the scholar level up at the same time, and you can change between them anytime you want with a simple click of a button. We'll get into more about how to do that later, but just remember that the job you choose and the role that comes with it is not the only thing that you're going to be allowed to do going forward because anytime you want to play DPS, you can equip a black mage weapon and then become that job, and now you're a DPS and you're more than likely going to end up with more than one job at max level. And if you feel up to it, you'll have more than one role as a result.

Now that you've created your character, you've chosen your job, and therefore you've chosen your role, it's time to start doing some questing. What should you be doing first in Final Fantasy 14? First, let's talk about the variety of quests that exist in the game. Final Fantasy has four different types of quests that you're going to see all over the game.

The type of quest that you're going to want to focus on is the main story quest. That's this symbol right here, the flaming meteor kind of falling out of the sky. That's what this is supposed to represent. And you should basically be following this quest chain all the way through the game. Anytime you're not sure where the next one of these is, in the top left corner of your screen, you simply have to click this button here. This will always be here. Click, and it's going to tell you where this quest is, and you just simply have to head there. So, anytime you're not sure where to go next, it's always in the top left side of your screen. So, you'll always know where the destination is. As a new player, sometimes getting to that destination will be the hard part until you learn your way around the maps. That is the main story quest marker, and you'll hear people refer to it as the MSQ. The MSQ is by far the fastest form of progression through the game for a new player. It's also really important because it's going to unlock dungeons for you. It's going to unlock trials for you. It's going to unlock raids and incredibly important cutscenes. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to stick to the main story quests as you level up your first job. That's not to say that you can't deviate from it from time to time, but it is very important that you keep up with it as best you can. Also, if you're enjoying this video, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe and maybe even leave a comment to help us out with the algorithm. I greatly appreciate any support you're willing to throw my way.

All right, the next type of quest that you should definitely keep up with along with the main story quest is your job quests. Your job quests are going to happen every five levels until 50, every two levels until 60, and then every three levels until 70. And then at 70, they'll be replaced with something called roll quests, which you'll be forced to complete before you can continue the main story quests at level 80. These job quests serve to provide a story for the lore behind your job, as well as unlock passives and abilities for your job. So, it's very important that you do these quests, otherwise you're going to stop unlocking new abilities and new passives, which is going to severely limit the power of your character. So, make sure that every once in a while you check in on your job quest. You can find your job quest right below the main story quest in the top left. It'll appear there whenever you have one to do, and you can go do it. Simply click on it, which will open the map and tell you where to go.

The next type of quest we're going to talk about is these blue quests here. When you see this blue symbol with the exclamation point and the plus sign on it, these quests are the most significant quests that are not main story quests. These are going to do things like unlock other jobs, unlock dungeons or trials, which makes them the most important non-story quests that you can do. If you're curious what they're going to give you, you can always right-click on them and look at the rewards. This would give me the soul of the gunbreaker and a gunbreaker weapon, allowing me to turn into a gunreaker. So, this unlocks the job of the gunbreaker. So, again, it's important that you do all the main story quests. These blue quests are worth looking into. However, you don't need to do all of the blue quests. There are tons of blue quests because there's tons of jobs and there's tons of dungeons and there's tons of trials to be unlocked in this game. And you don't necessarily need to unlock every single one of these things and do every single one of these blue quests as you're going along. Pick and choose from the blue ones. definitely check out the NPC, see what they're offering, see if it's something that you want. Maybe it's an aether current that's going to ultimately allow you to fly in that zone if you collect it, right? That's something that you would want to do. Whereas, if it's a job that you know you're not interested in playing right now, you can put that off until later and focus on the main story quest and keep progressing your character. As you can see, in this small area that I'm standing in right now, there's three blue quests that I could do. I'm currently 82 and I haven't done any of them. So, don't feel like you have to do all of them. Certainly not right away. eventually maybe, but for the time being, focus on the main story quests and only grab the blue ones that you feel are relevant to you.

The next type of quests that we're going to discuss are the side quests. Side quests are simply going to give you a little bit of XP, maybe a little bit of a side story. Generally, there are not great rewards from side quests. They're not very exciting compared to the main story quests, and there are tons of them. So, what I recommend is don't do the side quests on your first job, right? Because you're going to have to level other jobs. At some point, you're going to want to make another job, another class. And when you do, you won't be able to do the main story quest again to level. And this is where those side quests could come in handy. They've recently buffed side quests to give more XP to make them more worth doing for your alts jobs. So side quests can be a way to level your alts up when you get to that point. If you try to do every side quest you run across, you'll overlevel your character, pushing your level too far ahead of the main story quest. This won't be efficient. It won't be good for you, and it's likely going to burn you out on the game. If you run into this symbol right here, this is a repeatable quest. That just means it's a quest you can do multiple times. And if you run into this symbol here, the red one with a key inside of it, that means that you do not have the prerequisites required to complete this quest. Sometimes it will be something like a level that is required. For instance, if it's a job that you can unlock after level 70.

All right, next let's talk about mounts. The world of Final Fantasy 14 is massive, and you're going to want to get around a little bit faster and there's going to be times where you need to make a long journey and you're going to want to move faster than you currently do. That's where mounts are going to come into play. Mounts are capable of running faster than you can. you can upgrade their speed and give them the ability to fly by collecting the aether currents in that region. These upgrades are on a per region basis. So, every time you go to a new zone, you're going to need to find the aether currents, some of which will be found in the world, and some of them you'll have to do one of those blue quests we mentioned to get them as a reward. Once you've collected all the aethers for that zone, you'll be able to fly in that zone. The way you get your mount the first time is by getting to the level 20 main story quest, completing it, completing it for it, then going and it's going to lead you to the Grand Company area, and there you'll get a level 20 blue quest called My Little Chocoo. Upon completing this quest, you'll now have a Chocoo of your own to ride. To find the mounts that you've unlocked, all you have to do is click on this little menu here, click mount guide, and summon your Chocoo. Once you've summoned your Chocoo, you'll be able to ride it around, and once you've unlocked the Aether Currents for that zone, you'll be able to climb. I'll explain how to collect aether currents later in this video. This mount guide will show you all the mounts that you've unlocked in the game so far. Final Fantasy 14 has a ton of gorgeous mounts for you to collect. You can earn them through dungeons, trials, and quests. So, when you see a mount that you love, be sure to ask them how they got it so that you can go farm it for yourself. To get off of your mounts, all you have to do is fly down to for a level and then hit Z if you're on PC, or you can simply hit the mount button again, and it will unsummon it for you. You'll unlock flying naturally when you complete a Realm Reborn at level 50.

Okay, the next thing we're going to talk about is gear. First, let me open up my character screen by pressing C. I'm going to make this bigger so that you can see it. This is a nice little trick that you can do. All right. So, as you can see, we've got six pieces of gear on the left. We've got six pieces of gear here on the right. And then we've got a soul stone down here for your job. On the left side, we have our weapon, our helmet, our chest piece, our gloves, our pants, and our boots. And then on the right side, we have our jewelry. And if you're a gladiator, a shield. If you hover over a piece of gear, it's going to tell you everything you need to know about it. First being its name. The next line is his defense, magic defense, which you won't really need to pay attention to as a new player. The next line is the item level. This is a very important thing, and it's usually going to determine if the item is better or worse for you, at least up until the endgame, where you might choose a lower item level item because it has some specific stats that you're looking for. But for the most part, if you can wear it and it's a higher item level, it's going to be the thing you want to wear. Below that, it's going to tell you what classes can wear it. This one says thaturers, arcanis, black mage, summoner, red mage, and blue mage can wear this. It also says that you must be level 80 to wear. It's green because I meet all of these conditions. If that is red, that means that you don't meet those conditions because you're either not high enough level or you're not the right job. If you go down below that, it's going to show you more stats that have to do with this item. And if we look there, like for instance on this chest piece, if we look, it says intelligence 205. So, if you remember back when I was talking about racial passives and how those don't matter because there's going to be a difference of one to two intelligence from one race to the next. Well, here this one item gives 205 intelligence and it is by no means the best item in the game. So, there's items that are going to give even more than this. Which means if one of your 12 pieces of gear you're wearing are giving you 205 intelligence, the two intelligence that you got by choosing a different race doesn't matter at all. You will never feel the impact of the damage increase or decrease by choosing one race over another.

The cool thing about gear in this game is you don't have to stress about whether one piece of gear is better than another. All you have to do is click this button right here. It says recommended gear. And if there's a better piece of gear, you'll see an arrow. So, for instance, if I take this piece off and I put on this significantly worse piece of gear and I hit this recommended gear button, it's going to tell me, hey, if you wear these two pieces of gear, your character is going to be stronger for it. And so all we have to do is that we just hit recommended gear at the end of a dungeon or after a few quests and it'll check our inventory for us and it'll automatically grab the best gear for the job that we're running at the moment. Now, this works fantastic as a new player and it'll work great all the way until the end of the game. And then at the very end, it may not be the most reliable thing when you're custom-tailoring a very specific endgame build, but until you hit max level in the game, you can go ahead open this up, hit recommended gear, and equip the recommended gear anytime you want to. Once you have equipped your recommended gear, you should also hit this button right here, update gear set. By doing this, it's going to update the gear that you're wearing in this gear set list right here. And this is what you can use to simply click between two different jobs. So, if you're on black mage and you want to be an astro, you can go ahead and click equip set. And boom. Now, my character is an Astrologian with all of my Astro gear on. If I want to go back to a black mage with all my black mage gear, I just hit this. Boom. Now I'm a black mage. That's this button right here, the gear set list. But in order for that load out to appear here when you're an Astro, right, we would hit equip set. We'd be an astrologian and we go to our recommended gear and we'd say, "Hey, put on all the best stuff for the Astro equip." And then we'd tell it to save that loadout, update gear set. Yes. And so now, anytime we open this up, we'll have our most up-to-date Astro build. We'll have our most up-to-date black mage build. And the other reason that it's useful to save your gear here with this button is when you go to sell gear to, for instance, your grand company, you can tell it not to even show you the gear that you've saved here. Okay? Otherwise, when you go to get rid of a bunch of gear, it's going to show you all the gear in your inventory, some of which you might be using on one of your jobs or another. So, if you save it into here, it won't even show you the gear that is being used by one of your jobs. And this will prevent you from selling it on accident, which is great. So, to recap, hit your recommended gear button, equip it, then update the gear set so that it saves it into your gear list, and then anytime you want to change between them, you can do that at a moment's notice. This makes it so that even a brand new player is always going to be wearing the best gear that they have available to them.

Now, what if you want to look at your gear that you've collected in a dungeon? You might hit I and open up your inventory and notice, hey, I don't see the gear that I'm picking up. In fact, I just see a bunch of random stuff. Maybe some crafting materials, maybe some quest items. Right? In order to look at your gear on computer, you're going to hit control-I. This opens up your armory chest. Your armory chest is an extension of your inventory. You can also get there by going through the menu system and just clicking on armory chest down here. Okay, but this what this does is it breaks all your gear down by type. So, all of your weapons will be here. You click here for all of your hats. You click on the chest to see all of the chest pieces you've collected, the gloves for all of the gloves, and so on. And it's a massive extension of your normal inventory. It just keeps it really nice and organized. So, if you pick up a chest piece that you uh want to look at, you can go in here and look at specifically the chest pieces and see the chest piece that you picked up. If you want to, let me make this bigger so you can see it easier. And then, if you want to uh maybe you pick up an item, but it's not better for you, but you're curious. Does it look better than what I'm wearing? You can right-click it and say try on, and you can see how it looks on your character. So maybe you don't want to use it, but maybe you want to glim it. And we'll talk about how to do that later, but so that you can wear it to maybe make your character look cooler.

Okay, so now that you know how to open up your character screen and equip the best gear every once in a while, just do this after every few quests, after every few dungeons, uh or whenever you're thinking about it, you know, you got some gear and you're curious, hey, was that better for me? Go ahead and slam that button, hit equip best, and then get back to the fun. You know how to open up your inventory. You know how to look at the items that you found. Now, let's talk about combat. The first thing you need to know about combat is the global cooldown. The global cooldown is the timer you see counting down every time you press an ability. You can't press any ability that is on the global cooldown until that timer runs out. You can however press the off global cooldown buttons, otherwise known as OGCDs. You'll unlock these as you level up, and these will give you buttons to press while you're waiting for that timer to go, which will do a lot to speed up the pace of battle. Then the early game can feel a little bit slow. You'll also get abilities to proc. Procked abilities can be seen by the yellow lines rotating around the ability. Whenever you get one of these, generally it's a good idea to activate that ability. It'll often times be instant cast. It won't cost resources. It'll do more damage and a host of other beneficial effects like that. So, generally, when you see those yellow lines, you want to use it. Although, that isn't all the case. There's no one-size-fits-all answer for your rotation in this game, but it's certainly a good rule of thumb to follow.

The next thing to know is that this game has a host of forecasts. When you see this symbol over someone's head, that means they're going to explode. You want to be away from that person. When you see an arrow pointing down on either a person or a location, you want to stand there. By being there, you're going to divvy up the damage between the players that take the hit. And if there's not enough people there, then people will die. And then, of course, you have your standard forecasted ability where an area will turn yellow, signifying you don't want to be standing there, otherwise you'll take damage. Another mechanic you might see is an eyeball over the boss. If you see an eyeball, a red eyeball over the boss looking at you, you want to turn your character away from that. Not your screen, but your character. So, make sure your character is not facing the boss when they have the red eyeball over them. If they're looking at the boss during this, you will have failed the mechanic, which might result in your character being mesmerized and attacking fellow teammates or perhaps just killing over dead. It depends on the boss fight. These aren't all of the mechanics you need to know in the game. Not even close. But these are the ones you're going to encounter early and often and will be great to have under your belt and will save you and your team a lot of pain.

Some classes in Final Fantasy 14 will have something known as positionals. In other words, you'll have to stand in a certain area to do the most damage possible when using that ability. Some abilities will do extra damage from the flank. If this striking dummy was the boss, this arrow means the boss is facing this way. Generally, that's where the tank is standing and that's why the boss is facing there. Right? So, if I was the tank, the boss is standing here and you were using a skill that did extra damage from the flank, you would want to stand either on the left side or the right side of the boss. You want to be on the side of the boss for a flanking ability. If it says it does extra damage from the rear, you want to be back here in the rear where there's no circle. So, if you were the DPS hitting from the rear, you'd be right here. And if you're hitting from the flank, you'd be right here.

The next thing that we can talk about is your job gauge. Every class has something known as a job gauge. The job gauge is something you'll unlock as you level up your job. It's oftentimes a resource management system and a burst window system for your character. Managing your job gauge efficiently while using your abilities is going to do great things for your damage, your healing, or your tanking. When you're casting abilities, you'll see certain things on it light up, and it's going to change from job to job. And I'm not going to be able to go over that here for you specifically because, like I said, it's different for every job. But just know that you will unlock a job as you're leveling up and the gauge will unlock more and more features as you go through it, allowing you to become more and more powerful. When you get your job gauge, make sure that you take the time to understand it because this is going to determine how well you're doing with your job.

Next, let's talk about your Chocoo Companion. Around level 30 or so, you're going to unlock the ability to summon a Chocoo to fight alongside you when you're solo questing. In order to unlock it, you're going to need to do a level 30 quest called My Fisty Little Chocobo. So once you hit 30, be sure to go do that. In order to summon your Chocoo, you'll need some geishel greens. Go ahead and click it. It's going to summon your Chocoo by your side who will help you in combat. I highly recommend making your Chocoo a healer. This seems to be the most effective for me at least. Anytime you're out in the world killing things, have your Chocoo out, and it does level separately from you. If you go into the menu and click on companion, you'll be able to look at your Chocoo companion's skills and level. Here you can see this character's Chocoo is rank three. You can see what commands he has. He acts on his own accord. We don't need to use his ability. He'll do it himself. And here you can choose which ones to level up. We've unlocked a new level. So we could either choose to put a point into Choco drop a defender ability or an attacker ability or we can continue to go down the healer skill tree, which is what I'm going to do. So we're going to increase HP to ultimately unlock stronger healer abilities. So if you're ever out in the world, make sure to summon your Chocoo. Your Chocoo will stay out for 30 minutes for each Geisho green that you use. This stacks up to two times, so you can use two geisho greens in a row to keep your Chocobo out for an hour. If you look up here in the top left, it tells you exactly how much time is left on your Chocobo summoning. Right now, mine has 28 minutes. Another cool thing about your Chocoo is it has its own inventory. If we click on Chocoo Saddlebug right here, it opens up our Chocoo Saddlebug, and you can see that we can hold 70 items in here. All this is is an extension of your inventory. You can access it at any time. So, just treat it like more inventory space. It's something a lot of people don't even realize they have.

All right, next let's talk about fall damage. How does fall damage in Final Fantasy work? And can you die from fall damage? This is one of the first things we always want to know when we jump into a new game for the first time. We go find that tallest surface we can and we jump off of it to see exactly what happens to us when we do so. Well, if you're like me, you'll be excited to know that you cannot die from fall damage. Sort of. Simply falling from a high ledge will not kill you. The worst that will happen is it will take you down to one health, one HP. Now, as I'm demonstrating here, my character survived with one health, and it'll quickly start regening. If I had been in combat when I made that jump, I would have died when I hit the ground. So, you are not exempt from dying to fall damage while you're in combat. And if you hit the ground and you're at one HP and then you aggro a mob and it hits you, that can kill you. But fall damage alone while out of combat won't kill you.

All right, now let's talk about what happens when you die in Final Fantasy 14. You're going to be left with two options. One, to wait for a res, and two, to choose to go back to your home crystal, or if you're in a dungeon, to go back to the beginning of the dungeon. When you respond, your gear will have taken some damage. That is this green health bar next to all of your gear in your inventory. As it takes more and more damage, this bar will get smaller and smaller, signifying that you need to repair it. In order to repair your gear, all you need to do is look for a hammer on your map. When you get to that vendor, they'll have mender in their title. just right-click on them and then you can choose to repair all the gear you have equipped. Go ahead and do so. Boom. Now all of your gear is repaired. You can also choose to repair the items in your armory chests or in your inventory. The reason that you would choose to repair the things you're not wearing primarily are for glam, you can't choose to glamour a piece of gear that is damaged. So if you think you have something in your inventory that you're going to want to glam later, you're going to want to repair it. So try to make sure everything in your inventory is repaired before you glam. But we'll talk about that when we get to that section.

The way the loot system in Final Fantasy works is need, greed, and pass. You need items that you can wear, aka your job can wear. If you can't wear it on the job that you're currently playing, it won't let you need it, but it will let you greed it. This gives priority to the person playing the job that the loot dropped for. So, if white mage gear drops, the white mage can need it. That would give them the gear if all you were able to do was greed it. If they don't need the gear and they choose to pass or they choose to greed, then you can choose to greed it and then it will roll between all the people that greeted the gear. And if everybody passes and one person greeds, then the person that greeds gets the gear. So in summary, you can need it if it's for your job. You can greed it if it's not, and you can pass if you don't want it.

Okay, now let's talk about a staple in any large RPG or MMO, and that's fast travel. In Final Fantasy 14, fast travel uses aetherite crystals. So you see these really large aetherite. That's what this giant blue crystal is here. You would come up to this if you've never touched it before. You would right-click on it and that would attune you to it. After attuning yourself to.

It, you can open up the map at any time and teleport to this aetherite right from anywhere in the world for a small gold fee. The gold cost for teleporting around is fairly trivial. I've never been in a situation where I was spending more gold to teleport around questing than I was being given as a reward for questing. So, feel free to teleport around pretty liberally. There's no sense in running somewhere when you can teleport there.

Now, this is the big aetherite crystal that you can teleport to from anywhere in the world. But there's more smaller aetherite crystals in each town. So, that will be the aether. There are crystals scattered throughout this zone here, this town of Oolah, for instance, the one I'm in right now. And if you attune yourself, aka go up to each one and click on it so that your character is now attuned to it, you'll be able to teleport to them from any other aetherite crystal in this town. So, I can walk up to the main one and teleport to any of the smaller ones. Or I could walk up to a small one and teleport to the main one. Or I could walk up to a small one and teleport to another small one. You can go to any aetherite from any other aetherite in that town. When you open it up here, you can see all of your options and you can click on them and the map will go there and showing you where you're trying to go. These are all of the aetherite we could teleport to from this one that we're standing at right now. And if you have all of the aetherite in that zone, it will let you teleport to the outside of that zone. So, you can teleport to any of the gates rather than spawning here and then having to run all the way out one of the gates. Uh, we can just choose to click on them and it'll spawn us right outside of that town.

This is very handy. The towns in Final Fantasy 14 are huge. They do a great job with scale and making the world feel massive, which is great for immersion. But sometimes when you're just trying to get from one end of town to another, this can be a daunting task. And this is where the aetherite crystals are going to come into play. They're going to help you get around a lot faster and a lot easier.

Another thing you can do from this crystal is set it as your home point. As we discussed earlier, when we died, it sent me here because this was my home point. You want to make your home point the one that you're going to be going to most often. There's a couple of reasons for this. One, it's going to be where you respawn when you die. Another reason is that you can teleport to it for free. You get a skill called return. You can use this skill every 15 minutes and it's going to take you back to your home aetherite for free.

From this aetherite, you can also choose to visit another world server. Uh, if your friend is on another server on the same data center as you, you can also register a crystal as a favorite destination or a free destination. If you don't want it to be your home point, but you know you're going to be going there often and you want cheaper travel.

Speaking of getting around, once you start collecting aether currents so that you can unlock flying in expansion zones, you're going to unlock something called an aether compass. Be sure to put that on your bar so that you can click it at any time. It's going to tell you how far you are from an aether current. Once you collect all the aether currents in a zone, you'll be able to fly in that zone. So, if we click this compass right now, it's going to tell me right here in the middle. Uh, 296 yds to the northeast is where the nearest aether current is. A yd is a yard. You can tell by the first letter. So, if it says in, it's an inch. If it says yd, it's a yard. If it says mi, it is a mile. So, just remember the first letter is what determines the distance, okay? It's it's pretty much always going to give it to you in yds. Sometimes during cut scenes, you'll hear them say mi or something like that. And now you'll know what that means. So, we're going to go ahead and travel to the northeast here towards this aether current. And this is how you're going to find all the aether currents in the game. And now if I click it, it says it's 75 yds to the east. Okay. And then east of me here, we see it right there. That's what the aether current looks like. So we're going to go over there and get it. And we click here. Right click on it. Attuning to the aether current. Now we've unlocked this aether current in this zone. And if you wanted to hunt the next one, you could click the compass again. And it says there are no nearby currents, which means you have all of the currents that you can get in this zone by simply running around looking for them.

If you're still missing currents in the zone, it's likely going to be one of these blue quests. And if you go and you click on that blue quest, it will tell you if the reward is an aether current. And the way you check on your progress with your aether currents is you click on the travel button right here and you click a currents. And this is going to tell you how many of your currents you have in each zone. You can see here in Lakeland, I have all of the aether currents that I can collect by exploring the zone. That's the green ones on the bottom. And then these yellow ones on the top are ones that you unlock through questing. Either through the main story quest or through one of those blue quests that I just pointed at. So I'm missing one quest here. I already did the main story quest. So I know it's going to be one of the blue quests in the zone or nearby to unlock this aether current. If we look at the zone below in Ilmeg, I have all of the aether currents that you get by exploring, but I'm missing four of them that you get from questing. And you can see every zone in the game here. And you can see oh look in these areas I have all of them except for the turning mist. It looks like I'm missing a couple in this area. I've got most of them. Very useful for when you want to unlock flying in all of the zones in the game. You can choose to unlock flying as you're going through the zone, but generally you won't be able to fly in that zone until you've completed it because some of the currents will be locked behind the main story quest for that zone or that expansion. But it's insanely useful when the game tells you to go back to that zone later for another quest, which it always does.

Another thing you might hear people talk about from time to time is the hunter log. The hunter's log is an optional piece of content that you can choose to do. You can either press H on your keyboard or click hunting log right here, which is going to open it up and it'll show you how many of each type of mob you need to kill and where they're located. So, if you hover over overgrown ivy, it says you need to kill four of them. And if I hover over it, it says they're located in East Shroud, nine ivies. If I hover over the ke trap, it says this is south shroud, upper paths. So, I would open my map and I would click shroud. Then I would click south shroud and it says upper paths. And so then I would go to the upper paths area and look around for that mob, the ke trap. All I would have to do is teleport to quarry mill and then run on over here to the upper paths and look for the mob. Every time you fill out one of these logs, you're going to get a little boost of XP and it's going to tell you exactly how much XP you get each time. It's not a terribly significant amount. It's not something you have to do, but you can unlock some pretty neat stuff by doing so.

Because they've expedited leveling up so much in the early game. Now, this is more of a completionist type of activity than it used to be, as you used to need the extra XP to fill the gap in the main story quest levels. You used to go through the main story quest and you would get to a quest in the main story quest you couldn't do because you weren't high enough level. So, you needed to go out into the world and do fates or hunter logs uh to get the XP needed to continue progressing with your quest. But, that doesn't really happen anymore. They've streamlined the main story quest so much now that you usually won't need to do something like that. But if you do find yourself needing a little bit of extra XP or you just want to change the pace a little bit, go ahead and start hunting things down in your hunter log. And if you're ever out in the world and you see this symbol over an enemy's head, be sure to kill it. That signifies that it is a mob in your hunter log that you will need to kill to complete it. And since you're standing there and it's standing there, you might as well get it knocked out.

And don't confuse hunt logs with hunts. Each expansion is going to have a different quest that you have to do to unlock hunts in that expansion. Once you've done the quest for that expansion, you'll be able to go to the hunt board located in that expansion and peruse the daily and weekly hunts that are going to be posted. From here, you can come here and cycle through them. Then you can click on accept down here if you want to accept one. Or alternatively, if you want to know where the hunt is, you can click open map. That's going to show you where it's located on the map. And then if you want to teleport there straight from here, just close out your hunt menu and click on the nearest teleport. Then run over to where it's located. Some hunts are going to ask you to find really easy to find creatures, but then there's going to be elite weekly ones and things like that. They're going to be much harder to find. And when it comes to completing those, I highly recommend joining a hunt link shell or a hunt Discord so that other people can help you find that hunt and complete it. And the rewards for these rare hunts are incredible.

All right, next let's touch on fates. When you see a symbol like this on the map, that means there's an active fate there. You can go there to kill the fate. Killing fates can give you things like mount speed, mounts, and currency for cosmetics and other things. All you have to do is walk up to the fate. It'll say fate joined. And then if it's a lower level fate than you, make sure you hit level sync. If you don't sync your level to the fate, you will not get credit for it. So very important to do so. Then go ahead and start killing everything. It'll start filling up the bar for you so that you can get credit for the fate. A lot of times there will be other players here helping you with it. It's a good way to get some XP and some move speed currency for that zone. And upon completing it, it'll tell you that you got some XP and some currency. That currency is what you can use to upgrade your move speed in various zones.

Fates from Shadowbringer onward are going to reward the byolor gemstones. These are used to unlock riding maps for mount speed, purchase material, cosmetics, minions, rare crafting supplies, triple triad cards, and more. To be able to purchase some of the rarer items that can turn a profit, you need to do more fates in that zone. So, be sure to check your progress in your travel menu and choose shared fate.

Next, let's talk about the duty finder. The duty finder is an incredibly powerful tool in Final Fantasy 14 that allows you to participate in pretty much any content in the game anytime you feel like it. You simply have to press U on your keyboard or open your duty menu and then click duty finder. The first section in the duty finder is called the duty roulette. The duty roulette is fantastic for leveling up your second and third jobs. When you don't have access to the main story quests anymore for easy XP, you can do the duty roulette. What this will do is it'll put you into a random dungeon or leveling quest or trial or main scenario or alliance raid or normal raid, right? You choose the one that you want by checking them and then you click join and it'll throw you into one of those things and it'll tell you what you're going to get. You're going to get this XP plus some bonus. And then here, this symbol right here says adventure in need is a tank. So tanks will get a further bonus to the rewards that are listed here. So, if they're low on tanks and you sign up as a tank, you get extra experience, extra gill, that sort of thing. You also get tombstones of poetics and stuff like this, you can use these to buy the best in slot gear for each uh expansion. So, all in all, your duty roulette is something that's very much worth doing when you're looking for XP, gil, or tombstones.

Alternatively, you could come in here to queue up for a very specific task. Let's say you unlock a dungeon in Realm Reborn and you want to knock it out. Well, you can come in here, queue up for that dungeon specifically so that you can get it done for your quests and then continue on with your main story quests. Same thing with Shadowbringer, uh, Stormblood, and so on. The content, if you see a grade out box, that's content you don't currently have access to. And then we have trials. Same thing when you unlock trials, you can queue up for them here in the duty finder. Just look for this little monster face and then check the box that you want to go do. Next, we have various raids you can queue up for. Sometimes 24man raids, sometimes eightman raids, and then finally, you have your various types of PvP that you can queue for as well. But basically, the duty finder is going to be how you get into group content when you don't have a pre-made group of people to jump into it with. And it works incredibly well. Don't be shy about using it.

It's also worth noting that with the duty support system right here, you can run every main story quest dungeon in the game with NPCs. So, if you're someone that's shy or if you're someone that doesn't want to wait in the queue and you just want to get it done, then you are more than capable of using your duty support system to queue into the various dungeons in the game. And they've got it now such that you can do all main story quest dungeons. Every dungeon that's required for the main story you can do with duty support. Now, you'll still need to jump into groups to get the trials done, but as far as the dungeons go, this will get you through it.

All right. Now, let's talk about navigating the map in Final Fantasy 14 because it's not immediately intuitive. You can resize the map down in the bottom right corner. You can make it whatever size you want. There's plenty of customizing you can do for this thing. In order to zoom out, typically in MMOs, you would just right click, but doing that just grabs the map and you don't zoom out. So, what you can do is you can hit this up arrow here in the top left to zoom out. Now, we are zoomed out to see the entire area of Coerthas, right? And then we have all these sub zones within it. And then you can hit the up arrow again to zoom out even further. Now, we're looking at the entire world map for the game of Final Fantasy 14. At this point, you can click on another zone if you would like to look at the zones within that zone. And then you can click on the wine port to teleport to that zone. Important quests that you're tracking will be on here. So like if you're looking for your main story quest, you can zoom all the way out and then you can see, oh, there's my main story quest. Alternatively, you could just click on the main story quest up here, right? And the map will go there and it'll show you this. And so then you can click on it and then you can click on new Gradana. Boom. And now I'm there doing my main story quests.

Another way to get around the world is to hit your teleport button. That should be on one of your bars somewhere. And it will just open up a list of the world broken down by region. These are the same regions we were looking at there. La Noscea, the Black Shroud, right? And you can just look at each one individually and go there. If you know where you're going to go when you're a new player, these names don't mean a lot to you and you don't know what's in each place. So, this isn't terribly intuitive, but once you've been in the game for a while, this might be a faster way to get where you're going. Or perhaps the game tells you to go to an area and you have no idea where it is. Well, you can come in here and you can look for that name.

It's worth mentioning though that one cool thing that they added to the game is up here in the top right. You can click teleport settings. And if you don't really know these places by name, like let's say you don't know what the far east is and which zones are going to be in there, right? You're not alone. You can come in here and you can go open teleport settings and you can choose to display by expansion. So if you know that you're in Stormblood or Heavensward, right? And those names are familiar to you as opposed to Far East, you can click that and now it's going to sort them by expansion. So you've got Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker, right? Which are all the expansions here that have come out. So if that's a lot easier for you to remember your way around, then feel free to go into those settings and change that setting right there.

Next up, let's talk about retainers. Retainers are your bank alternative. There is no bank in Final Fantasy 14. Instead, you use retainers. These are basically mules that you can store your items on. They're also used for a lot more than that at the same time. So retainers are a pretty big deal in this game and they're pretty easy to overlook for a long time if you don't know how useful they are. So as soon as you hit level 17, you can do a quest called Scions of the Seventh Dawn and this will unlock your retainers and you can get two right away and then you can get as many as 10 total if you want to spend a little IRL cash. But the two that you can get in game without doing anything extra is perfectly fine. That's more than enough. I've never needed more than two.

So once you do the quest and you create your retainers, you're going to come over to the summoning bell here. And this summoning bell is going to allow you to pull out your retainers that you've created. You get to customize how they look and their personality. So, if we pull out this retainer right here, we can see the list of things that we can do with this retainer. We can entrust or withdraw items, aka treat her like a bank. Same with our gil. We can have her hold gil. And likewise, if we use her to sell things, we can sell items from our inventory or from her inventory. And when she sells them, there will be gil on her. And then we can withdraw that gil from her once she's got it. So she can sell and every retainer can sell 20 items at a time. So if you have two retainers, you can have 40 items on the auction house. So this is how you use Final Fantasy 14's auction house. Your retainer. So your retainer is both your access point to the auction house. It's also your bank, right? So retainer, like I said, doing a lot.

If we say we want to sell an item in our inventory, we can do this. And then we can say I wanted to sell this armor right here. I can put that in there. And then I have no idea how much that's worth, right? Who who knows? So, we can compare prices. There's a little button right here. We click that and it's going to show us what this is listed for right now. So, there's some as cheap as 8,976. So, maybe I would want to list this and undercut it. Another thing you can do is you can click this history button right here to find out if it's actually selling. Like, yeah, people are listing it for this price, but is anybody buying it for this price? That's very important to know cuz sometimes there's just new players listing things that nobody's going to buy, right? So, we could check the history. Now, it turns out there was one of these sold on 11/3, but before that on 12/22. So, this is not something that sells very often at all. Very, very infrequently. So, if you listed an item like this, it would be unlikely that it's going to sell. And you can see this the price is just kind of fluctuating all over the place here when it does sell, but there's far more listed than are being bought. So, just something to be aware of. But that's how you could kind of get a feel for if you wanted to undercut the market. You just click the compare button and then from here you can find out if people are actually buying it or not and you can check. Right? So that is how you sell items on the auction house in Final Fantasy 14 through your retainer. You can also view your sale history. So you can see items that you have sold in here.

And the next big thing you can do is you can assign a retainer class. So you can talk to your retainer and you can tell your retainer that you want them to do a certain class. And the retainer can only do classes that you have unlocked. So if you've unlocked conjurer, they can do conjurer and they can level up their conjurer as high as you've leveled your conjurer. So, you would not want to choose a class that you have not leveled up very much because then your retainer is going to be capped. So, if all of your classes are 90, but then your conjurer is only 35, you don't want to pick the conjurer for your retainer because it's going to get stuck at 35 even though the rest of your classes are 90, you'd want to choose one of your 90 classes. And so, in this case, my black mage is level 90. So, I'll go ahead and choose and she'll be able to become one of those. So, now that we've given her the role of a combat class, she's going to be able to do combat missions. And don't worry if you pick a class and you don't like it or you change your mind, you can choose reset retainer class here. So let's say you chose a combat class, but you wanted to do a gathering class like botanist instead, right? So you could go out and gather crafting materials. That's totally possible. You can reset it, but you are going to lose your progress that you made on that character cuz right, she is level one. And so now I have to send her out on missions to level her up.

Now another thing about retainers, before you can set them out on missions, you are going to need to see right here it says view retainer attributes and gear. You are going to need to put gear on them. So, you'll have to go ahead and put some hand-me-downs on your retainer if you happen to have any lying around. It's nice to make your retainer the same class as you are so that you can just pass your gear off to them when you're done with it. And this is going to keep them right behind you or at the same level as you because the missions that you send them out on are going to be limited by the item level that they're wearing. So, if their item level right here, mine is 000 on this character cuz I haven't put any gear on her. But if it was 300, then she'd only be able to do little missions that were up to 300.

If you send your retainer out on what are known as quick missions, they're going to bring back crafting materials, dyes, or housing items, things like that. If you send them out on combat missions, they're going to gather stuff from the things they kill, like leather or bone. And in order to send them out on missions, you're going to need this currency called venture coins. And there's a few different ways to get that. One of which, and probably the easiest, is to get it from your grand company through the use of seals. You'll get tons of seals once you get into your grand company and you start working on that and you can use those seals to buy these venture coins. Anytime you have more seals than you need, venture coins are always a good thing to buy with those. By the way, alternatively, you could pick up venture coins at the Wolven Pier or even Hunt vendors.

Now, if all of that information about the retainer sounded like way too much information and you're just feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed, don't sweat it. You can completely ignore every aspect of the retainer except for its banking function until later on when you're looking for something extra to do in the game. A lot of people play this whole game and never touch any of the other functions like sending them out on missions and all of that stuff. It's totally possible to just ignore that if it's something that just seems like it's a bit much work for you.

Another thing worth mentioning is the Hall of the Novice. The Hall of the Novice is something that you can do to unlock gear and cosmetics and also train yourself in your class and your role. Feel free to hit it. Just go to your duty. Go to Hall of Novice and go here if you feel like you wish you knew more about how to play your class or your role in the game and click begin and you can unlock some cool stuff and it also helps teach you some dungeon mechanics.

Okay, next thing we should talk about is the inn and the innkeeper. In order to find the inn, look for the bed on the map and if you hover over it, it will show you an inn. This will be in all of the large main cities. Go ahead and head to the innkeeper. Right click on them and before you step into your inn, there's always a mender right next door. So, be sure to repair your armor before you go in here, especially if you plan on doing some glamming. And you talk to him. He's going to say, "Do you want to go into your inn room?" We'll say, "Yeah."

Once inside the inn room, you have a variety of things that you can interact with. You've got a summoning bell to interact with your retainers. You've got a crystal bell that will summon the esthetician. This will allow you to change pretty much anything on your character that you could change without plastic surgery in real life. So, your hairstyle, your hair color, you know, your eyebrow shape, your lipstick, you know, certain things like that. You can change your scars. I guess it's technically, but you know, it's it's topical stuff. You can't change your gender or your race here, but you can change some pretty topical features. It's very nice that you can do this in game just by interacting with the esthetician. You've got your toy chest, which lets you do a little mini game. You've got your armor chest, which stores gear like your artifact armor, gear from seasonal events, and gear that you buy from the Mog station.

Now, let's talk about the glamour dresser. This is probably the most important thing in here, and this is going to be all about your fashion portion of this game. How do you see all those cool looking characters running around? Well, a lot of times you're going to find gear in this game that looks really cool, but it doesn't have great stats. Or you'll get a quest item that looks really cool, but again, it doesn't have great stats. Or maybe it's too low level for you, but it looks way cooler than anything you've got right now that you're finding at a higher level. Uh, there's a lot of items in the game that just look really cool, but they're not necessarily best in slot for stats. So, this is where the glamour dresser comes into play.

What you're going to do is you're going to click on your glamour dresser, and then you're going to look for the item. Let's say you found or you farmed a really cool looking weapon, right? And so you scroll through here and you find that weapon and let's see, we try this one on to make sure this is the one. Yes. Okay. So, we found this weapon. We're like, damn, that looks great. I really want my character to look like he's wearing this weapon all the time. Even though I'm wearing something else, this just looks so much cooler than the boring weapon that I'm wearing. So, I would click this. I would left click it, right? And it says, "Use a glamour prism to move this into your dresser." And I would say, "Yes, do that." And by doing so, it would now be here in this list of weapons that I could apply. Right? So, you have to use the glamour prism. It's an item that you'll find in your inventory and you can purchase in game and you'll even get some of them as a quest reward when you unlock glamour. Here they are right here. I've got 220 of them. Right. So, every time I add an item from here and I put it in my dresser, it's going to cost me a glamour prism. But when I need to apply it in here, it's not going to cost me anything anymore. I can use it forever.

So, I would then pick one of the weapons that I put in here. So, let's try on this one. What is this? Uh, no. You know, I don't like that one that much. Let's see what this one is. Okay, we've got this one. And then I would apply the glamour. And then now my character when I'm running around, it looks like I have this weapon on. Even though the weapon that I'm actually wearing looks entirely different. It's a cool system. It's a little bit confusing to navigate this menu right here. Just remember that this over here is where you choose main hand, off hand, head, body, hands, right? You can filter by sections of the body and then look for the gloves that you found that you want to try on. You know, make sure to right click try on and make sure it was the gloves that you wanted before you then click on it and add it to your glamour over here. Okay. And then once you've added it, you just go to the corresponding ones. Like if I added those gloves, I would go here, you know, and apply the glamour. And then boom, my character looks like he's wearing these gloves, but he's actually wearing these gloves that look nothing like that.

There is one thing to note about the glamour system. Now, when you're low level, you're going to be changing gear a lot, which means you're going to replace these gloves, right? You'll take these gloves off and you'll put another pair of gloves on. And let's just do that for example. See what happens here to my character. Actually, we'll do it with a chest so it's more obvious. We'll open up my inventory and we'll put on a different chest piece. Okay, so we put on this chest and now my look changed. And this is going to happen to you a lot when you're leveling up. You're going to put on a new piece of gear and it's going to replace your glamour that you just put on making your character look all beautiful and sexy, right? And this is going to happen every time you upgrade to a new piece of gear. But you can fix that problem with glamour loadouts. So if you find a look that you really like, you can hit edit glamour plate and you can save into each slot, like your whole look that you want to wear and then you can apply that. So like if you go out into the wild, you go do some questing for a bit. You find a bunch of gear upgrades, right? Every time you find a gear upgrade, it's going to replace the glamour because the glamour is attached to the item, not to the slot, unfortunately. So what that means is every time you take that piece of gear off, you lose that look until you apply the glamour to the new piece of gear. If that happens to you and you lose your look because you change out your gear, right? You come into your recommended and you equip all your newest best gear and your glamour gets messed up, what you can do is you can just click glamour plate right here and then you can choose the one you want to apply and you can apply it. So if I wanted to reapply this look after I changed a bunch of gear and it messed up my glamour, I could just come in here and click one button to apply it. Or I could go to this one and apply this same way.

If you want to dye a piece of gear, all you have to do is right click on it, click try on. Then from here, right click again on the piece of gear and click enable dye preview. Now you have your dye screen open, and you can see what it looks like if you were to dye it any of the colors that you have available to you. Once you found the color that you liked, you would just simply hit apply, and it would apply this dye to this outfit. It's recommended that you apply your dyes to your glamour as opposed to your armor. And that way, every time you apply your glamour, you get that dye attached to it. Remember that you will have to have the dye in order to dye the outfit. You can buy dyes from various merchants in the game, and you'll also be given them as rewards for various quests in the game.

All right, let's talk about the group content that Final Fantasy 14 has to offer. First of all, let's talk about the dungeons. Dungeons in Final Fantasy 14 are woven into the story, and so you'll be doing your main story quests to unlock each one of these dungeons. There are also some side dungeons that you can unlock through the blue quests that we talked about earlier. The dungeon groups are four-person groups with two DPS, one tank, and one healer. Each dungeon has three epic boss fights, and it's a great way to get everything from gear to mounts to minions. Minions are little non-combat pets that can follow you around if you choose to have one out.

The next piece of content in Final Fantasy 14 is the trials. This is eight-man content consisting of two healers, two tanks, and four DPS. Trials are my personal favorite part of the game as they are an absolute spectacle. The way trials work is you spawn right in front of the boss you are meant to face off with. There is no trash. There's no filler. It's just one epic boss fight. The boss will usually transform and so will the stage that you're fighting on, creating the most epic boss fight experience I've ever had in any game. These bosses can give you everything from gear to cosmetics to mounts. And you can do them on a variety of difficulties with the normal basic difficulty being the easiest so that you can experience the spectacle without all of the difficulty with the option to turn up the difficulty to get things like really cool mounts.

Then there's the normal eight-man raids content found at the end of each expansion. This is great story content that can expand on the story of each expansion. They come in a series of 12 different raids. Some of these have trash pulls and others just plop you down right in front of the boss. The next piece of content is the 24-man raids. This will be three groups of eights heading through a giant dungeon with gigantic boss fights along the way. These raids aren't particularly challenging, but they are very epic. The raids will provide you cosmetics, gear, mounts, and story.

All right, next, let's talk about the user interface. Let's talk about everything that's on the screen right now and what it means. Down here, we have our ability bars. You can have as many or as few of these as you would like on your screen, and you can change the shape of them to anything you want. Simply right click the number and it will change the shape of the bar. Then you can click that number and drag it wherever you want. You can click this lock to lock everything in place so you don't accidentally drag a skill off your bar in combat. You have your health and your mana bar. Pretty straightforward. You've got your experience bar down here. If there's a moon here, that means you're going to be earning rested XP while you're in that area. It can be beneficial to log out inside of a town in order to get that rested XP. Here you can see that this part of the bar is a slightly different color than this part of my XP bar and that would be my rested XP. In the bottom right, you can see all of these symbols here signifying how full my inventory is. You've also got all of your menu options. You can click on this and we'll go through all of these here in a moment so that you know what each of these things is as this can probably be the most daunting part of this entire game is is this menu system right here and learning your way around it, learning what you need and what you don't need. So, we'll jump into that next.

Over here we have our quest, our active quest. You can either click on the quest name to bring it up in your journal. You can open your journal anytime by pressing J. Or you can click on the quest description, which will open up the map and take you to where you need to go for that quest so that you can click on the nearest Aetherite and teleport to it. Again, the name opens up the journal. The description opens up the map. And if there's an item or an emote that you need to use to turn in the quest, then it'll appear right next to the quest, and all you have to do is press it when you're near the turn-in NPC. Very useful.

You've got your mini map here. You can lock and unlock your compass so that it rotates or doesn't rotate when you do. I like mine to have fixed north. This is also going to tell you the weather. This is important here, the fair skies or whatever the weather might be because there's certain rare hunts or rare fates, for example, that will only spawn under certain weather conditions. So, knowing how to check the weather in a zone is important. So, if you enter into a zone, you just hover over this and you can see what the weather is, so you know whether the thing you're looking for is able to spawn or not. The sun here going around the clock is going to tell you what time of the day it is there. Right there. And you can zoom in or out on this if you want.

Right here, you have the time, your connection, and your mail. It says I have one piece of mail, and I'll show us how to check our mail here in a moment. In the top left, as we discussed before, you have your main story quest. And below that, if you have a job quest to do, you can click on that to see where to go for your job quest. And that covers everything that's on my screen right now. But your screen won't necessarily look like my screen or anybody else's screen. You can customize the heck out of your UI. In order to do that, simply press escape and go to HUD layout. Here you can change the location of everything on your screen. This is an incredibly powerful tool. You can also save multiple layouts. So perhaps you have one for a DPS and one for a tank and one for a healer.

So first we have our basic items selected. Hot bars 1, 2, 3, 4, right? We could say two one and you could click the UI element settings. So select an element on the screen and then you can change that element. You can change how it's set, its opacity. You can change its size. It is all incredibly customizable. And of course, you can grab anything on the screen and drag it around. This is hot bar 6, for instance. It's up here in the middle of the screen. That looks like that would be an awful place for it and it would. But if we click on the settings, we can see that it's not checked. So this is not turned on. If I turn it on now, I'll be able to see it there. I don't want that. So I'm going to hit that again. Now I can't see it. Perfect. It is absolutely worth coming in here and customizing your layout to the way you like it. But I would first spend a little time progressing through the game a bit and getting familiar with what is and what isn't important and where you're going to want to be looking for certain items before you come in here and try to customize your UI or you might end up removing things that you need or you might move them into places that don't make sense. But definitely come in here and play around with your UI once you're more familiar with the game as it will make a world of difference in your experience in the game.

Okay, now let's go through the daunting task of going through the menu system and talking about which items are important and when you're going to need them. All right, first under the character creation screen, stances. This is just going to change your stance. That's not terribly important. Basically, it pulls your weapon out and puts it away. You can do this by pressing Z at any time. Great for screenshots and also getting off of your mount.

Next, we have action trades. This is a menu you can open by hitting P on your keyboard. And it's also one that you're going to need to know where it is and how to use it. So, in here you've got all of your classes abilities, all of your role abilities, all of your traits. These are your passives. You're not going to use these, but it is important to be aware of them so that you know why and how the way your class works. And you've got orders here for your Chocobo. Under general, you've got things like sprint, which is absolutely something that should be on your bar somewhere. Sprint in this game is not a button that you press. It's a skill that you use. So, you can't just press shift and sprint anytime you want. It is an instant cast ability that lasts 10 seconds while in combat, 20 seconds while out of combat, and it has a 1 minute cool down. After it expires, you get jog, which is a buff that lasts until you generate enmity or change zones. It's really useful in certain trial situations when you need to get out of a massive AoE ability and you need to move fast. You're going to need to hit this ability. So, make sure it is somewhere where you can get to it.

You've got limit break. This is also going to be on one of your bars somewhere. When that LB3 becomes available, you're going to want to hit this sucker, assuming you're the right person to be doing so. If you're a damage dealer, it's almost always going to be you that should be pressing it, but there will be certain situations in very specific content where you should leave it for the healer or the tank. Likewise, teleport and return should be pretty easy to access. Your return is your free teleport back to your home crystal. Teleport is what

you're going to use to get anywhere else on the map. Or, you can just press M and click on the crystal you're trying to get to. And then you've also got main commands like your companion, Chocobo, Saddlebag, your character, right? And any one of these can be dragged onto your menu.

It's important to note that all of these can be dragged on here, right? If they're an ability or if there's something you can cast, you can just pull it onto there. Every class is different. Every build's different, so I can't tell you exactly which ones to put on. Just be aware that there's going to be things in here that you're going to want to drag.

When you unlock a skill for the first time, it's automatically going to put it on your bars somewhere. So, fortunately, it's pretty hard to miss when something's added to this list because it'll just end up slammed into your bars somewhere, assuming that you have room for one. So, just be on the lookout as you're doing your job quest for new skills to be added to your bars.

Next up, we have the adventure plate and the portrait. The adventure plate is something that other players can see if they right-click on you and click "view adventure plate." They'll see this pop up with some of your stats and a cute little picture that you took for yourself. And portrait is a similar thing that you can make that will pop up at the beginning of dungeons, and everybody in the group will see it.

The next one is your currency menu. So, you can click here and click "currency." You could also open this with Control + C, or you can just click this little icon down here that says "guilt." And you can right-click this to flip through the various types of currency that you have in the game: your seals from your grand company, how much MGP you have from the Golden Saucer, and how much gil you have.

In here, you'll see your common currencies, right? That's the ones we just talked about. You can see your battle currencies, the tomes, which you buy best-in-slot gear with at the end of each expansion, as well as some other cool currencies such as your Allagan tombstones, or your wolf marks for PvP, or your allied seals. Last, you have your beastmen currency for those beastmen.

The next menu is our character screen. We've spent a lot of time on this one today. In here, you can look at your character stats. You can look at your gear. You can equip the best-in-slot gear. You can save that loadout so that you can click your gear set list and then equip one with the click of one button. Another thing that's great to know is that you can drag this onto your bar. Now you can, with the click of a button, switch between these two loadouts right here.

The next tab is your profile. This is going to tell you information such as your grand company that you're in, your name, what race you are, what your city-state is, and things like that. Here you can assign a title to your character based on things that you've done in the game. You can also look at your classes and your jobs that you have leveled up and what level each one is. If it's grayed out, that means you have not made it or unlocked it yet.

And then you can also check your reputation, which is going to show you your commendation. At the end of every dungeon and trial, you get the opportunity to commend someone else in the group. And likewise, they have the opportunity to commend you. You only get to pick one person to commend. So, don't feel bad if they don't choose you. People typically choose the tank or the healer if they have time to choose at all before everybody has left the dungeon. So, if you're looking for commendations, make sure you give those new players time to get out of their cutscenes so they can commend you before you leave. You can also see your reputation level with various societies.

The next item is the armory chest. We can open this with Control + I at any time. I for inventory, Control + I for armory chest. This is the one that just breaks it down by weapon, helmet, chest, right? All of the gear we pick up will go straight into here. You won't see it in your regular inventory. It'll go straight into here if there's room for it to go in here. If this fills up, it'll start overflowing into your regular inventory, and that should tell you it's time to go do some house cleaning. You need to go sell some gear or sell it to your grand company for seals, which we'll get into here in a moment.

The next item on the list is the inventory. Again, you can open this with I. This is just where all of your stuff is going to go if it doesn't have another spot that it's supposed to automatically drop into.

Then you have your Chocobo saddlebag, which is where you can drag things from. So, I could take my green dye if I know I'm not going to need it on demand anytime soon. I can just use this as extra storage for my character.

Then we have our companion. This is our Chocobo. This is where you can set up commands. You can put him on your bars if you want to. You don't need to. He is pretty much self-sufficient. You can choose what skills that he has access to. So, you can make him a defender, aka a tank, a healer, or a DPS. I have found that the healer has been the most useful for all-around gameplay when doing solo quests out in the wild. Generally speaking, if you don't die, you're not going to fail. So, having him healing you is very helpful. And likewise, you can come in here and change his gear and his appearance.

Next, we have your mount guide. Mount guide is, simply put, your list of mounts that you've unlocked so far in the game. Anytime you get a mount, it'll appear in your inventory. You can right-click it, which will unlock it, and then you'll be able to use it in-game. Every one of these is a mount that I could hop onto at any moment. Simply grab it and drag it onto your bar to summon that mount specifically.

Or, you can use mount roulette if you just want to grab a random mount every time you hit the mount button so that you get to experience all of your collection. Or, you can further refine that by setting mount roulette to select from favorites only. So, you can do this, right? And then it's only going to choose the ones that you right-click and add to your favorites. So, we go like this, add to favorites. And now it's only going to choose a random mount selected from my favorite mounts. Very, very useful tool.

Mounts can be earned by doing a host of things in this game. Just about anything you can do, there's a mount there, whether it's Golden Saucer, whether it's dungeons or trials or questing, there are a lot of mounts to be earned in a variety of different ways. So, have fun collecting your favorite ones.

Minion guide. And just like the mount guide, we have minion guide. Minions are non-combat pets, and they work exactly the same way. You can collect them from dungeons and so on. And when you get one, you just right-click on it, and it will use it, and then boom, it'll appear in here. Boom. Just like that. And now Eden Miner is here as a non-combat pet for me, or a minion. And again, I could choose to only summon my favorite ones and have my random one on here, or I could pick my favorite one and have that out all the time.

Next, we have facewear and fashion accessories. You can unlock facewear, and this is going to be things like goggles and glasses. And then fashion accessories are going to be things like umbrellas and wings that your character can wear. To unlock facewear, you first have to have a piece of qualifying eyewear in your inventory. And then you've got to visit a Calamity Salvager in any one of the three major cities.

The next thing we have is the PvP profile. You can see your PvP information and check out how your character is doing. I don't do a lot of PvP, so there's not much to look at here.

Next, we have Gold Saucer. Gold Saucer will tell you all kinds of stats about yourself, such as your general currency, how you're doing with Chocobos, cards, card decks, and Verminion. The Golden Saucer is a whole guide unto itself, and look for that to come out for me in the future. And just know that the Golden Saucer is a place where you can go play a variety of mini-games to unlock mounts and cosmetics and more.

Next, we have achievements. Achievements will show you all of your achievements in the game, all the ones that you've nearly completed, and the ones that it recommends that you complete. If you're an achievement hunter, this will be a nice, useful menu for you to tab through looking for things to do. But likely, if you're watching this video, you're new. And so, literally everything you do will be useful for you to do. This will probably come later once you become more of a completionist looking to finish off everything there is to do in the game.

Next, under Duty, you have recommendations, things that it recommends you do. You have collection, which is where your Aetherial Compass will be. You definitely want to drag this onto your bar so that you can find those aether currents. And much later on, you also have collections from Ocean Fishing, Bozja, Eureka, and the Shadowbringers Alliance raid quests.

Next, we have our key items. These are items that are in your inventory. It's right here. Here's your regular inventory, and then you click this tab. Now, you're looking at your key items. This is where quest items will go. If you have to go do a quest and then that quest requires you to use an item when you get there, it's going to be in here. You can just right-click and use it. Or, when the box pops up asking for the item, you just right-click on the spot where you would place the item, and then it'll automatically put the item there for you.

Next is the journal. This is the one you can open with J. This is just the list of quests that you have accepted. You can hold 30 at any given time. So, you should be fairly selective about what you do and do not pick up because it is very easy to fill this up if you grab everything that you see. Focus instead on the main story quests. Grab some of the blue ones if they look especially useful to you. Maybe it's a class you want to unlock sooner than later. Maybe it's an aether current that you want to get so that you can unlock flying, but certainly don't grab all of the side quests. Don't even grab all of the blue quests that you see because there are a ton of them in this game. Better to do the blue ones that you need and save the side quests for later when you're leveling up an alt.

Duty Finder. Well, we touched on this earlier. This is where you come to jump into any piece of content in the game that requires other players to join you. Your queue will be incredibly short as a tank or a healer, and expect to wait a little bit longer if you're on a DPS. As always, there are always more damage dealers than the other roles, so your queue times may vary. Though, my queue times lately have been great, even as a DPS, rarely waiting over 5 minutes.

Your duty roulette is one of the best ways to level up other jobs. After you've leveled up your main with the main story quest, duty roulette will make your alternate jobs fly through the levels. So, definitely take advantage of each one of these when leveling up a new job.

Next, we have the Trust System and the Duty Support System. These are two systems that perform very similarly, except the Trust System is for Shadowbringers expansion and beyond, and it's only available in the main story quest dungeons, whereas Duty Support you can use to jump into a party of NPCs for almost any of the dungeons in the game. Basically, you use the Duty Support System if you don't want to play with other people and you'd rather play with NPCs. And you use the Trust System if you want to level up your Scions to 100 and unlock this bikini top for Y'shtola.

Next, you have New Game Plus. If you want, if you've already done the game on your main and you want to go through that main story again on maybe a new job, you can do that with New Game Plus. Just be warned, you can't use this to level up your character because the main story quest does not give experience in New Game Plus.

Next, we have Halls of the Novice. We touched on this earlier. This is what you can use as a new player, and I highly recommend you engage with the system. You can get cool things, cosmetics, gear, and most importantly, some knowledge on your role. If you've never played an MMO before, definitely, definitely use the Halls of the Novice to kind of get a feel for what you will be doing in this game, and what your role is going to be responsible for.

Next, we have Timers. This is a nice list of all the timers in the game. It's going to tell you when certain things are ending, when you're going to get your next mission allowance, when the next fashion report is going to begin, or where the current one ends. Right? These are various activities you can participate with in-game. Eventually, when you start doing that, you're going to be curious how much more time you have left in the current activity and how long until the next one starts. So, this would be where you would come to find that.

In the next menu, we have the Hunting Log. The Hunting Log is the one we touched on earlier. This is where you can come and look for mobs to hunt by participating in the system. You can unlock various XP and cosmetic rewards. Hunt logs stop at around level 50. So, it can be something that's interesting to do for your early game characters as a way to break up the main story quests, but it is absolutely not required, and it's something you can totally overlook if you choose to, as the XP you get from it is not nearly as necessary as it used to be.

Next, we have the Sightseeing Log. This is just a list of hidden places that you can find in-game and interact with to unlock these. Collecting all of them will let you buy the paintings to put in your house.

Next, we have the Gathering Log. If you happen to get into crafting and gathering, although it's certainly not something you need to get into, especially as a new player, you can check out your crafting and gathering log here.

Next, we have your Orchestration List. This is simply a list of orchestra songs that you've unlocked. You can use these in your house, for instance, to add a little bit of an ambiance to that house you're putting together.

Next, you have your Challenge Log. The Challenge Log is something you can do to get extra XP. For instance, it says here, "If we complete three dungeons via the duty roulette, I'm going to get a reward of 788,000 XP and 1,000 gil." Feel free to check out the Challenge Log if you're ever looking for something to do for extra rewards. If you're looking to power level that companion, be sure to come down here to "Buzz and Buddies" and defeat 20 enemies of comparable level to get your companion 4,100 XP.

Under the next menu, known as the Travel Menu, we've got Aether Currents. This is what we were talking about earlier where you can come in here and see exactly what you have and what you don't have. As you can see here in the Dravanian Forelands, I have all of the currents collected, and I can fly in this zone. Attunement is complete. However, in the Churning Mists, I am missing one of the aether currents that is found out in the lands, in the wilds. You run around and you look for them using your Aether Compass. And then I'm also missing one likely from a blue quest that I haven't done in that zone yet. However, sometimes it can be a main story quest if you haven't done all of that yet.

All right, the next one we have is your mount speed. This is going to show you your mount speed in each zone. You're either going to have no stars, or one star, or two stars depending on the zone and what you've done there. In order to get one star in a lot of zones, all you're going to have to do is the story quest to get through the zone, and you're going to automatically get the one-star mount speed.

In order to get the second star, what you're going to have to do is the next step here, and that is the Shared Fates. And if you click on this button, it's going to open up the Fates progress that you have in the zones. So, for example, in Il Mheg, I've done one gold fate. Your level of participation determines the rank you get. So, if you do really well, you'll get gold. If you do a little less well, you get silver. And in this case, you're looking for gold ranking specifically. And once you've done that, you'll be able to go and take that currency that is required to buy the riding map from the NPC in that zone. If you've never done any fates in a zone, it will display, "There's no information to display here."

Next, we have the map. We went over this pretty much in depth earlier. The main thing to remember is that you can resize it. You can zoom out by clicking this button here in the top left. And you can drag it around. You can zoom in. You can click on anything. And you can teleport anywhere that you have been before, so long as you have attuned yourself to that aetheryte, right?

Next, we have the Teleport Menu, which is a different way to do the same thing that we just talked about. Rather than looking at the map and zooming in and out and looking for the place you're looking for, like Coerthas is here, instead you could just come into here and look for the one you're looking for. You can look at all of them at once, or you can break them down by zone: La Noscea, Black Shroud, Thanalan, and so on.

Next, we have Return. As discussed, this is going to take you to the aetheryte that you set as your home. It's free, and it's got a 15-minute cooldown.

Next, under the Party Menu, we've got Party Members. If you are in a party, you'd be able to see them here. You can open this at any time by pressing O on your keyboard. You'll also be able to click and see your friends list, and you can search for players in here as well.

In order to search for a friend, perhaps you want to add to your friends list, for instance. You'll be able to go to search conditions and type their first name here, or you could search for their last name here. Just make sure that you type in the name you're looking for and make sure you don't type the first and the last name in the first name bracket. You can also filter it down further by which language they speak or what location they're in. Do note though, if they're not online, they won't show up.

The next thing we have is the Party Finder. You can come in here to look for and make custom parties for various things. There isn't much need to be using this until you are later in the game and you're looking for very, very specific things. The Duty Finder is going to be a much better tool for you until then.

The next thing we have is Signs. This is something you can just drag onto your bars. And it's great for telling people what they need to do or assigning positions to people in a group so they know what they need to do. This is really just something for the raid lead or the group leader to organize the group, give people jobs or places to stand or to be.

Next is Waymarks. Very much like the party signs. So, the signs are going to put on people's heads, and then the waymarks you're going to put on the ground somewhere. So, what you can do is you can drag these onto your bar, and then you can use it to tell people where to stand in a given moment in the fight. Maybe you put these down before the fight and say, "Hey, when the boss jumps into the air, you need to go stand in this spot." It's a great way for teaching people mechanics in a fight they've never done before, and helping them out.

Next, we have Ready Check. Ready Check is something that you can just press, and it'll ask the entire group that you're with, "Hey, are you guys ready for this?" And then if they are, it'll tell you, "Everyone responded yes." You can go ahead and pull the boss now.

Next, we have Countdown. You can set up a countdown anywhere between 5 and 30 seconds to let the group know that you're about to do something. All right.

Next, Social Player Search. We touched on this already. You can search for friends there. You've got Emotes. You can look through your list of emotes that you have access to. And you can even drag these onto your bar if you want to. Great for role-playing or just the occasional screenshot.

You've got the Free Company Menu, which will show you the free company that you're in. A free company is just another name for a guild. You can level up the free company, and the company can unlock buffs for everybody in it. As with any MMO, I highly recommend getting into a free company in this game, as the social aspect of MMOs is often times one of the best parts. If you're looking for a fun and friendly Final Fantasy guild that welcomes new players, then be sure to join our Discord. I'll have it linked down in the description and will get you into our free company.

Next, we have Linkshells. Linkshells are basically like free companies. Linkshells are a way for you to communicate easily with people that are not in the same free company as you. This way, if you and a group of friends are all in different free companies, but you want to all be able to talk to each other, you can be in one linkshell, and you're allowed to have multiple linkshells, whereas you're only allowed to have one free company. So yeah, just think of this as a chat room for you and a group of people that want to be a part of it.

Sometimes linkshells are set up for very specific activities like hunts. Maybe they will announce anytime a specific mob is spotted or something along those lines, and you would join that linkshell if you were looking for that kind of information. And then that way, while you're playing the game, boom, you see it in your chat. Someone's like, "Hey, there's this mob just spawned over here." And you can run over there and join them in killing it.

Next, we have Cross-world Linkshells. This is the same thing as a regular linkshell, but what this does is it allows you to talk to people that are not necessarily on the same servers. As you can see here, we've got people that are on Behemoth and Hyperion and Exodus, and it allows us to talk to each other even though we're on different servers. Very handy.

Not too long ago, the game reworked its blacklist system. So now, if you click on "blacklist," you can see who you have blacklisted. And you can see here it says, "Messages from blacklisted characters will not be displayed, and their character model will also be hidden." So, you won't be able to see them, and you won't be able to see what they say.

And to add people to this blacklist, what you'll do is come up here to "contacts." And what this does is it brings up a list of the 50 players with whom you most recently partied. And this is a great way to find someone that you had a good experience with or a bad one. So, if you had a good one, you might click on their name, right? If we click on Rex here, and I could say, "Hey, I want to invite this person to my Cross-world linkshell." Alternatively, if we click on Alisaie here, maybe they were an awful person to me. I could go "add to blacklist," and it would add them to my blacklist list so that I would not see them or see what they had to say.

And then here we have the System Menu, which is going to have the support desk. You know, this is where you can obviously do support desk type things, look at the news, contact them for harassment or other things. It is very important to know that Final Fantasy does have a very, very strict policy against being basically. So, if you are the type of person that is typically chewing people out, being mean to people at the end of a dungeon, telling them they're trash, well, you may not want to be that type of a person anymore. Not only because it's bad, but also because it can get you banned in Final Fantasy XIV, and easily. So, they have a very, very low tolerance for that kind of behavior.

Next, we have Official Sites. You can open this, and you can go to any of their official sites. We have the Play Guide, which you can do, and it'll open up a guide on the browser. We've got Active Help, which you can use to search for various topics in the game.

We've got Character Configuration. There are actually some very useful menu options in here. It's definitely worth going through here and turning certain things on or off depending on your preferences. One of my favorite settings to change was to open all of my inventory instead of just one of them. So, when I click on this one, it actually opens all of them in one giant page as opposed to if it was just normal and I clicked it, it would just be one with lots of little tabs, and then I'd have to flip through the tabs to find the thing that I was looking for. You know, screw that noise. I want to see all of it at once. Apply. Click it. Now my whole inventory opens at one time. I much prefer this way. And there are a lot of beautiful options like that in here. This game really lets you go to town on customizing yourself.

So, if you're having a hard time keeping track of who's who in your party, like who's the tank, who's the damage dealer, who's the healer, you can come into your Character Configuration menu and go to "Display Name Settings" and then click "General." And then right here, you can turn on or off class icons. So, you can see here next to my name, I'm a DPS, so it's blue. And this one is a green square, right? Because this is a healer. And if we were in a party together, then their name would change to green because they're the healer. My name would change to blue because I am the tank, which would make it very easy for you to know where your healer was and where your tank was at all times, so you could position yourself correctly.

After you've kind of got familiar with the game and you've seen a lot of the stuff in it, definitely visit these options and take a look at some of the things you might want to change. Play around with it, and you might find a lot of quality-of-life upgrades in here.

Next, we've got the System Configuration. This is where you're going to change, you know, your settings like your graphics settings. If you've got a strong computer, you can crank those display settings up. You can change all the sound effect settings here. This is actually really useful. You can turn down the effects of other players. So, you can hear your own effects at, let's say, 80%, and then your party at 52%, and then other people outside of your group. You can change that even lower. Sometimes when you're in a trial or a raid or something, there can be a lot of noise going on, and it can be a bit much, especially with 24 people around. So, you can turn down other people's effects so that you're hearing yourself well enough, but everybody else is kind of toned down a bit. It's very nice that they let you customize those levels.

Same thing here with the graphics settings again. Yeah, if you've got that fat video card here, come in here and crank those settings up, make the game look as beautiful as you possibly can. Mouse settings, gamepad settings; it does have controller support, and great controller support at that. So, if you are a console user, then come in here and definitely set this up. You've got theme settings. You can change this from dark to light to classic, and you can change, you know, the format of your screenshots.

Then you've got the HUD layout like we were talking about earlier. And just like everything else in this game, I swear you can grab this and you can drag it onto your bar if you want. And then you can open this up anytime you want to. I swear they made it so that you could put anything on your bar. So, if there's something you open a lot in this game, if there's some menu you open a lot, if it's the sound menu, you can grab that and put it there. And then boom. If you want to turn on or off certain sounds, like I've turned off music and master volume so I could record this video. You know, if you're constantly adjusting certain sounds or certain settings, you know, you can grab these and put it on a bar for ease of access if you want.

Next, we have User Macros. You can set up macros in this game. However, they are not at all required. If you've played Final Fantasy XI or some other games, macros could be a very big thing, a very big part of combat in those games, but not in Final Fantasy XIV. These are by no means necessary. And outside of crafting, I hardly see them used at all. Unless someone just wants to maybe put some kind of a funny message anytime they cast their resurrection, like, "Hey, get up off the floor," you know, or something like that. You can set up something like that here. But go easy on those. You know, everything in moderation, or else you risk annoying the people in your group by spamming chat with nonsense.

Next, we have the Keybinds. This is definitely an area you're going to want to visit and spend some time in. Probably sooner than later, you're going to want to get your keybinds set up the way you like it. And there are a lot of keys in this game. You're going to notice here I've got 12, 24 abilities. And then I've got some run over here. Some of this stuff I've dragged on here just for this conversation. I don't actually use these things, so I can clean this up a bit. But I've got at least 24 minimum abilities that I need to use very frequently. And so the easiest way to go about that is to, well, use an MMO mouse or something like that, or so that you've got like 1 through 6, you know, and then you hold Alt and 1 through 6, and you've got those here, and Control 1 through 6, that sort of a thing so that you kind of have all of the buttons within hands reach. Pick the layout that's going to be nice for you and go with that. But the last thing you want to be doing is clicking your mouse to activate abilities in content. That's going to be a detriment to your performance. It's likely going to result in you dying or being very ineffective, or both.

Next, we have License. Well, that's what that says. It's just a license for the game. Not something you really need to worry about.

Then you have Log Out and Exit Game here. Anytime you want, you can pull up the same exact menu by pressing Escape. And you can see all of those same options that we just looked at at the end: your HUD, your macros, your keybinds, and how to exit the game.

Quick shout-out to my wife. You can find her on Spotify and YouTube under DashPlays.

And finally, we have PvP. Now, there are a few forms of PvP in Final Fantasy, all of which are completely optional and separated from the rest of the game. However, there are some cool cosmetics to be earned inside of the PvP arenas. So, let's talk about what they are.

Crystalline Conflict was added to the game. This is a 5v5 push-the-cart type of map, very similar to Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch. Beyond that, there's a mode called Frontline, which is going to feature three opposing teams of 24 players for a total of 72 players on the battlefield. This is where you'll go for those massive scale PvP battles if that's something you're looking for. And finally, we have a mode known as Rival Wings, which is 24 versus 24. It's inspired by MOBAs where NPCs and players fight side by side over objectives on either side of a linear map. If you like PvP or you just like to collect all of the cosmetics, you should check these out.

And that is everything. If you made it to the end, you're a legend. So, let me know down in the comments below. If you enjoyed the video, do me a huge favor of liking, subscribing, or commenting on the video for the algorithm. If you have a question about anything, don't hesitate to ask in the comments below. I'll do my very best to answer. Be sure to come back to this video in a week or even a month. You'll be amazed at how much better you already understand everything that I've talked about. Remember, the Final Fantasy community is one of the nicest out there, so don't stress and just have fun, and you'll learn as you go. Massive thank you to my YouTube channel members for supporting the channel so that I can make monster videos like these. If you want to become a channel member, click the join button below for perks like behind-the-scenes footage, private Discord channel access, and more. Sincerely, thank you so much for watching, and I hope to see you in the next video. If you're not sure what to do next, maybe check out one of the videos on screen right now, like this one here, full of the biggest mistakes new players make and how to avoid them.