Final Fantasy XIV: Low Level Magic

I played to level 15 with all three magic classes.  Later, these classes evolve and split off into more than three jobs once they reach the job stage at level 30, but all Discipline of Magic jobs stem from these three classes.

Level 15 is a key point in Final Fantasy XIV because it's the point at which you can use the Duty Finder to automatically find groups and run dungeons.  It's when the game really picks up and becomes much more fun.

Dungeons are one of my favorite parts of the game and they also give great loot and experience.  I would much rather level via dungeons than via grinding out Leve Quests.  And that's what I've had to do while getting these classes up to 15.  Lots of Leve Quests.

Actually, under level 10 isn't too bad if you do your class quests and your class hunting log.  It'll generally get you to level 10 without too much grinding.  But leveling from 10 to 15 is a slog.  That's where Leve Quests come in.  Unfortunately, Leve Quests don't add much variety.  Any one Leve Quest vendor will give you the same four or five quests over and over.  The quests scale to be the optimal difficultly and experience... but going through the motions of the quests is exactly the same every time.  It's an efficient way to level, but it's not a very interesting one.

Right now I hate levels 10-15.

That's my basic methodology... do class quests, do hunting log, then do Leve Quests.  I got all three of these classes up to 15 even though it took awhile.  One of the benefits is that I can now start getting rid of low level gear in my inventory.  More importantly, I'm excited to start running dungeons as these classes.

But what have I thought about the actual classes up to this point?

Arcanist

Arcanist has been my favorite of the three magic based classes.  I thought I would like the Scholar job and this is the class that leads to it.  It has a mixture of damage over time (DoT) skills and healing abilities.  It also has a sweet summonable pet.  Arcanist is the class that leads to the Summoner job, so that makes sense, but it's cool seeing that the Scholar gets summons too!  This is the class that I'm most excited to level up beyond level 15.

Conjurer

I went into Conjurer expecting to not like it.  It seemed like the boring start to the White Mage job.  I was wrong.  Conjurer is actually really fun.  It's a combination of elemental attacks, healing, and damage mitigation.  The damage mitigation really sets it apart from Arcanist in an interesting way.  I liked my time leveling this class to 15 and now I'm intrigued to see how it plays with groups in dungeons.

Thaumaturge

I like DPS classes a lot.  I always have.  My main job is a Bard, which is a ranged DPS, and I love playing as it.  This is a ranged DPS caster and I thought it would be a great fit for me.  It is not.  I can't seem to get my head around the correct spell rotation or how the class abilities work together.  I feel like I must be doing it wrong.  This class leads to the Black Mage job, which is one of the most powerful DPS classes in the game.  I hung in there and got Thaumaturge to 15 but I wouldn't go back to this class without doing a lot of research first.  I feel like there's some key aspect about the spell rotation that requires more explanation than I've been given in the game.

And that's all of them.

I had a lot of fun with these casters and now I'm super excited to take my two healing classes into dungeons.  I anticipate running dungeons as a healer will be a completely new experience.  I look forward to it!

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